Exhibition information for POST at 1904 East 7th Place, Los Angeles, CA 90021.

Exhibition: e-motion
Curator: Susan Joyce

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 6, 7:00 – 10:00 PM
SRL performance @ 9:30PM

Exhibition Dates: July 6 – August 3, 2002

Regular Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12:00 noon – 6 PM


POST is pleased to present e-motion featuring new media; motion based works by Kent Anderson Butler, Casey Hanrahan, Kristine Marx, Yucef Merhi, Mark Pauline, Erwin Redl, and James Rouvelle.

Since the invention of motion pictures a century ago, artists have been experimenting in innovative ways, exploring the possibilities of art and technology. Electronic culture has expanded the world of visual art. The works in this exhibition represent the use of technology in creative and meaningful applications. In concert with artistic expression, these artists employ diverse disciplines such as light, sound, video, performance, language, and engineering. Ideas are transformed into visceral experiences, all in some way engage in the activity of motion, and in some instances
interaction between the works occur. We are just beginning to scratch the surface on understanding the potential of technology and its relationship to contemporary art. With the assimilation of machine to technology, cultural transformations take place. The evolution of electronic culture is a change in the dynamics of society, representation and experience.

Kent Anderson Butler - performance/video installation "Immersion" is an investigation of the union between two people and represents the process of ritual and spiritual experience.

Casey Hanrahan –Using materials such as aluminum, steel, and rivets, the artist employs systems of mathematics and design to construct optical meditative drawings for the purpose of targets.

Kristine Marx – video installation depicts situations that are both intimate and impersonal. The banal is experienced as a spatially disorienting and isolating event. The work draws attention to the elastic, permeable boundary between self and other, interior and exterior, reality and illusion.

Yucef Merhi – Poetic Words is a work constituted by 4 light emitting spinning devices. When people interact with these machines they will see a word, created by combining two words, related to a social, philosophical or political issue, like Anorecstasy (Anorexia - Ecstasy). In Artistotelian terms, the words always exist in potency but become poetry in motion when the spectators spin the object and feel/interpret the content. Most recent net-poetry project of Merhi can be experienced at http://www.turbulence.org/Works/yucef.

Mark Pauline – Survival Research Laboratories videos of machine experiments and performances. SRL was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in 1978 as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to redirecting the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare. SRL has staged over 50 mechanized performances in the United States and Europe that consist of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.
http://www.srl.org

Erwin Redl - elevator shaft light installation. In this body of work, space is experienced as a second skin, our social skin, which is transformed through artistic intervention. Due to the very nature of its architectural dimension, participating by simply being "present" is an integral part of the installation. Visual perception has to work in conjunction with corporeal motion, and the passage of time, an additional parameter of motion. Redl’s
light installation was recently featured at the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

James Rouvelle – interactive sound robotics. Robots are sensitive to changes in light and sound. A blue LED at the tip of each responds to its environment by either illuminating, holding, or dimming at various speeds. Each robot attempts to locate others by emitting, sensing, and responding to a sound similar to sonar. Movement by visitors in the space creates an additional dimension of interactivity.