Inspired by Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novel, The Invention of Morel, the exhibition Memory Burn observes mortality and death in relation to recording devices. The title of the exhibition refers simultaneously to unforgettable visions burned in the mind and to digital burning used to archive memories.
<img src="https://www.bitforms.art/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/aw_freewillmode_3_w-150×112.jpg" data-large-src="https://www.bitforms.art/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/aw_freewillmode_3_w-400×300.jpg" class="lazy installation-small" alt="Memory Burn, bitforms gallery, 2015. Left to right: Angela Washko, You’re Either In Or Out, 2014; Angela Washko, Disposable Muses (Or: Your Turn Now, Fuckers), 2013″ style=”aspect-ratio: 1.33375 / 1; cursor: pointer;”>
Opening: July 10, 6 – 8 PM
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM & Sunday 12 – 6 PM
bitforms gallery: 131 Allen Street, New York NY 10002
“I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.”
– Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
Inspired by Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novel, The Invention of Morel, the exhibition Memory Burn observes mortality and death in relation to recording devices. The title of the exhibition refers simultaneously to unforgettable visions burned in the mind and to digital burning used to archive memories.
In the novel, a fugitive stranded on an island obsesses over a beautiful tourist named Faustine, only to find out that she and her fellow travelers are three-dimensional recordings projected by a machine. Coping with loneliness and gradual madness, he learns how to integrate himself into the machine’s memory, altering it to suggest that he and Faustine are together, in love. Although the process means certain death, he wishes to live on as a projection, hoping a machine is invented that can merge his soul and conscience with Faustine’s.
The phenomenon that takes place in the novel foreshadows our contemporary experience with recording devices, as well as virtuality, and electronic networks. We document our lives as if to prolong them. Featured in the exhibition are a range of works that utilize photography, video, face recognition software, and virtual reality.
Daniel Canogar’s large-scale photographic print, Enredos 1, depicts bodies tangled amongst clusters of wire. Utilizing the cobweb as a metaphor for electronic networks, the work conveys complex emotional connections tethered by technological means. The dangling bodies are connected but also imprisoned.
Japanese artist duo exonemo’s Body Paint – 46inch/Male/White, features a hand-painted LCD screen that plays video of a performer in matching body-paint. The figure assimilates with the painted screen, expressionless and still, staring blankly into the distance. A metaphor for our symbiosis with screen-based technology, we the living exist within our luminous devices.
Debuting in the U.S., Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Level of Confidence commemorates the mass kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa normalista school in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The project uses a face-recognition camera that tirelessly looks for the faces of the disappeared students. As a viewer stands in front of the camera, the system uses algorithms to find which student’s facial features look most like the viewer. The piece can be acquired for art collections, but all proceeds are directed to a fund to help the affected community, for example in scholarships for new students at the normalista school.
Sara Ludy’s series of web based video series Beaches documents the artist’s travels in the online virtual world Second Life. As the artist’s avatar navigates virtual beaches, she uses her real world camera to document private resorts, fauna and flora. The resulting images are uncanny, mimicking reality but forever looping in a fantasy world. Ludy’s WARZONE, a field recording within Second Life debuts in the exhibition – the audio installation presents the artist’s wanderings through a virtual world known for melee combat simulations.
The interactive installation Memory/Place: My House by Sarah Rothberg is a virtual reality recreation of the artist’s childhood home made using home movies, diaries, and photographs. The virtual reality headset is situated in a physical installation that is simultaneously anachronistic and futuristic, featuring brightly colored furniture and a CRT television feed of the virtual home. The installation speculates the emotional impact of future archiving technologies on personal memories.
The video series Free Will Mode by Angela Washko places avatars from the game The Sims into constrained and life threatening architectural environments – bedrooms without exits, inescapable swimming pools. The avatars, accepting their entrapment eat when hungry and sleep when tired, but refuse to confront the world they inhabit – even if it kills them.
Andrea Wolf’s series Unsolicited Memories; Archival Exercises is an archive of found super8 and 8mm films projected onto Plexiglas cubes. Just as memories can be triggered by events at random, the cubes turn on and off with no discernible pattern. A disparate array of footage populates the cubes that preserves the past and paradoxically creates new narratives.
A virtual space in conjunction with the exhibition is accessible at www.bitforms.com/island/island.html.
OPEN AiR | Sarah Rothberg: MEETINGS RESEARCH (HUMAN IN THE LOOP)MEETINGS RESEARCH (HUMAN IN THE LOOP) is a performance-experiment by 2024 Artist-in-Residence Sarah Rothberg which uses improvisation, conversation, and AI language models to (literally) reflect the present moment.
Electric Op at Buffalo AKG Art MuseumAn emerging movement called “Op” (short for “Optical”) took art and popular culture by storm. Op artists use abstract patterns to create optical illusions that are dynamic and interactive, much like the electronic images of the time.
BITFORMS GALLERY EXHIBITED A GROUP SHOW THAT EXEMPLIFIES NEW MEDIA ART A pioneer and champion of new media, digital and internet-based art, New York-based gallery bitforms presented the works of Ellie Pritts, Claudia Hart, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Manfred Mohr, Jonathan Monaghan and Refik Anadol.
http://Web3 Travel Guides: Future Horizons, Art Dubai Digital And BeyondOne of the longest-running and most well respected new media art galleries, bitforms represents established, mid-career, and emerging artists critically engaged with new technologies, offering an incisive perspective on the fields of digital, internet, and time-based art forms.
Why Lulu Island is a ‘paradise for contemporary art’In an interactive exhibition entitled Translation Island, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has transformed Lulu Island in Abu Dhabi into an interactive playground of light.
Lumiere 2023: Stunning images as festival returns to DurhamLumiere features 40 installations, with Bishop Auckland lit up for the first time. Spanish artist Daniel Canogar created a projection for The Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Gray AreaRafael Lozano-Hemmer is one of those rare artists who both understands complex technologies and can harness them to make works of art that are, miraculously, not only smart but spectacularly visually compelling.
‘There’s no such thing as a neutral algorithm’: the existential AI exhibition confronting SydneyWhen Y2K seemed like the world’s most pressing technological concern, the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was using a dictionary and a set of grammatical rules to teach a computer how to write questions.
New show may make you feel like you’re being watched. That’s because you areTracking technology, facial recognition and more are all at play in Atmospheric Memory, the Mexican Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s latest exhibition, which is designed to make air into something tangible.
Visit “A Crack in the Hourglass,” Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s memorial to the countless victims of COVID-19, online through Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo During the COVID-19 pandemic, whenever someone dies, the pain of the loss itself is aggravated by the inability to collectively express our mourning in funerary rites and rituals of farewell.
Sara Ludy directs video for Kass Richards’ debut solo record, The Language ShadowKass Richards elaborated further in a statement: “What ‘Atlantis’ is attempting to get at is the sacred humanity of the creative act, the importance of returning again and again to that meditative process, especially in a world of so much creative undoing.”
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer featured in Art21’s “Borderlands” episdoeLozano-Hemmer highlights the intimate, personal relations in a public space that is otherwise systematically dehumanizing. The artist explains, “The most important role that art can play is that of making complexity visible. The usage of technology is inevitable; it’s up to the artist to use those technologies to create experiences that are intimate, connected, and critical.”
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Art 21 segment highlighted in artnet, “We as Artists Need to Intervene”Known for his large-scale, interactive installations, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer uses contemporary technologies like computerized surveillance, heart-rate sensors, and robotics to create participatory experiences and platforms for public participation and connection.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer featured in the new season of Art21Lozano-Hemmer creates participatory artworks that utilize technology like robotics, heart-rate sensors, and computerized surveillance tools in order to facilitate human connection. Technologically sophisticated yet deceptively simple in their execution, Lozano-Hemmer’s spectacular, immersive works are often installed in public places as a means of transforming these sites into forums for civic engagement.
Daniel Canogar, Loom: Streaming September 10–October 25, 2020bitforms gallery is proud to present a first of its kind, cloud-based, 24/7 stream of generative software-based art, presented in collaboration with Small Data Industries.
Daniel Canogar’s Data Abstractions, Art in AmericaAfter three months with the internet as my primary portal to the outside world, I was intrigued by the premise of Daniel Canogar’s latest work: “to expose the hidden threads of data networks.” Inside bitforms gallery, six large, wavelike metal structures covered with modular flexible LED screens hang on the walls or sit on the floor, all part of the artist’s “Billow” series (2020).
Daniel Canogar, “Billow”, Artforum Critic’s PickDaniel Canogar’s sinuous, ripple-like sculptures emanate colorful LED light in “Billow,” his solo exhibition here. It’s no accident that his bending architectural forms mimic hills, valleys, and mountains: Their slumbering shapes make the works’ cascading waves all the more hypnotic.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer on Seductive Participation and the Oppression of Metrics, Art in AmericaCan an artist engage with surveillance technologies without being complicit in their use for control and oppression? Audiences tend to treat interactive works as a fun spectacle, a chance to take a selfie. So how do artists clarify their position? How do they present their work as commentary, rather than mere reproduction?
Virtual Opening of Billow by Daniel Canogarbitforms gallery is pleased to present our fourth solo exhibition with Daniel Canogar. The data-sphere is a driving force of society and the economy, despite its invisible nature. This lack of visibility can make it difficult to comprehend how information affects daily life. Billow attempts to expose the hidden threads of data networks.
Wet Logic reviewed by Louis Bury for Hyperallergic From behind bitforms gallery’s glass facade, an artistic toilet bowl (“Toilet Joke I,” 2020) beckons passers-by into Wet Logic, Sarah Rothberg’s and Marina Zurkow’s digitized meditation on water’s unearthliness.
Artsy names Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Border Tuner among best public art of 2019“Border Tuner, a timely and ephemeral light and sound installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, created a unique and powerful platform for interconnectivity and public participation at the U.S.–Mexico border. By melding performance, robotic technology, and social discourse, Lozano-Hemmer’s large-scale installation shared a lesser-told story by visibly highlighting positive counter-narratives about El Paso and Ciudad Juárez’s interdependent culture. A challenging public project to achieve, Lozano-Hemmer’s piece was able to brilliantly and poetically render intimate bridges between strangers standing in two different cities and countries that share so much.”—Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator, Public Art Fund
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer interviewed on BBC regarding his new work, Border TunerImagine huge searchlights which can be seen over a ten mile, 15 kilometer radius talking to one another across two countries. This is exactly what electronic media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is creating this November between Ciudad Juárez in Mexico and El Paso in Texas. Called “Border Tuner,” the project will see enormous bridges of light connecting the US-Mexico border for the first time.
Wet Logic, an exhibition by Sarah Rothberg and Marina Zurkow, opens at bitforms galleryWet Logic presents a model of the world organized according to a wet, oceanic ideology rather than a dry, land-based paradigm. This is a world that manifests the circuitous nature of time and the enmeshment of humans to the planet. Rothberg and Zurkow present a series of systems that further human connection to oceans by way of action and imagination.