DIA ANNOUNCES NEW WEB-BASED PROJECT BY ARTIST LISI RASKIN

Latest in Dia’s series of Artists’ Projects for the web launches November 13, 2009

 

New York, NY—Dia Art Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of Warning Warum, a web-based project by artist Lisi Raskin, the latest in Dia’s ongoing series of online artworks. The project can be seen beginning November 13 at www.diaart.org/raskin. A launch reception will be held at Dia on Friday, November 13, 2009, from 6-8pm on the fifth floor at 535 West 22nd Street, New York City. Remarks by the artist and Lynne Cooke will begin at 7pm.

 

In Warning Warum, Raskin presents a web-based artwork with an interactive, hand-crafted replica of a nuclear control panel. Visitors may enter an address, select a weapon, and then detonate it. Raskin punctuates these launch states with construction paper animations set to soundtracks in which she mimics an absurd siren, radar sounds, and a massive explosion. The final screen maps the address previously entered by the visitor against a damage radius of concentric circles, illustrating the possible destruction caused by the selected weapon. The mapping functionality provided by Raskin’s project echoes a web program once made available by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), in conjunction with the 1999 film, “Race for the Superbomb.” The PBS website hosting this program still exists but the mapping function was removed after 9-11.

 

Long fascinated by Cold War culture, Raskin explores “the nuclear sublime” with a practice ranging from drawings, objects and installations, to video and performance. Her deliberate imprecision and choice of materials, such as construction paper and crayons, reflect a pre-adolescent sensibility. Having grown up with the nuclear age fears and post-apocalyptic fictions prevalent in 1980s America, Raskin’s artistic practice continues to imagine annihilation. Her work operates through stark contrasts – in her project for Dia, the playful imagery and very lo-fi game are set against the violence implied through a hypothetical nuclear blast mapped onto real world sites. This tension between what is real and what is imagined interests Raskin, here in connection to the transgressive nature of imagining death on a massive scale.  The abstract space of the web, where technology mediates every decision and outcome, is an apt venue for this exploration.

 

Lisi Raskin lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited internationally at various institutions, including the Frankfurter Kunstverein; the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. In 2009 Raskin participated in both the 2nd Athens Biennial and the 11th Istanbul Biennial. A recently published monograph entitled Lisi Raskin: Mobile Observation chronicles her most recent research project to the atomic monuments in the American west. The collages that Raskin created for Warning Warum specifically refer to the control panels that she saw at the Titan Missile museum in Green Valley, Arizona during her Mobile Observation research trip.

 

Artists’ Projects for the Web

Dia initiated a series of web-based works in early 1995, becoming one of the first arts organizations to foster the use of the World Wide Web as an artistic and conceptual medium. Dia’s collection of web projects currently numbers thirty-two, and includes Dorit Margreiter’s alphabeth (2009), Liliana Porter’s Rehearsal (2008); Barbara Bloom’s Half Full – Half Empty (2008); Rosa Barba’s Vertiginous Mapping (2008); Ezra Johnson’s Wrestling with the Blob Beast (2008); and Wilfredo Prieto’s A Moment of Silence (2007), among others. To view these projects visit www.diaart.org.

 

Funding

Funding for this project has been provided the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Beverages for the launch event are compliments of Brooklyn Brewery.

 

Dia Art Foundation

A nonprofit institution founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is renowned for initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects. Dia displays selections from its collection of works from the 1960s through today at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, in Beacon, New York. In the fall of 2007, Dia initiated a partnership with The Hispanic Society of America, where Dia presents commissions and projects by contemporary artists within the Society’s galleries while developing a permanent home for these initiatives in New York City. Additionally, Dia maintains long-term, site-specific projects in the western United States, New York City, and Bridgehampton, Long Island. For additional public information, visit www.diaart.org.

 

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For additional information or materials please contact

Ashley Tickle, Dia Art Foundation, New York City, 212.293.5518 or atickle @ diaart.org.