The image at the top of Roberta’s last post reminded me of this one. It’s a still from a video, “X-I am Here” by Bjorn Wangen, of Malmo, Sweden, one of five artists in an exhibit on a new online site, binarykatwalk, recently launched by artist Jeremy Hight, who has a track record that includes being in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum artport. Hight emailed us about the site.
I downloaded a swell piece of screen saver art from the exhibit,”Holding Pattern” by Cathy Davies, a Los Angeles artist. Wangen’s and Davies’ were my two favorite pieces.
The Wangen I loved for its techno-paranoia in a techno medium. He’s receiving radio signals on an antenna on his roof, and the image is of landscape as well as all kinds of noise interference. The x is where he lives, Malmo. There’s a sweet desire to figure out place in the world and in the technosphere, and at the same time there’s that weird “we know where you are and everything about you” vibe.
The Davies I love because it frames the sky, space and nature in the technological world of an airplane window framed by the window that is the computer screen. Because it is a screen saver, it’s a reminder of the official Windows screen saver, with its techno-clouds and its floating window. But it’s way more charming. (I may have destroyed my computer with this one, but I really think the slowness preceded my download.)
Some of the things that interested me about this exhibit:
–the photos of the artists. So hip to do that! Artist-celebrities.
–the international mix, including someone from Montreal and Germany as well as another Los Angeles artist
–the fair balance of male and female for a change
–the mix of media, including a short-short story and two other pieces that were words mixed with images
–the technology totally worked
–there was lots of background info there if you wanted to delve into it, but it wasn’t something you had to make an effort to bypass
My site criticisms are fairly small:
–I would like to know just how long the video will take before I click the button.
–the navigation buttons are a bit too modest and invisible
Others in the show are Ollivier Dyens, Agricola de Cologne and Lisa Tao.
Oh, and since de Cologne is literally from Cologne, Germany, perhaps I should start calling myself Libby de Philadelphia. But his happy smile in his art-celebrity shot makes me like him anyway.
