"Superlowrez" at vertexList

A second, quirkier approach to the art/technology divide is currently in evidence at Williamsburg’s small, experimental vertexList gallery, with "Superlowrez," Dec. 17-Mar. 12, 2006, curated by Marcin Ramocki. This strange show was conceived in collaboration with the Philadelphia-based group Bit Editions (also to be found online at www.biteditions.com), which "publishes fine art made from electronics." It marks Bit Editions’ first full-scale collaboration with a gallery.

For the show, vertexList brought aboard eight artists, among them the stalwarts of the Brooklyn art scene: Joe Amrhein, Brian Conley, Matt Freedman, Kristin Lucas, Jillian Mcdonald, Joe McKay, Akiko Sakaizumi and Jude Tallichet. All of them agreed to work with the same gadget for the project, a custom-built box of 12 x 14 electronic light-up "pixels." Since this dimension is calculated to be just under the pixel-content of the normal computer cursor, the format is extremely constraining (additionally, each box has a chip that can hold just 1,984 "frames" of information.

Predictably enough, the results are eccentric. As he has done in the past with artworks in other media, Joe Amrhein reflects back the language of art criticism, creating a display that mindlessly scrolls sentence fragments with buzzwords like "idiosyncratic," "seductive" and "over-caffeinated." Joe McCay’s box shows a blocky hand playing a continuously iterating game of "paper-scissors-rock," creating a not-very-intelligent artificial intelligence to set your mind against. Brian Conley has programmed into the box the morphology of a continuing stream of animal brains, the crude grid of the screen turning it into an amorphous, undulating wave. And Akiko Sakaizumi creates a queasy, video game-inspired narrative, highlighted by a flying chicken body being shot at and impregnated by a phallic cannon, and giving birth to its own head.

The best work is Jude Tallichet’s EMPR. Tallichet has taken Andy Warhol’s 1964 film, Empire -- a single static shot of the Empire State Building as the light and atmosphere change around it -- and recreated it in the Bit Editions box. Compressed into the limited time-frame of the device, the passage of time in Warhol’s famous endurance piece is signified by jerky shifts in the lit pixels, as the building starts out a shining box against a dark background, then reverses as day becomes night. The idea of the piece -- to use the filter of the primitive graphics to render the immense, symbolic building toy-like and small -- takes the enforced technological limitation and sublates it, to good effect.

If the approach of "Breaking and Entering" is Cartesian, vertexList’s is more like a modest demonstration of Hegel’s dialectical logic, in which opposites collide into each other to form a higher synthesis. Technology and art are still antagonistic -- the whole significance of picking the antique device is as a challenge to the various creators. But the idea is not for artistic ideas to suck the medium dry, but to use the energy of the clash to pull out some sort of exciting new creation. The resulting show is something of a novelty -- but all the more interesting for being so.

Report from NYC, Dec 2005 (fragment)

Smile Project (www.smileproject.com) is an exhibit of emotive robots, electronic inventions and video games by artist, Jason Van Anden. We headed to the opening at VertexList gallery in Williamsburg in a torrential rainstorm. Really great, inspiring pieces, especially Neil and Iona the robots that are programmed to communicate with each other on their own…I think they’re going to take over NYC soon!

Aron Namenwirth and Jason Van Anden at VertexList

"Mixed Feelings" is a curious name for Jason Van Anden’s sculpture. His two robotic figures at VertexList are unequivocal: they laugh incessantly. Circuit boards displayed on the gallery walls show the circumscribed paths of their internal activity while small motion detectors mounted under their chins help them interact with their surroundings. Their computer-monitor heads bob around on stick necks while their waists rotate giving them a complete, if unstable, survey of the room. Their skin is papier-mâché rubbed with graphite. Both have prominent gluteal clefts and sagging breasts designating them as female. They are, in utterance and appearance, quite hideous.

Aron Namenwirth’s colorful paintings provide the two grotesqueries with something to look at. The fact that a painter would let his work be seen in such a disruptive environment is telling. Establishing a contemplative atmosphere is not his primary concern. Instead, Namenwirth shares Van Anden’s interest in social critique. He’s entitled his painting show "Nonlinear Collateral Damage." Titles include "green is for greed," "walmart the cancer within" and "the end of democracy."

Namenwirth has been working with the grid for some time, but this most recent offering seems stricter in its application. In earlier work, a secondary geometry sometimes detaches itself from the primary grid to float to the foreground. There are no such lapses at VertexList and the sense of a coded image, always present in Namenwirth’s work, is all the more conspicuous. It furnishes both an impetus for the paintings and their link to Van Anden’s sculpture.

Abstraction is a façade to Namenwirth, and the grid is a means by which power obscures its Machiavellian movement. Like the TV censor with his black strip or the government agent with his shredder, Namenwirth understands abstraction as the form truth takes when twisted from its comprehensible, information-bearing nature. Abstraction is not a transcendental end, but a technical means by which truth is deformed. Representation becomes the goal in which the integral image is reconstructed and the truth made accessible once more.

Van Anden’s work suggests that identity, rather than information, is obscured by technology. His sculptures are proxies for people. They are the size of people, they are more like people, and they express themselves like people. They do these things only partially and with an awkwardness that characterizes (for the time being) a machine’s imitation of man. Van Anden toys with mimesis to hint that in contemporary society humans are not just like machines, but are machines. Art’s symbolic power allows for this perceptual reversal. The robots’ behavior suggests that our own expressive poses amount to little more than simulacra of emotions circumscribed to such a degree that they become comic.

Valentina Tanni, June 2005

Ha inaugurato pochi giorni fa a New York la mostra Code Residue, aperta fino al 3 luglio prossimo presso lo spazio Vertex List. L'esposizione, come annuncia il titolo, è dedicata al codice, inteso non solo come linguaggio di programmazione, ma come paradigma di un'intera società...

Con la rivoluzione digitale, la mappatura del genoma e l'infittirsi della ragnatela informativa globale, il codice si è fatto sempre più invasivo e onnipresente. Trasformandosi nello strumento principale attraverso cui la società occidentale struttura e trasmette i propri contenuti, racchiusi sotto il generico termine "informazione". Ma il codice ha una natura logico-matematica, mentale ed effimera. Forse proprio per questo molti artisti sentono la necessità di tematizzarlo e materializzarlo in sculture, quadri e installazioni. Gli artisti presenti in mostra, selezionati da Marcin Ramocki, sono: Joe Amrhein, Mira Friedlander, Tan Lin, Joe Mckay e Carlo Zanni.

Matt Freedman - Twin Towers at vertexList

Tom Moody, April, 2005

Here in New York the fall of the twin towers etched a pretty deep scar in the civic consciousness. Everyone was affected by it in some way, and people still have a hard time talking about it. Unlike the millions around the U.S. who goggled at the event over and over on TV, in this city it was a lived thing. Ironically it was those TV-gogglers, with no direct experience of the tragedy, who bayed most loudly for war. People here just wanted Bush to stop stirring the pot. (Not everyone, but hundreds of thousands turned out for demonstration after demonstration.) Below, images of New York artist Matt Freedman's work at vertexList, from a two person show with Jude Tallichet. Shades of Richard Dreyfuss and the Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: the damn things get to you.

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I'd say Freedman's that rarity in the art world who can handle more than one emotional pitch in the same work, whereas the general drift is toward art with a clear meaning and vibe that can be reduced to a curatorial wall label. (My own "label" of his piece aims for political content that couldn't be expressed in an institutional setting but otherwise also grossly oversimplifies.)

Sampling Brooklyn, Keeper Of Eclectic Flames (fragment)

By HOLLAND COTTER, January 23, 2004

Elsewhere, the artist-run Vertexlist has opened with a solo show by the new-media artist Joe McKay. A kind of electronic fun-fair, it includes a wide-screen voice-activated video Ping-Pong game and a motorized version of a paleo-Macintosh screen icon, sure to have geek appeal. Of most interest, though, is an online database of clips produced by digital camera users who accidentally used movie mode when they meant to take still pictures of family and friends. The results have the unflattering awkwardness of old-time candid snapshots and are just as funny and touching.

CS: So, tell me what's going on here with your space.

MR: Well, we are in the construction phase right now, but we are getting ready for our opening on November 15th. And I thought that vertexlist, which is a big pile of numbers underlying the language for making images out of curves as opposed to pixels, is a nice metaphor, it's sort of a metaphor of a code that holds the image together. I think that this is the new tendency in the art world - to have the code and to have the physical representation of the code on the same level; they coexist. That's what I'm looking for. And that also ties in to many social issues. If you check out the website for the gallery, it says that vertexList looks for work that comments on post-capitalist codes.

The first show will be paintings and video work. And the paintings are by a Taiwanese artist, who is based in Williamsburg, CJ Yeh, and he wrote HTML code for Mondrian's paintings. And then he took the same size canvas, and hand-painted the HTML text onto the canvases. So there will be seven paintings that are complex simulations of Mondrian's work. When I saw them, I knew that this was very interesting work and it needs to be shown. Accompanying the paintings will be a computer set-up with a CD-Rom which shows how the code is created, so you'll be able to click on the painting and you will see the code running, and as the code is running you'll see the painting being drawn.

The video artist is Ted Szczepanski. He works with infomercials. He takes old infomercials from the 80s and 90s and chops them into little pieces. And then he sabotages them until they become a kind of techno music that subverts the original intent. They are very rhythmical - you can almost dance to them. I think we will be showing three pieces, one of which is Table Topsy-Turvy, which is based on a morning etiquette show.

CS: Sounds great.

MR: Yes, let's hope that this all can happen.

CS: Oh, I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about the word rhizome, and how it's an important term for artists working on the computer.

MR: Well, sure, the idea of the rhizome comes from Gilles Deleuze. Rhizome basically means the stem of the plant that grows by traveling underground - like grass, and the idea of creating those connections, like spreading out and being able to connect in a non-linear way through modules and units. And the idea of a culture that's not linear and straightforward, but more web-like and enveloping and perhaps less, masculine, less hierarchical, less paternalistic. It's a structure of un-structure. So, I guess that it's a very important term for people who work on the Internet. They are able to spread information in a way that hasn't happened before.

CS: Or maybe it's happened before, but it just hasn't been written down in linear history books?

MR: It happened before, but not with the speed with which it's happening now. If you want to get information out over the Internet, you can do it fast - in two hours - if you really know how to do it.

CS: So how do you maintain such a laid-back personality in the face of all this information?

MR: . . . Me? (Laughs) I'm not laid-back - I'm very stressed.