Everyware: Cosmic Rays Digital

The Terminal: Human Shaped Hole

Jason Isolini, 2021

Directed & Composed By: Jason Isolini Featuring: Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ian Bruner, Joshua Citarella, Jessica Evans, James Irwin, Claire Jervert, Kakia Konstantinaki, Angeline Meitzler, Erin Mitchell And Neale Willis Curated By: Off Site Project Set Within A Cyclical 360º Narrative, 

The Terminal: Human Shaped Hole Imagines The Future Work Life Balance Brought About By AI Technologies. Comprising A Succession Of Artistic Vignettes, The Terminal Traverses An Invisible Supply-Chain That Transports Products And Workers In Equal Measure.

@jisolini / www.jisolini.com

Jason Isolini is a multimedia artist based in Brooklyn New York. He received his B.F.A from the School of Visual Arts in photography and his M.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited Internationally at Annka Kulty’s Gallery in London, UK, The FiDi Arsenale in New York NY, and Anonymous Gallery New York, NY.

---

Shift AR

Shasti O’Leary Soudant 2021

Augmented Reality sculptures projected into non-material space.

Shasti O’Leary Soudant is a transdisciplinary artist, designer and writer who explores the interstitial space between the digital and the physical. Her boldly-colored, monumental sculpture installations center around public interaction and are often inspired by scientific and mathematical forms. Using a wide range of media and material to create immersive experiences, she aims to explore hidden systems that, when structured in algorithmic or random arrangements, result in unexpected and surprising outcomes. Shasti’s work is in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Savarino Companies’ 500 Seneca project, The Albright-Knox Public Art Initiative in partnership with the NFTA, the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, the City of Jacksonville, Florida, the City of Midland, Texas, and the City of Erie, Pennsylvania. She has traveled extensively, exhibited internationally, and speaks fluent second grade French.

 https://www.shastiolearysoudant.com

---

Fountain Droste

Matthew Gantt, 2022

A site-specific iteration of a previous work in Mozilla Hubs entitled ‘Fountain’. In the original piece, a surreal environment containing a 3D stone fountain and ambient soundscape is presented, alongside text instructing virtual visitors to add sound files and media objects of their own to the fountain, drawing connection with both the classic activity of leaving spare change in a physical fountain, and the Duchampian notion of found materials repurposed as readymades. This arrangement of digital materials, virtual environment and audience interaction works to create an emergent and participatory assemblage over the course of the work’s installation.

Social Media: @gan.tttt

Matthew D. Gantt (b. 1987, Durham, NC) is an artist, composer and educator currently based in Troy, NY. His practice focuses on sound in virtual spaces, generative systems facilitated by idiosyncratic technology, and digital production presets as sonic readymades.

Gantt has taught electronic and experimental composition across institutional and grassroots contexts, including Harvestworks, CUNY Brooklyn, Bard College, Sarah Lawrence, and community workshops aimed at creating equitable access to developing technologies. In Fall ’19, he joined the Electronic Arts PhD program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/EMPAC, researching spatial sound, virtual reality and the experimental arts practice as a frame to refigure new possibilities for immersive media futures.

---

Lure of Slowness

Elly Vadseth & Boris Kourtoukov 2021

Lure of Slowness, Hydrological Rhythms is an interactive, audiovisual, augmented reality installation and multichannel sound piece. The work co-imagines interspecies relationships through the gelatinous lens and imagined temporalities of snails through trails, sculptures and positional audio that appear in real time uniquely for each visitor. The Virtual installation is housed in the application Lure of Slowness, available for download on the Apple and Android stores. The work is in dialogue with multi species theory emerging in the humanities and eco feminist discourse. The application and artwork is designed to Reflect on slowness and movement journeys of adaptation past, present, futures.

https://www.lureofslowness.live

Elly Vadseth is an artist working with embodied research methods, choreography and new media. Her research interests include multispecies and decolonial epistemology, biological and neural ways of knowing, multispecies temporality, posthuman choreography and worldmaking. Boris Kourtoukov is an Oslo based artist that works within a wide range of the digital medium. From bending reclaimed technology, to making expressive wearables, to co-opting algorithms for individual introspection. A performative and process-oriented approach to matter and place plays an integral part in the artist’s  transdisciplinary practice.

---

BAG:(plastic): LEARNING HOW TO GET STUCK IN A TREE, LIGHT POST, OR UTILITY POLE

Richard Michael Haley

Dream that you’re a bag, imagine you’re a plastic bag, or will yourself into being a plastic shopping bag. Float on top of the wind and use it to guide yourself towards a tree, a light post, or a utility pole.

Let the wind wrap you around it tight, hold in place until you are stuck, keep yourself adhered as the wind pushes you deeper in.This will take you to the second of the three levels.

http://www.richardhaley.com/

Richard Haley is an artist, writer and curator originally from Northern California. Happenstance dropped him in the Midwest. His art practice is focused through lens-based technology, using the fluid undefinable nature of photography and video to explore notions of being. He often refers to his work as “rehearsals.” An ongoing series where surrogates and stand in for Haley perform actions and mundane tasks mapping the reach and constraints of the body.

---

Tally Saves The Internet

Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy 2021

Tally Saves the Internet is a browser extension as art intervention that transforms data advertisers collect into a multiplayer game.

 https://sneakaway.studio/

Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy (Sneakaway Studio) build online interventions, animations and mobile apps to reimagine a more sustainable and equitable digital future. Concerned about the unintended consequences of automated systems, their creations break apart and reconfigure existing structures to build awareness of the internet’s underbelly. Selected exhibitions include Locust Projects in Miami, Drexel University in Philadelphia, Art Center Nabi in Seoul, Transitio_MX in Mexico City, TINA B Festival in Prague and Venice, the University of Florida and the University of Texas. They’ve received support from the NEA, Mellon Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, UC Berkeley, DAAD, and Fulbright.

---

Hey You Sandpiper

Kristin Lucas, 2022

A generative interspecies duet written entirely from code using javascript libraries and an API that support WebGL, tone and speech synthesis. Script co-written with an AI entity. Code co-written with Joe McKay.

Social Media: @ksltwo / https://kristinlucas.studio

Kristin Lucas is an interdisciplinary artist living between Austin and New York. Lucas’s experimental double-edged works blur boundaries between the technological and corporeal, and leverage imagination and play within a labyrinth of everyday systems and paradigms.

---

I AM ERROR

Bassam Al-Sabah, 2021

I AM ERROR explores the construction of masculinity in action-adventure video games, confronting the armouring of the male body in gaming culture by queering its military ethos from within. The 30-minute-long animation features a collection of cinematic sequences from an imaginary video game in which the hero’s body is constantly in flux, undergoing metamorphoses as a result of his encounter with other lifeforms, whose physical touch makes him vulnerable to change, threatening his identity and selfhood. Combining the genres of fantasy erotica and body horror, Al-Sabah’s film celebrates the hero’s physical growth and transformation, as his body sprouts and blends into its surroundings, among writhing flowers and tentacular creatures.

@this.isnowhere / www.bassamalsabah.com

Bassam Al-Sabah is an interdisciplinary artist working with film, video, sculpture, and paintings.  He has been awarded residencies in Temple bar gallery and studios, The RHA, Gasworks (London), and Cite internationale des art (Paris). Recent solo exhibitions include De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2022) Gasworks, London (2021), The Glucksman Museum (2021) and Solstice Art Centre (2019). Recent screenings include The Douglas Hyde(Ireland) The Jeu De Paume (Paris) SQIFF (Scotland) EX-IS (Korea) and Transmediale (berlin)

---

Alice

Claudia Hart, 2019-2022

Hart’s Alice world is conceived as “a machine for thinking,” an hallucinatory chamber for repose and contemplation.  Hart’s wallpapers are covered with animated graphics culled from Internet signage, computer codes, and emoji graphics. Programmed by the artist, her multimedia designs are metaphors that unfold, using computer vision to reveal “magical” layers of new information. 

Social Media/ Website address: www.claudiahart.com 

Claudia Hart emerged as part of a generation of 90s intermedia artists examining issues of identity and representation.  Since the late 90s when she began working with 3D animation, Hart has embraced these same concepts, but now focuses on the impact of computing  and simulations technologies.  She was an early adopter of virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, and later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR and objects produced by computer-driven production machines. Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums all over the world.

---

The flowers I have never seen in my garden

Online venue: https://hubs.mozilla.com/vA8xeJa/ (activated on March 24th)

The flowers I have never seen in my garden is a digital exhibition featuring works by Chris Golden, Sabrina Ratté, Mohsen Hazrati, and Lauren Moffatt. Constructed in the free-floating space of Mozilla Hubs, the works on view utilize this programmable backdrop to examine how gardens might appear in the wake of ecological and social cataclysms.  

These flowers, the works on view, are not invisible, so much as hypothetical, speculative. Each work contributed, each virtual garden plot, extends into all the others, creating a network of virtual pathways that unfold sequentially, like the illustrations of an idea that is carefully trying to prove itself.  

The exhibition doesn’t claim to be an online gallery space, or even a 3-dimensional archive, but acts more like a herbarium populated with anthropomorphized flora. A kind of new world is invoked where mechanism and finality mingle, not in the manner of a futuristic cyborg, but in a way where human history and natural history as we know them overgrow into a parallel reality that shares the same concerns as ours. Questions of ecological preservation, identity and its relationship to memory, and the threat of mass extinction are duly addressed. Only here, the familiar solutions offered by our world are placed in parentheses.  

Chris Golden‘s Aura Garden, for example, treats of memory—only here memory is invaded by a sort of aural shimmer that translates the dynamics of floral growth into a psychedelic reflection of the calmness in nature. Through a mingling of visuality and sound, the viewer is confronted by the notion that “moments,” even at their most epiphanic, are nothing more than contingent human constructs. 

Sabrina Ratté’s Floralia offers a speculative natural history through a graduated and precise process of segmentation and reconstruction. Simulating the fusion of technology and organic matter, the work plunges the viewer into a speculative future, where samples of extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room. Through editing and visual strategies, this archive room is sporadically transformed under the effect of interference caused by the memory emanating from the listed plants, revealing traces of the past that continue to haunt the present.  

Mohsen Hazrati, the architect of this Hubs environment, uses the utopian space of the virtual to revisit the history of technology. Taking the ancient Iranian innovation of using wine and other stringents (lemons, vinegar) to generate small volts of electricity, Hazrati has realized a 3D recreation of this pioneering ancient technology. The fruits that spark this device to life are wholly virtual, but have a practical, effective existence within an imaginarium modeled to look like a garden.  

Lauren Moffatt, for her contribution, plays off of the tension that obtains between augmented reality and virtual reality. Her Flowers for Suzanne Clair (named after a secondary character in J. G. Ballard’s disaster fiction novel The Crystal World) creates a strange type of organic digitality which pivots on a process of collecting and digitizing plant specimens through an exchange between the physical and the virtual. Fusing photographic details of flowers with aleatory textures, these fictive plant species are windows to alterity glimpsed through a prism of biological life.  

Staging, ultimately, is essential to what is happening throughout The flowers I have never seen in my garden. Looking at the the digital species the show models itself around, history itself becomes heavy with an unsettling inertia; and the concept of “nature” becomes mechanized to a point where we can almost peer past it, towards a sentient nothingness that defies the logic of temporal descriptors. 

The flowers I have never seen in my garden is curated and designed by George Vitale (synthesis gallery) and produced by Cosmic Rays. 

CHRIS GOLDEN (b. 1988, GBR, https://chrisgolden.art) is a digital artist exploring the energy and vibration of this world. His work focuses on synthesizing a meditative-psychedelic perspective through colour and form. Chris presents a spectrum of projects across physical and digital planes that shares a visual way of being. A reminder of our energy that resides within. 

MOHSEN HAZRATI (b. 1987, IRN, http://mohsenhazrati.com) focuses on digital culture and New Aesthetics, positioning connections to Shirazi culture and Iranian mystical literature. Recent exhibitions include UCL MAL, Los Angeles; Transfer Gallery, Los Angeles; Babycastles Gallery, New York; Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco and SUPERHIGHWAY 2020. He is currently a member of the Digital Art Fellowship program at Akademie Schloss Solitude.  

LAUREN MOFFATT (b. 1987, AUS, https://www.deptique.net/) is an Australian artist working with immersive environments and experimental narrative practices. Her works, often presented in hybrid and iterative forms, explore the paradoxical subjectivity of connected bodies and the indistinct boundaries between digital and organic life.  

SABRINA RATTÉ (b. 1982, CAN, http://sabrinaratte.com/) is an artist living between Montreal and Marseille. Her practice includes video, animation, installations, sculptures, audio-visual performances, prints and Virtual Reality. Mixing analog technologies, photography and 3D animation, she investigates the influence of digital and physical spaces and the interplay between these surroundings and subjectivity.  

synthesis gallery is an immersive blend of technology and art displayed under one roof, showcasing cutting-edge experiences by new wave artists and visionaries through virtual and augmented reality. Dedicated to exhibiting internationally renowned, well-established artists alongside emerging ones, since its inception, synthesis has garnered considerable attention in the art scene.