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Re-Imaging the Future by (art)n Laboratory | |||||||||
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Art(n) Laboratory - face of gold - virtual photograph - 2002 | |||||||||
Ray Kurzweil, prolific inventor, author and futurist prophesized that Virtual Reality would navigate the 21st Century, forever changing the way people interact with each other and evolve as “spiritual machines.” For the past three decades, internationally noted multimedia artist, Ellen Sandor, has creatively challenged and inspired the public to consider the implications and possibilities that the future may hold within the virtual world Kurzweil envisioned. Under Sandor’s direction, a diverse portfolio comprised of commissioned sculptures, installations and singular pieces were created in collaboration with her Chicago-based collective, (art)n, and an interdisciplinary mix of International artists, scientists and thinkers. (art)n’s work addresses subjects that place the most current issues of science, art, history, and technology into the public arena for social discourse and debate, recording an elegant portrait of the digital landscape for future generations. Common themes throughout (art)n’s oeuvre include the exploration of outer space, the natural environment, and the human body, combined with examination of various forms of human expression ranging in scope from the horrors of war and terrorism to the need for tolerance and creativity. In a spring 2004 review of The Art of Science exhibition at the International Center of Photography, Seed magazine noted “(art)n is responsible for the three artist-generated pieces in the show . . . These images force a certain duality on the viewer. But it's more than it is certainly an area where their intersection is of significant value. Public access to such amplified images of the body may or may not reinforce the sentimentality we feel about our physical selves. The greater impact of this showcase, however, lies in the recognition that the techniques capable of reducing our bodies to numerical data can also elevate them to interpretive art.” Realized as computer-generated images that are visible to the naked eye in three-dimensions, the group’s virtual photographic process, widely known as PHSColograms, have also been called the “daguerreotype of Virtual Reality.” Drawing on the process-oriented works of the Surrealists and Dadaists, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, (art)n has broken new ground with its conceptual blending of process and content. (art)n’s body of work resembles what Alfred Stieglitz once described his showings as a “laboratory of ideas,” and are visual evidence of C.P. Snow’s “third culture,” embodying a new way of seeing, thinking and creating a framework for the digital domain, in multiple dimensions and multiple media, across disciplinary cultures and timelines. Since 1983, (art)n’s works have been widely viewed by millions of people around the globe in museum and gallery exhibitions, and virtual showings on the Internet. (art)n has been featured in more than 150 group exhibitions, including eight major traveling shows, complemented by twelve unique surveys of new works and retrospectives, collectively organized in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. (art)n has been written about in Chinese, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and Spanish. Commissioned projects include works in The Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum of Jewish Heritage, International Center for Photography, and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Public Art Program. (art)n: Collaboration and Process At the beginning of this new century, artists have everything from natural materials to electronic media to make art with and discover new metaphors in the meaning of the work and the process by which it was created. In the past hundred years alone, artists have explored humanity through the different kinds of materials they have used to make art. And with every new material lies the critical quest to invent new techniques, new forms, new approaches, new meanings, new theories and continued dialogues with art history. Since the first works of digital art were created in the 1960s, one of the most intriguing directions has been the reinvention of collaboration as an artistic process. Throughout history, collaboration has existed by necessity to facilitate the massive scale of a project or the technological challenges of working in a new medium. Artists today are increasingly working in groups to respond to a variety of options that are available to them, revealing provocative changes in the behind the scenes look at how art is being made. (art)n's approach to the future of 21st Century art includes a broad spectrum of disciplines and views that have inspired new concepts of what art is, what it can be, and how it can be made. These developments have emerged from working in collaboration with peers from other disciplines, combined with the invention of the group's unique digital imaging processes. Over the past three decades, (art)n has witnessed the transformation from the physical to the virtual, producing a compelling body of work that reveals an eloquent portrait of the virtual world.
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