While nature often presents us with a balance between beauty and mathematical complexity, many artists spend their entire careers chasing after this formula. San Francisco-based Israeli artist Shirley Shor's work is as visually stimulating as it is conceptually nuanced. In her algorithmic software installations, videos, and photos, Shor demonstrates that the emergent trends of 'data visualization' and artistic number crunching need not be separated from emotional, historical, or cultural content. The artist generally begins a project by writing a code that metaphorizes concepts like conflict, identity, or language and uses it to program real-time generative 'behavior' on the part of pixels. The result is an ever-engaging conflation of modernism and Duchampian surrealism, in which hard lines, rotoscopes, and geometric anomolies coalesce in constantly evolving animations. While these works are clearly logic-driven, they also embody the playfulness one might expect of an artist who wrote her graduate thesis on the European DEMO scene of the 1980s. Shor's first New York solo exhibition opens April 27, at Moti Hasson Gallery, and runs through May 27. - Marisa Olson
