Warped and Wrapped :
The changing shape of Video Art

Rx GALLERY GRAND OPENING
THURSDAY JUNE 19

6pm-9pm

After nearly a year and half, we are pleased to announce the official
opening of our new downtown gallery/lounge, Rx. The first project
"Warped and Wrapped: The changing shape of Video Art" is a month
long series of exhibitions, screenings, and events exploring the changing
form of video. From interactive installations and kinetic sculpture to media-jamming and digital animation, Warped and Wrapped showcases artists
working with video as sculpture, revealing a medium in transition from
static screen-based systems to more fluid, organic ones.

Orders for the Evening
(Courtesy of K.)

Video Sphere
Obscura Digital

Particle Screen combines water, mist and light to give the illusion of being able to blow away light. Small columns of light gather in the center of an acrylic tank, flocking like small insects around the center. A shallow pool of water, made slightly cloudy by an emulsion, sits in the base. The tiny particles in the emulsion capture light projected from below, transforming the dots into mini dancing light sabers. Blowing into the cube disturbs the mist and the flocking lights scatter in all directions, simultaneously shooting up into the air as the light captures the vapor.

As the mist eventually settles the lights gently calm down to gather again in the center.

Graham Plumb...
is a British media artist, recently moved from London to San Francisco. He works with digital and real media to make illusionistic experiences that test our sense of perception.

Recent collaborations include an ongoing project with the London office of Tomato Interactive and summer research project at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy.

Graham also designs interactive exhibits for Museums, previously establishing a media department with Ralph Appelbaum Associates in London, and more recently joining West Office Exhibition Design in Oakland. Graham has asked us to mention he is looking for a s*** hot Director programmer to help him with his next project for an exhibition in New Delhi.

gsplumb@yahoo.com

The politician is a work in progress and the first member of the Parthenon of the Public Figure--a series of interactive video based sculptures exploring the public and private lives of public figures as viewed by the public.

Andy Diaz Hope
Andy Diaz Hope is an artist, designer and engineer whose work explores technology and its influences on our lives and interactions. Diaz Hope is Director of Interactive Environments at MOTO Development Group. His work has been shown at Yerba Buena, SFMOMA, SF Cameraworks, GenART Newfangle and the Chicago Art Institute.

Jemima Brown’s practice with synthetic twin sister and 'collaborator' Dolly Brown comprises video, photography and sculpture projects.

In videos and performances previous to 1998 plastic twin Dolly had often been the centre of attention by being completely passive – a dead thing dragged around.

Untitled 1996 – 98 represents a significant development in Jemima and Dolly’s work together, as it was the point at which Dolly actually became active through being passive. The 2 monitor video installation pitches Jemima and Dolly against each other in a staring contest, which Dolly inevitably wins.

Untitled 1996 – 98 was made during time as a guest artist and Fulbright scholar in the MFA Graduate School, University of California Los Angeles, when Jemima sought an increasingly active role for her 'clone'. Despite being an inanimate object cobbled together from sex doll parts, mannequin limbs and body casts, Dolly began to act as a catalyst in the making of the work, and gradually became its co-author. Since 1998 all work has been credited to Jemima and Dolly as a double-act.

See www.jemimaanddolly.com for more info

In Aleatory TV, an invisible electronic “agent” tries to build a sentence (pre-selected by the artist) by listening for specific words from live broadcast television.

When the agent believes it has found a word or phrase, it adds the word to the sequence of television clips of the words the agent has already found. As words are repeated, they are replaced in the sentence as it is being built.

Many times the agents’ recognition of the word is incorrect. It may truncate the word being searched for or accidentally add extra words, creating a fragmented montage that is always in a state of transformation highlighting broadcast television’s gestures by removing them form it’s context.

"Flash Point" is an spatial array of 4 modified slide projectors. Each projector contains a high power strobe light which is set to fire off at a random interval. The slides' image is projected for a minute fraction of a second, long enough to be imprinted in the viewers memory. Once the projector fires off, the projector tray is advanced and the system recycles itself for the next random trigger time. A triggering event can occur anytime within a 30 second range. The projectors are spaced horizontally at intervals along a white wall to add anticipation to the location of the next image. There is no way of know which will fire off when, and where.

Images are edited and selected to trigger memories on universal level. The images are of iconic faces, expressions, and the occasional landscape. The faces are close up portraits of various people with various expressions and various cultural backgrounds. The landscapes are interspersed to create a sense of virtual space and time.

Flash point is a reversal of the common assumptions of the act of "recording". Instead of the photographs being the record of the experience to be taken away by the viewer, the only way to experience this photo is through the memory of that photo. The photograph traditionally is a visual record of an experience that has since past. "Flash Point" challenges this role by using the photo image to create an experience. The flash initiates an event where what the viewer "sees" is only what they can remember, thus the image exists only in the viewers own reflection of the experience.

More at www.testsite.org

Kurt Bigenho
with Elizabeth Cruz
Cynthia Yuen
 --

Orders for the Evening
(Courtesy of K.)

The basic premise is to coax impromptu “performances” from audience members
by giving them "orders", simple verbal instructions, which encourage odd,
provocative and humorous behavior. Anticipating possible resistance, two
ladies in bondage gear will be handing out the "orders", and then taking the
necessary measures to enforce them. Video imagery will be remote-broadcast
via helmet-cams to a bank of flickering tv monitors elsewhere in the space.
Over the course of the evening, mini-typologies of shared "action" will
evolve, mix, overlap, and merge.

www.unfinished.com