works/san jose

works/san jose

remote/control
Curated by Jason Challas and Sheila Malone
Remote/Control will showcase 8 artists whose work utilizes electronic reproduction, signals and transmission of images. Remote/Control will reflect concepts of Mass-Media production, representation of “self” in virtual spaces, and the illusion of control that personal electronic devices create in our world. These electronic representations serve as tools for social observation and reflection.

John Pierre Bruneau’s installation features the “Everyman” tv/living room. Bruneau creates a low-tech telepresence that responds to the viewer’s placement in the space.

Jason Challas’ Logic series of paintings and video work juxtapose “organic” video images with images from the mass-media and graphic symbols of logic gates used for schematic circuit design.

Joe DeLappe’s pieces work with internet game spaces to create social interventions and physical and interactive art. His recreation of Gandhi’s salt march in Second Life will be annotated in this exhibition with the recreation of Gandhi’s subsequent 9-month sentence in the Puna jail resulting from the march.

Joseph Kohnke’s piece Growth exhibit a 2” x 4” length of lumber that has an embedded soundtrack of live conservative A.M. talk show radio. Kohnke will also exhibit “Hollow” which uses CPR mouths, harmonicas and electronic mechanisms which move the harmonica slowly back and forth across the mouth. A blower is activated and produces sound.

Sheila Malone Re/surfacing, a short video playing in the Changing Room, follows the impact of “T”, the hormone Testosterone, on the biological “sex” and the “cultural gender of Renate- aka Henry.  The Changing Room investigates the line of demarcation between and with binary opposites, discovering the under pinnings of how gender can be expressed as something unfixed and changing- in a direct relationship to image, time and form.

James Morgan’s piece, Mac$name is the tale ambition and madness told through massively multiplayer game City of Heroes. Mac$name is a contemporary play where the audience is the actor and drives the story making decisions as the central figure. Mac$name takes on a series of diverse visual forms that shift with the tastes of the lead actor(s).The title of the work refers to the play of William Shakespeare, Macbeth, and to $name which is a system variable containing the character’s name. Thus Mac$name is not a single word but many to the medium that hosts it.

Tom Riebold will exhibit a robotic walking chair. A preview of pervasive household computing; artificial intelligence extrapolating into furniture, upgrading the chair with kinetic tedium and imparting a type of robotic pet status.

Shannon Wright Toy (Collapsing Elephant), 1998-1999. Dimensions variable. Birch plywood, purchased toy elephant, hardware, steel cable, reworked stick shift lever, consumer videoconferencing cameras, video projectors, lights, microphones.