THE FUTURE IS NOW
By Greg Cook, Globe Correspondent
Boston Globe, MA
April 26 2007
Something old, something new intersect at the Boston Cyberarts Festival
For the past four months, Brian Knep has been studying frogs in his
windowless, closet-sized lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston,
where he has been an artist in residence since 2005. Dozens of times
each day, the 38-year-old Bostonian plucks tiny tadpoles and frogs
from an aquarium, plunks them into cups of water under bright lights,
and photographs them.
Knep runs this raw material, some 3,000 photos, through software he
has written to compile the images into a digital animation of real
swimming tadpoles losing their tails and sprouting legs as they become
frogs. And then reverses it, making them young again. He calls the
project "Aging," and a first draft debuts at Judi Rotenberg Gallery
Saturday as part of the fifth Boston Cyberarts Festival.
Cyberart, tech-art, and new-media art are synonymous terms for the
growing body of art made with new technologies – computers, iPods,
cellphones, digital cameras, and video. It’s the most distinctive
sector of Boston-area art these days, and this year’s Cyberarts
Festival, from April 20 to May 6, is the big biennial gathering
of artists from all over the world. It’s when all art is electric,
when interactive is the watchword, when the future is now.
"Now we have more technology than any time in history, and artists
are always the first people to get their hands on technology after
the engineers and scientists," festival director George Fifield
says. "[Artists] show how we live with it, how to stop it from hitting
us over the head. New technology and new media radically alter the
way we see and think about the world. And artists explain it to us."
Many who follow new media attribute its growing prominence in
Boston-area art to the region’s colleges, which attract students and
provide jobs to artists and scientists. The programs at MIT’s Media
Lab and Center for Advanced Visual Studies and MassArt’s Studio for
Interrelated Media stand out. And there’s also the region’s vaunted
tech industry.
More and more venues are featuring new media, too. Through May 6,
Axiom Gallery in Jamaica Plain presents videos and LED animations
by four artists featured in Aspect, the Boston-based journal of
new-media art. Here we have a gallery devoted exclusively to new media,
a rare thing, teaming up with an equally rare example of a publication
devoted solely to the genre.
Elsewhere, tech-art represents more than half the programming at
Art Interactive in Cambridge, which this month presents interactive
installations by San Francisco’s Camille Utterback, in which cameras
turn visitors’ shuffling through the gallery into abstract doodles
projected on the walls. Other frequent new-media venues are Second
Gallery in South Boston and MIT’s List Visual Art Center in Cambridge.
New-media art, says video artist Denise Marika, is "Boston’s chance to
put itself on the map of the art world." At her Brookline home, she’s
finishing up video projections for "The Puzzle Master," a "multimedia
opera" recounting the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Five singers will
perform Vermont poet F.D. Reeve’s libretto set to computer-manipulated
music by Eric Chasalow of Newtonville at Brandeis University May 5-6.
For Marika, the tale of the ancient inventor Daedalus speaks of
"the threat and question of technology itself and our sense that
we control it or somebody controls it. And how that intersects with
people’s power struggles throughout the world. And how that affects
the individual – Icarus." Chasalow says that Daedalus is "unwilling
to admit he doesn’t have as much control as he thinks he has."
In a cinder-block garage in Allston one recent afternoon, members of
Kinodance rehearsed their new show, "Denizen." Inspired by "Seasons,"
Armenian director Artavazd Peleshian’s 1975 film documentary about
Armenian shepherds, some of the Boston-area dancers visited Armenia
last year to film sights – like a herd of sheep – and their own
performances at locations Peleshian used in his film.
A projector shone the footage onto the dancers and the wall behind
them. Their shadows magically, poetically mixed with video of
silhouetted women dancing between the stone arches of an abandoned
monastery. Later, flames of a video camp fire engulfed a live dancer’s
body as she curled in on herself, opened out and closed up again,
then stumbled about on her toes.
This human-technological interaction is also the foundation of Chicago
composer Olivia Block’s "Rime and Glaze," which she’ll perform with
Berklee College of Music students at the school on April 29. Out
of a furtive arrangement of goosey honks, plucked violin strings,
sung "ha, ha, has", electronic clicking, and tones and static, we
notice the traditional instruments mimicking the electronic sounds,
and vice versa.
Boston’s new media scene is simmering and scruffy, both thrilling and
frustrating at this stage of development when few major artists have
emerged. One of the most exciting artists in town is Brian Knep. He
takes advantage of the knack of computers for producing special
effects, for producing endless variations within set parameters,
to create distinctly digital art.
"What I’m trying to do is make technological art that’s more soulful,"
Knep says.