bitforms gallery

YAEL KANAREK: WORLD OF AWE, NEW WORKS
SHOW DATES: 3 5 04 – 4 10 04
World of Awe is an integrated media project that uses the conceptual framework of an alternative world to explore the dissemination of a journey in the digital era. The narrative in World of Awe reveals a journal of a traveler who crosses through a portal on 419 east 6th street in Manhattan to a parallel world called the Sunset/Sunrise in search for a lost treasure. The traveler, a protagonist with digital characteristics, free of gender classifications, wanders in a world that doesn’t yield to the oppressive laws of our physical reality. The Internet was chosen as the medium through which to express the allegorical other-worldliness of the traveler’s tale in the Sunset/Sunrise at www.worldofawe.net.

Following one of the reoccurring themes in World of Awe, Yael Kanarek is presenting a new body of work that reveals the nostalgic and societal reliance on digital technology. Interface becomes skin; a pearl replaces hardware; and source code is webbed into a sensual trap.

In SPIN_LOCK sheer organza ribbon becomes a distribution media for the twenty-seven files found in the kernel directory of Linux source code. Whimsically, the sculpture maintains the terms of the GNU General Public License under which Linux is distributed.
Captured in a series of photographs and a video loop (Schedule_task), the ribbon is tested as a second skin that traps her traveler in a soft wear causing the traveler to execute over and over some basic functions of an operating system such as multitasking and sleep mode.

In Feedback-Loop a computer screen is ‘stripped’ to a metal steel frame where a candle and a pearl becomes the guts of the machine. Parchment (sheepskin) replaces the screen onto which an ink drawing references the love letter 69.325 Pearl from Chapter 2 of the Traveler’s Journal as appears online. A Text object from the Traveler’s Journal printed on parchment describes the finding of software in silicon canyon.

Born 1967, New York City and raised in Israel. Yael Kanarek has been developing her integrated media project World of Awe (www.worldofawe.net) since 1995. Selected for the Whitney Biennial 2002, Ms. Kanarek is a recipient of the Jerome Foundation Media Arts grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts 2001 Fellowship Award and the Alternative Museum Digital Commission 2000. She has been an artist-in-residence at Harvestworks collaborating on Music for World of Awe with composer Yoav Gal. In 2002 she completed Chapter 2 of the Traveler’s Journal commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2003, Ms. Kanarek launched an interactive net.dance in collaboration with dance filmmaker Evann Siebens, commissioned by Turbulence.org and was R&D resident at Eyebeam, collaborating with bnode architecture studio on the mRB project. In October 2002 World of Awe was awarded the prestigious CNRS/UNESCO Lewis Carroll Argos prize in France and in June 2003 the project won the 1st prize in the Netizens International Net Art competition in Rome, Italy.