SENTIENT ELECTRONICS: PATTERN DISCOVERY TECHNIQUES

November 23 |  7-10pm

Featuring:
DJ RUTHLESS // fl!pfl0p // MONOCHORD
Audio-Visual Performances and Installations
Presented by wallplay
One Night Only: November 23th, 2019 // 7-10pm
117 Beekman Street. Seaport District NYC

Temporary Installation from MONOCHORD (Sophia Sobers & Steven Pestana)

Artwork from: Jim D’Amato, Taezoo Park, Lee Wells, Justin Wood
operated by wallplay @wallplaynetwork #wallplay
@syntaxprojects @justinwoodart @jim_damato @digitalbeing
@ifacarts @seaportdistrict.nyc

Sentient Electronics

October 5 – November 30, 2019

Presented by Wallplay – 117 Beekman St. NYC

Featuring: Jim D’Amato, Taezoo Park, Lee Wells, Justin Wood

Sentient Electronics explores some of the ways artists are responding to the rise of personified machines and artificial intelligence. Jim D’Amato’s dense abstractions withhold any obvious pictorial illusions or representations and instead a nexus of intricate biomorphic forms converge and allude to spaces that could exist in the natural world, or in the mind. Taezoo Park’s “DIGITAL BEING” is a series of the new and old media artworks created from abandoned technologies based on the hypothetical existence of an unknown creature (A.I.) born within the circuits of technological garbage. Lee Wells’ portraits of Sophia (A.I.), and Roomba hackbots delve into the world of machine learning, surveillance voyeurism, and AI anxiety. Justin Wood’s mixed media installation responds to the rise of robot priests and looks at the future of religion through the lens of emerging technologies. Through paintings, video sculpture, and interactive installations, Sentient Electronics aims to capture a moment of time where artists are engaging the prospect of humans losing the intellectual dominance of our world.

JIM D’AMATO

Jim D’Amato is an American artist based in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally in galleries, alternative spaces, and museum stores. Jim attended the School of Visual Arts in New York, and studied with Jack Whitten, Marilyn Minter, and Mary Heilmann, among others. He has been included in group exhibitions with Richard Serra, KAWS, H.R. Giger, and more. His work is available in the Pierogi Gallery Flat Files in New York. It is also available at museum stores and art institutions through Art-o-Mat, a unique organization helping make art accessible to the public.

TAEZOO PARK

Taezoo Park has been making artwork out of abandoned technology combined with digital media to bring to life a hypothetical creature from inside machines. He calls this new life “Digital Being”. He has been working on finding and depicting these inherent creature of digital technology as a new media artist in New York City for the past 10 years.

Additionally, to find out the new direction of developing technology, he had been researching with social scientists of the department of information science in Cornell University from 2013 to 2015. To see the reality of e-waste matters, he, as a residency artist, worked in Gowanus E-waste Warehouse, which is owned by LES Ecology Center from 2014 to 2015. To find a proper way to maintain electric/electronic artworks, he, as one of technicians, has been helping to restore Nam June Paik’s video artworks in New York City from 2015 until now.

His work has been featured at ABC news, BBC news, ACM Interactions, Open Journal System: Continent, ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community, ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, Gizmodo, SciArt, World Maker Faire, CHI(Computer-Human Interaction), SPRING/BREAK Art Show, BRIC Arts Media, Moniker Art Fair, Contemporary Art Fair NYC, New Museum Ideas City, Governors Island Art Fair, Portal Art Fair at Federal Hall National Memorial, Harvestworks, Ca’ d’Oro Gallery, Clemente Center, ACE Hotel, Cornell University, Pratt DDA Gallery, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Lower East Side Ecology Center, Northside Festival, World Trade Gallery, Made in NY Media Center by IFP, Barnes & Noble, AFA Gallery and World Trade Center.

LEE WELLS

Lee Wells is a conceptual artist, independent curator and writer working in Greece, London and New York. His artwork and projects question systems of power and control and have been exhibited internationally, including the 51st Venice Biennale, The Guggenheim Museum, and PS1/MoMA, in addition to numerous festivals, art fairs, and galleries. Wells was most recently invited as an artist and curator for the 1st Mykonos Biennale in Greece and continues to further the dialogue between video and painting to create new ways of thinking.

JUSTIN WOOD

Justin Wood is a New York City based artist and curator working in the overlap of the digital and physical worlds. His work is built on a conceptual framework derived from the impact of emerging technologies on humankind. His work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions and he holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (NY) where he studied painting with Jack Whitten, Michael Goldberg and Joanne Greenbaum. His work was featured recently at ChaShaMa, Wallplay, Spring Break 2018 and Art for Climate Justice, an installation on board the Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise. His work has been covered by ArtNews, ArtInfo, Artnet.com, Hyperallergic, Art Nerd, the Miami New Times and The Takeaway (WNYC). In 2019, through a ChaShaMa residency, Justin launched Syntax Projects as a curatorial and experiential event platform.

Simulant Dystopia

June 15 – July 31 | Opening reception 6/15 | 6-9pm

Sean Capone
Joel Cretan
Jim D’Amato
Andrew Erdos
Carla Gannis
Taezoo Park
Psykosmos

In 2003, futurist philosopher Nick Bostrom published a landmark paper titled “Are you living in a computer simulation”.  This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Simulant Dystopia dissects the simulation hypothesis by considering the methods of human extinction, obstacles or distractions to human progress and by engaging with the possibility of human-digital hybrids and life inside the simulation.

Born from a meditation on life in Northern Florida and rendered in silver-lined blown glass, Andrew Erdos’ Psychotropic Swap Palace Mouse is a reflective and sardonic creature that visits you in a state of delirium and encourages you to question reality and follow it into the moonlit swamp.  Carla Gannis’ “Until the End of the World” is an operatic moving image work that speaks to notions of feminist selfhood and post-human potentiality in the digital age. Jim D’Amato’s biomorphic paintings, rendered with a machine like precision, blur the line between abstraction and representation, objective reality and dreams. Joel Cretan’s hardware hacked Super Nintendo gives weight to simulation argument through its imaginative view of process,materials and interactivity. Psykosmos (Nicolas Kouri & Andrea Vigil) delve into the world of subatomic weirdness and consciousness expansion while illuminating symptoms of a pragmatically programmed sensory experience.  Sean Capone’s digital animations address the physical verses digital future of humanity and point towards a degeneration of the species. From 2045, Taezoo Park’s Digital Being, a consciousness born from forgotten and abandoned technology, remembers scenes from 2019 New York City.

The works in Simulant Dystopia reflect an anxiety about the ability of humans to technologically and intellectually outpace environmental and social collapse. They doubt our ability to reach the posthuman stage and warn against relinquishing control to the machines we create in our bid for survival and transcendence.

Captivity

May 8 – 31, 2019.  
Wed – Sat: 1 – 6:30pm and by Appointment

Opening Reception May 11, 6 – 9pm
with music from DJ Ruthless & DJ DR

1424 Lexington Ave. @ 93rd st.

The works in this show relate to various experiences and connections that limit or extend the concept of freedom; of the self and of the mind.  Boundaries, containers and leashes both real and imagined. Fear, anxiety, social constructs, the reach of government and civilization. The costs and benefits.  At times they are soft, comfortable and ephemeral and other times hard, distressing and physical. They point towards possible futures and express deep personal histories as they examine the limits we extend or abide by.

Featuring:

Joel Cretan
Linda Loh
Jason McLean
Psykosmos
Sophia Sobers
Vargas Suarez Universal
Lee Wells
Justin Wood

A ChaShaMa space to Present
@chashama
chashama.org

Joel Cretan
Joel Cretan is a digital artist and Bay Area native now living in New York City. Computers are deterministic, but their behavior is so complex that it is impossible to anticipate how they will handle all the crazy inputs you can throw at them; this complexity is one reason he enjoys exploring the unexpected results of combining simple and sophisticated algorithms for creating patterns and shapes. Some of his more recent creations reflect the cyberpunk dystopia that the future has turned out to be.

Linda Loh
Linda Loh is a multidisciplinary artists living and working Melbourne, Australia.  She received her Graduate Certificate in Visual Art – Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 2009 and her BFA in Expanded Studio Practice from RMIT University in 2012.  She is set to receive her MFA in computer art from the School of Visual Arts in 2021. Most recently she completed a residency at the NARS foundation in New York.

Jason Mclean
Brooklyn based Canadian artist, Jason McLean, creates autobiographical imagery, through scavenged objects, and memory mapping. Jason McLean’s diverse art practice includes sculpture, sound works, zines, book works, mixed-media installations, correspondence art, curatorial explorations, puppets, and performance, but he is probably best known for his diaristic mapping and surreal drawings. Inspirations fueling his daily observations are relationships with local and visited environments. His works are often described as mental maps, where samplings of his daily observations are mashed-up into antiheroic, yet poignant combinations. Grounded in family life as Husband and Father, McLean works by using humour to touch upon challenging subject matter, such as sadness, loss, displacement, and economic hardship.

Jason McLean was born in London, ON in 1971. After attending H.B. Beal Secondary School, McLean graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver in 1997. He has exhibited nationally and internationally including shows at The National Gallery of Canada, The Vancouver Art Gallery, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Loyal Gallery in Malmo Sweden, Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, Franklin Parrish Gallery and Zieher Smith Gallery in New York City. He has work in major collections throughout North America including the Museum of Modern Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, Bank of Montreal Collection and the Royal Bank of Canada. McLean is represented by Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Canada, Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and Back Gallery Project, Vancouver, Canada.

Psykosmos
Psykosmos, created by Andrea Vigil and Nicolas Kouri, it’s a fusion of their personal projects called Psy and Collagenom. This collective project studies the interaction and change of the elements of the mind and cosmos and thus the unification of the micro and macro cosmos. This project aims to integrate science and spirituality through art, channeling the energy of the inside and the outside world.

Sophia Sobers
Sophia Sobers is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in installations and site specific work. She is interested in investigating the boundaries between science, technology, nature and the spiritual and her work ranges from installation and sculpture to drawing, photography, and digital objects.

Sobers holds an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BS in Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She has exhibited her work nationally in institutions such as the Rubin Museum (New York, NY), New Bedford Art Museum (New Bedford, MA), and Westmoreland Museum of American Art (Greensburgh, PA), and has presented her work in solo exhibitions at the University Art Gallery at the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA), AS220 Reading Room (Providence, RI) and Find & Form Space (Boston, MA). She has created public art as part of Cherry Blossoms in Winter (Branch Brook Park, Newark, NJ), I-195 Redevelopment Commission (Providence, RI), and Alloy Pittsburgh (Rankin, PA) and has been honored to receive numerous commissions and grants, including the Puffin Foundation Grant. Her work has been written about in SciArt Center, E-Squared Magazine, Blouin Artinfo, and the Creators Project.

Vargas-Suarez Universal
Vargas-Suarez Universal is an artist currently  living and working between New York; Texas and Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan).  ​He was born in Mexico City and raised in the Houston, Texas suburb of Clear Lake City, adjacent to the Johnson Space Center (NASA). From 1991 to 1996 he studied astronomy and art history at the University of Texas at Austin and moved to New York City in 1997. He is primarily known for large-scale murals, paintings, drawings, and sound recordings. He sources American, Russian, European, Canadian and Japanese spaceflight programs, astronomy, and aerospace architecture to create commissioned, studio-based and public artworks for museums, galleries, private and public spaces. Vargas-Suarez has conducted post-studio research at NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA; Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, FL; Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX; Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, Korolyov (Moscow), Russia; and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. His writings have been published by Right Brain Words, New York; Edizioni Charta, Milano and The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Selected collections include: The Museum of Modern Art Library, Whitney Museum of American Art, El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum of Art, Brooklyn  Museum of Art, Dieu Donne Papermill, Inc. Archives (all in New York); Jersey City Museum, NJ; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, RI; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin,TX; Palazzo delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Italy; Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain; DA2 (Domus Artium, 2002) Salamanca, Spain; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain, Winzavod Contemporary Art Centre, Moscow, Russian Federation, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection and the UBS Art Collection.

Lee Wells
Lee Wells is a conceptual artist, independent curator and writer working in New York. His artwork and projects question systems of power and control and have been exhibited internationally, including the 51st Venice Biennale, The Guggenheim Museum, and PS1/MoMA, in addition to numerous festivals, art fairs, and galleries. Wells was most recently invited as an artist and curator for the 1st Mykonos Biennale in Greece and continues to further the dialogue between video and painting to create new ways of thinking.

Justin Wood
Justin Wood is a New York City based artist working in the overlap of the digital and physical worlds. His work is built on a conceptual framework derived from the impact of emerging technologies on humankind. His work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the mediums of Projection Mapping, Screen Paintings, Video Sculpture, Painting, Installation, Video Art and Virtual Reality. He holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (NY) where he studied painting with Jack Whitten, Michael Goldberg and Joanne Greenbaum. His work was featured recently with Wallplay’s OnCanal Series at Spring Break 2018 and Art for Climate Justice, an installation on board the Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise. His work has been covered by ArtNews, ArtInfo, Artnet.com, Hyperallergic, Art Nerd, the Miami New Times and The Takeaway (WNYC).