The ‘2012 RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition’

Museum And Gallery

FirstWorks’ eighth annual “Pixilerations”

Balancing act: tech and art

By GREG COOK | September 27, 2011

TENUOUS CONNECTIONS Smith’s Digital Painting: Social Network.

Rebecca Mushtare's StoryQuilt invites you to sit at a faux sewing machine and tell it a story, which the Mount Kisco, New York, artist's software converts into a virtual quilt that is projected on the wall above. I leaned into the microphone and spoke about a 2-year-old boy upset by a scene in the movie Ponyo. As soon as I finished talking, it spit out a pattern of black-and-gray triangles in a variation of a flying geese quilt, inspired only by the "duration, volume, frequency" and other "measurable components" of my tale.

What does it mean to reduce our stories to simple measurements of their dimensions? This sort of sabermetrics approach to life is common among the 40 artists from around the globe exhibiting in "Pixilerations," the eighth annual festival of tech art organized by FirstWorks in Providence through October 2. (I'm focusing on exhibits, but there's also an okay pair of billboards in the parking lot at Page and Pine streets, and a concert of electronic music at Firehouse 13, 41 Central Street, Providence, on September 30.) Moneyball has demonstrated the benefits of analyzing baseball performance data to discover what sports talents really help win games and discover a deeper, more accurate understanding of this human phenomenon. But artists' data mining often disconnects from the soul of the thing — in the case Mushtare's StoryQuilt, which is among the works on view at RISD's Sol Koffler Gallery (169 Weybosset Street,). Don't we lose something important if we don't pay any attention to the content of our stories?

TEXTILE TALE Mushtare’s StoryQuilt.

Often the needs of tech in tech art get in the way of the art. Works are more moving when they're (apparently) simpler, allowing the content of the art to come to the fore. At Brown University's Granoff Center for the Creative Arts (154 Angell Street), Georgie Friedman of Boston describes her installation as video of a lightning storm projected across one wall of a Granoff room. It's mostly dark, the room filled with the sound of wind and thunder, then intermittent flashes of red and white light behind silhouetted trees. The work is pretty straightforward, but the presentation — particularly the sound — transforms the gray room into the outdoors.

Il Jeffuria Pizza, an interactive video installation by Jeffu Warmouth of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, offers a touch-screen menu of pizzas that prompt video of a life-sized Warmouth in a chef's hat to act out wacky orders. Order "Baseball Pizza" and he swings a rolling pin at balls of dough thrown his way; order "UFO Pizza" and a pie floats down (on very visible wires) for Warmouth to add pepperoni and cheese. It's lite comedy in the tradition of silent film comedians, William Wegman, and Sesame Street.

Chun-Chiang Niu of Taiwan projects images of papers flapping in wind atop three similar sheets of paper taped to the wall. The real papers don't move, but the video tricks your eyes into thinking they're waving. It's a simple move, but powerfully disorients your senses, confusing the virtual with the real.

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[ 05/20 ] "The Ashes Series," photographs by Wafaa Bilal @ David Winton Bell Gallery

[ 05/20 ] "Rhode Island School of Design Graduate Thesis Exhibition 2013" @ Rhode Island Convention Center

[ 05/20 ] "The Festive City," @ RISD Museum

ARTICLES BY GREG COOK

CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN | May 13, 2013
What does it mean to be a man? That's the question at the heart of this smart, sumptuous exhibit — one of the best shows in the region this year.

MERRY PRANKSTERS | May 07, 2013
Parked out front of Brown University's gray modernist Granoff Center on a recent sunny morning were one of those 15-foot-tall inflatable rats that unions install in front of businesses they're protesting and a limousine sloppily painted to resemble a yellow and black school bus.

ALTERED IMAGES | April 30, 2013
Among the handsome Washington Street storefronts of AS220's renovated Mercantile Block building, with their neo-old-timey signs, is the residents' entrance to the building. It is against AS220's religion to leave any space empty that can be filled with art. So the lobby is the AS220 Resident Gallery, which occupants of the building take turns filling with their stuff.

IN THE CITY | April 23, 2013
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Providence art scene is how the city itself has been such a rich subject. A decade ago, the city became a galvanizing topic as artists fought to protect the old mills that served as their homes and studios from demolition — with mixed success. But lately, the community's industrial architecture itself has attracted artists' attention.

THE AFTERMATH OF ATROCITY | April 16, 2013
From the ruins of the Iraq war emerges Wafaa Bilal's "The Ashes Series" and Daniel Heyman's "I Am Sorry It Is So Difficult To Start," on view at Brown University's Bell Gallery.