Google launches exhibition program with The Project Room for New Media at CAM

Digital Art @Google: Data Poetics
June 11 - August 13, 2010
Opening Reception: June 11, 6-9pm

Exhibition location:
Google, Inc.
75 Ninth Avenue, 2nd Floor
Guests must RSVP
rsvp@chelseaartmuseum.org


Google and The Project Room for New Media at Chelsea Art Museum (CAM) in New York are launching an exhibition program, Digital Art @Google NYC, which will engage Googlers with the art world and promote creativity with digital technology. Data Poetics, will open June 11 with works by well-known international digital artists, Scott Draves, R. Luke DuBois, Aaron Koblin, Mark Napier, W. Bradford Paley, Lincoln Schatz, John F. Simon, Jr., Thomson and Craighead, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas. The exhibitions and artist talks, which will take place at Google, will be open to guests at times announced on the website.

Digital Art @Google NYC is curated by Nina Colosi, Curator of The Project Room for New Media at CAM and founder of its public art program, Streaming Museum, which presents exhibitions in cyberspace and public spaces on 7 continents. The programs were inspired by pioneer video artist Nam June Paik who in the 1970s envisioned the Internet, predicting an "information superhighway" as an open and free medium for imagination and exchange of cultures.


According to Colosi, "A natural synergy exists with Google in this partnership. The Project Room's program showcases artworks and educational programs in its dramatic two-story black box space at Chelsea Art Museum, which incorporate technology and the Internet in the creative process."

Digital Art @Google emphasizes the correlation of Google's mission in organizing the world's information and making it accessible, with the ability of artists to reflect and synthesize information in the creation of artwork that expresses the contemporary world. The exhibitions and speaker programs will inspire, entertain, and help envision the world in new ways.

The exhibition program was initiated at Google by Josh Mittleman, User Interface Software Engineer, and supported by the Google Community Affairs committee at Google New York City. Mittleman described the motivation of the exhibit, "Art is one of many tools that can help to organize and make sense of the world's information. Digital Art @Google NYC is the first step toward introducing the digital arts community to Google, and to starting a conversation that will lead to a rich, ongoing collaboration."

The opening reception will be held on Friday, June 11, 2010 from 6-9 PM. Visitors may attend the opening, view the exhibition, and participate in the artist speaker program taking place at Google, Inc., 75 Ninth Avenue, 2nd floor, by sending an email to RSVP@chelseaartmuseum.org.

Artists Featured


HD Traffic
JOHN F. SIMON, Jr., HD TRAFFIC, 2009
software and HD video
BIOGRAPHY
b. 1963, Louisiana. Lives and works in New York.

Best known for his software and screen based artworks, John F. Simon, Jr. uses the unique properties of digital media to create time-based paintings whose compositions never repeat. His software art was shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and many others.

ABOUT THE WORK
John F. Simon, Jr's new software artwork HD Traffic 3 (2010) combines Piet Mondrian's rectilinear compositional style and his love of Jazz improvisation with the emergent dynamics of object oriented programming. From simple rules John Simon is able to coax cubes to form realistic traffic patterns, stopping and starting at intersections, passing each other and avoiding collisions, and even ending up in a giant traffic jam. His software endlessly varies the visual elements of the scene such as: the number of vehicles, the street sizes, traffic lights, car speeds, background colors and many more. Like traffic on a city street, the basic patterns are the same but the details never repeat. This new piece, spread across three large screen LCD monitors, follows Simon's lifelong fascination with using software automation to explore the infinite possibilities of image making.

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PAM Standing
MARK NAPIER, PAM STANDING, 2009
custom software, computer, monitor, generative animation. Overall: 42 x 24 x 7" / 106 x 61 x 18 cm; Screen: 23 x 15 x 4" / 58 x 38 x 10 cm edition of 3
BIOGRAPHY
b. 1961, United States. Lives and works in New York.

Mark Napier is recognized as one of the first to explore the potential of the Internet as a space for public art. Breaking boundaries of ownership in early web-based works such as Shredder (1998), Riot (1999), and Feed (2001), Napier questioned fixed designs of web navigation, opened content choices to users, and dissolved information into abstract expression. His recent works investigate monumentality, permanence, skin, the body, obsolescence, mythology, and architecture.

Commissioned to create Internet art for the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Napier was also part of the 2002 biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Exhibitions of his work include Centre Pompidou, Paris; P.S.1, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Ars Electronica, Linz; The iMAL Center, Brussels; Eyebeam; Markel Foundation in Rockefeller Center; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; Princeton Art Museum; la Villette, Paris, W Hotel, Seoul; Lafayette College; and Cleveland State University. He has received grants from Creative Capital, the Greenwall Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

ABOUT THE WORK
PAM Standing is a new-media Venus: a body re-formed from fragments scattered across the web. This generative screen-based work is a mashup of hundreds of images of Pamela Anderson downloaded from the Internet. Body parts of the pop-culture diva are joined together to form a virtual marionette that moves puppet-like on the screen. Flesh tones blend with numbers, lines and arrows that reveal the skeletal framework of the figure. In a reversal of Cubism, the female figure is "de-fragmented", rejoined into one seemingly complete body from it's media representation. Part reflection and part parody, PAM Standing explores sexuality in a world dominated by digital media and global information networks.

Courtesy: bitforms gallery nyc.
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Next
LINCOLN SCHATZ, NEXT, 2010
generative video work
screen, computer, custom software, camera

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1963, United States. Lives and works in Chicago.

Lincoln Schatz is an artist working with relative experiences of place and the meanings created over time using non-linear structures. Through use of custom software in his recent work, Schatz selectively records and displays video images culled from specific environments. Known for generative video works that collect, store and display nearly a decade of video memory, Schatz recently premiered new work in portraiture that celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Esquire magazine. Commissions of his work also include Qualcomm Corporate Headquarters, San Diego; the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago; One Arts Plaza, Dallas; and the Blackstone Hotel, Chicago, among others.

ABOUT THE WORK
Next is an interactive generative portrait. It is constantly changing, never revealing the same composition. The piece collects video from its environment daily, gradually amassing hours of brief video snippets. A generative memory of events is displayed on-screen, overlapping and juxtaposing past with present imagery. This video installation pictures the people and surroundings encountered by the artwork and presents nonlinear temporal possibilities. Imagery will be collected for approximately eight years, at which point the piece will no longer record.

Courtesy: bitforms gallery nyc
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland TextArc 2001-2010
W. BRADFORD PALEY
ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND TEXTARC 2001-2010
A TextArc is a visual index that draws an entire text, line by line, around the outside of a page; then repeats the text, word by word, just inside. If a word occurs more than once it's drawn larger, at the centroid of all its occurrences. This lets one see which words are used mostly in one place (they're pulled toward that place) and which are distributed in a more interesting way. Stars ("distribution glyphs") next to each word point to every occurrence.

A spectrum paints each section of the text a different enough color that a word used in an unusual place stands out. For example Queen, appearing briefly before the bulk of its usages, shows up as cyan in the mostly green tiny text lines along the bottom.

Note how the "ensemble characters" Hatter, Dormouse, and March Hare all have similarly shaped distribution glyphs, indicating that they always appear together. Similarly King and Queen always appear together. But Queen's glyph also graphically depicts foreshadowing: spikes pointing toward the bottom right (which don't appear in King's glyph) show that Queen appears four times, evenly spaced (reinforced just when one might forget it), before either character appears in person in the text.

CODEPROFILES 2002-2003
CodeProfiles was written August 9-15, 2002 for the CODeDOC exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art; commissioned by Christiane Paul whose curatorial agenda for the show became the organizing thesis of the print.

The artists shared source code with one another and the public, to focus upon it and the process of creating computer-mediated art. The assignment was to write code that moves three points in space—far too few points to interpret, leaving too much to arbitrary graphical choices—anathema to Mr. Paley’s approach to design. But when three different processes were traced through the “space” of the source code the problem became constrained enough to shape this result.

This code reads in its own source and displays it in a tiny font, then moves three points in "code space." The white Insertion Point traces the code in the order it was written. The amber Fixation Point traces word by word as someone might read it. The green Execution Point shows a sample of how the computer reads it.

It is displayed here for the first time as an “Illuminated Diagram”: a hybrid medium that combines the strengths of print (information density) and projection (used to direct attention over time).

Note how the code occasionally goes into a nested loop near the upper right, and that loop calls routines near the beginning of the code. If that's easy to see, a harder "geek riddle" is to understand how the code traced itself. In a very real sense, from the moment the tracing scheme was conceived it began tracing the order in which it was written; the same tokens were used later by the program itself to profile runtime order and frequency—all without breaking the Java sandbox.

ONCE MORE AROUND THE SUN, 2007-2010
Once more around the sun is a calendar designed to allow easy travel conflict spotting (since you can circle contiguous days with no weekend breaks), and to let people mark the more important events during the year with one or two words. It is printed yearly on newsprint-like (though high-quality) stock, folded, and distributed in packages of three to help people feel comfortable using it as a scratch pad on which to plot their lives; inventing their own visual language as they go.

It was conceived to perceptually/experientially connect tiny and large time scales: if someone marks the calendar then looks back in as little as an hour, they will be able to see the year slipping away. And yet, if this calendar is marked well, it can bring back those lost hours by revealing patterns one might not know in one’s life. It might even do more; if it’s discovered a decade later the key events marked should serve as strong mnemonics, bringing back an entire year that might otherwise have dimmed to just an anecdote or two.

Note how this representation foregrounds the regularity of the way we divide time, interrupted only by the slight differences in month lengths, and the subtler hour deletion & insertion for Daylight Savings Time (on March 14 & November 7 in 2010).

RELATIONSHIPS AMONG SCIENTIFIC PARADIGMS
W. Bradford Paley, Dick Klavans, Kevin Boyack

This "map of science" was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 scientific papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as colored circular nodes), based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (thin curved lines) were made between the paradigms that shared common papers, then treated as rubber bands; holding similar paradigms closer to one another while a physical simulation forced them all apart. Thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigm circles contain more papers. The feather boa-like labels list common words unique to each paradigm.

The smaller images along the bottom show how several individual nations concentrate their own efforts. Note how the English-speaking countries seem to focus more on medicine, the humanities and earth sciences; and Asian countries on computers and the physical sciences. Compare that with the relatively balanced focus of the European countries.

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Hindsight Is Always 20/20
R. LUKE DUBOIS, HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS 20/20, 2008
4 from portfolio set of forty-three letterpress prints (41 eye charts, 1 title page, 1 synopsis page). Each print: 21.25 x 28.25” / 54 x 72 cm Edition of 10
BIOGRAPHY
b. 1975, United States. Lives and works in NYC.

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural ephemera. Stemming from his investigations of “time-lapse phonography,” his recent work is a sonic and encyclopedic relative to time-lapse photography. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a single image, his work reveals the average sonority, visual language, and vocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information.

An active visual and musical collaborator, DuBois is the co-author of Jitter, a software suite for the real-time manipulation of matrix data. He appears on nearly twenty-five albums both individually and as part of the avant-garde electronic group The Freight Elevator Quartet. DuBois holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and teaches interactive sound and video performance at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. He is represented by bitforms gallery.

ABOUT THE WORK
Hindsight is Always 20/20 examines the history of American political discourse through the metaphor of vision. Drawing from the annual State of the Union (SOTU) addresses given by Presidents to Congress, 'Hindsight' consists of a single Snellen-style eye chart for each president to have given SOTU addresses. Instead of the typical characters present in an eye chart, the piece employs words drawn from their speeches, presented in order of most frequent (top line) to least frequent (bottom line) word. The result is a startlingly clear snapshot of the lexicon of each presidency, containing a mix of historically topical keywords and rhetoric unique to each president and the time period in which they served in office.

Courtesy: bitforms gallery nyc
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SCOTT DRAVES, GENERATION 243, 2009
Original software, nonrepeating playback of 12GB of 1080p nonlinear video, internet community consisting of 350,000 people and computers

Generation 243

BIOGRAPHY
b. 1968, Alexandria, VA. Lives and works in New York.

Draves is a software artist best known as the creator of the Electric Sheep (1999), a continually evolving abstract animation with 350,000 active monthly participants. He created the original Flame algorithm in 1991 and the Bomb interactive visual-musical instrument in 1995. Draves' software artworks are released as open source and have been used for two decades by many other artists and designers in their own work. Other works include Clade 1, a 1080p BluRay installed in Google’s New York offices. Dreams in High Fidelity, a moving painting that runs infinitely, is installed in the lobby of Google's headquarters, and has been acquired by corporate and residential collections nationally.

Draves' award-winning work is permanently hosted on MoMA.org, and has appeared in Wired and Discover magazines, as an official skin for Google Chrome, as the graphic identity for Siggraph 2008, at the Prix Ars Electronica 1993, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and on the main dance-floor at the Sonar festival in Barcelona. Draves is now an engineer in the mapping division at Google Inc. In 1990 he received a BS in Mathematics from Brown University and in 1997 a PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University for a thesis on metaprogramming for media processing.

ABOUT THE WORK
This is the artist’s print of a commissioned piece for the Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, installed there during opening ceremonies in September 2009. It is an infinitely-running, continuously morphing exploration of the 243rd generation of Draves’ crowdsourced evolving artificial life form, the Electric Sheep.

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AARON KOBLIN AND CHRIS MILK, THE JOHNNY CASH PROJECT, 2010
music video, collaborative web project
JAMES FROST (Director) and AARON KOBLIN (Director of Technology), HOUSE OF CARDS, 2008
music video, interactive data viewer, source code
BIOGRAPHY
Aaron Koblin. b. 1982 United States. Lives and works in San Francisco.

Koblin is an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to depict cultural trends and emergent patterns. Aaron’s work has been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science Foundation's first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Currently, Aaron is Technology Lead of Google’s Creative Lab where he helped to launch Chrome Experiments, a website showcasing JavaScript work by designers from around the world. Koblin holds an MFA in Design|Media Arts from UCLA.


The Johnny Cash Project
The Johnny Cash Project is a global collective art project where participants are invited to create a drawing that is woven into a collective tribute to Johnny Cash, set to his song Ain't No Grave. The project was inspired by the song's central lyric, "ain't no grave gonna hold my body down," and represents Cash's continued existence, even after his death, through his music and his fans. A collaboration with director Chris Milk, the work continues to grow and evolve as more people participate.

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House of Cards
ABOUT THE WORK
House of Cards is a music video that used lasers and sensors to scan the band Radiohead into a three-dimensional particle-driven data experience. The code and data were launched on Google Code as an open source "music video without video" project. Aaron Koblin was Director of Technology. With Director James Frost and a bunch of other great people, lasers and sensors were used to create a 3D data "music video". The project was launched as an Open Source project on Google Code. An interactive online viewer (created along with Aaron Meyers) allows for 3D investigation of the data online. Nominations in 2009 include a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video, UK VMA for Best Rock Video, and British Design Museum Awards.

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Flickr Flow
FERNANDA VIÉGAS & MARTIN WATTENBERG, FLICKR FLOW, 2009
print and interactive
BIOGRAPHY
Viégas b. 1971 Brazil, Wattenberg b. 1970 United States. Live in Cambridge and Winchester, Massachusetts.

Viégas and Wattenberg are the founders of Flowing Media, a studio focusing on media and consumer-oriented visualization. Before starting Flowing Media, Viégas and Wattenberg led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking public visualization platform Many Eyes. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the "history flow" project that revealed the self-healing nature of the online encyclopedia. Viégas is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Wattenberg’s visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics. Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for their visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

ABOUT THE WORK
The two of us see the world as a stream of color, and in 2009 we finally had a chance to draw the river in our heads. We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. In the image above, summer is at the top, with time proceeding clockwise.

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Google Tea Towels
THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD, GOOGLE TEA TOWELS, 2002
4 prints, 29" x 17" each
BIOGRAPHY
Craighead b. 1971 Scotland, Thomson b. 1969 United Kingdom. Live in London and Kingussie, Scotland.

Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead are fascinated by how global communications networks like the web are transforming the way we all perceive and understand the world around us. They live and work in London and Kingussie in the highlands of Scotland and make artworks for galleries, online and sometimes outdoors. Recent exhibitions include: Artists Space, New York; FACT, Liverpool; Tang Contemporary, Beijing; Dundee Contemporary Arts; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. They currently have a solo exhibition at the Highland Institute of Contemporary Art (H-I-C-A) in Inverness-shire and are screening their recent video work, 'Several Interruptions' on the side of a highrise building in Syracuse, New York as part of the Urban Video Project.

ABOUT THE WORK
A beautifully crafted set of four tea towels sporting a series of authentic search engine results returned to a user when the criteria, "Please Help Me", "Is Anybody there?", "Please listen to me" and, "Can you hear me?" were entered into the search field, while using Google in Netscape 4.7 on Mac OS 9.2 or Netscape 6 on Windows 98.