bitforms gallery
Curated Catalog // Summer 2018

During the last decade we feel technology should be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, perfectly integrated into our everyday experience, or our homes, without intruding. The future art audience has technology in their everyday life; through technology they experience the world around them, and this is what connects them to
one-another.
The Niio Featured Exhibition is dedicated to the moving image and public space, aiming to present curated screening programs to a wider audience. It is based on the idea of mediating works from an extended list of contemporary video artists, through new digital exhibition formats and cloud-based platforms.
                                                                                          - Daniela Arriado, Co-Curator

Marina Zurkow
Elixir IV

The "Elixir" pieces describe impossible landscapes: cut-crystal bottles bob and toss like buoys in the ocean, beacons bearing potions, poisons, messages, genies. Each bottle contains an animated figure engaged in a repeated, metronomic action. In "Elixir I", a woman is rowing; "Elixir II", a blindfolded man stumbles to stay upright. "Elixir III" holds a little girl trying to fly with paper wings; and in "Elixir IV", a high diver twists and arcs, while the bottle presses forward in an Antarctic landscape. The highly layered video treatment pays tribute to the 19th century Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky, whose portentous, luminous paintings of tiny ships on huge swells of ocean both mesmerize and terrify the viewer.

“Zurkow plays with motion and fixity, the graticule projecting from its enlightenment centering and creating, drawing out and forth a landscape that never has existed quite: but that may now be describing a new polar circumferencing. And the possibilities of this landscape are also internal, or not seen on official maps.”
– Elena Glasberg, notes from The Anthropogenic Landscape and Feminist Art Practice

Sara Ludy
Rainbow Glass

From the series "Glass"
Digital video, media player, screen or projector
Dimensions variable, landscape orientation
10 min, seamless loop

Marina Zurkow
Weights and Measures

Airplanes, elephants, and plankton – three beautiful “machines.” "Weights + Measures" compares proverbial apples and oranges, in order to probe a system of relative values. Take any two of the three creatures in the system: in water, airplanes sink while elephants swim. Elephants and airplanes both release methane, and both have been instruments of transport and war. Airplanes produce carbon dioxide (CO2), while plankton consumes it. As the largest land mammal, elephants are at the top of the terrestrial food chain, and microscopic plankton is at the bottom; yet without phytoplankton, the oceans would starve. Each ‘machine’ brings into focus several facets of a complex ecosystem, which includes the economics of short-term imperatives and long-view evolutionary time; the microscopic and the monumental; and human interventions of biological technology.

Pascual Sisto
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a computer generated (CG) 3D Animation based on the 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan. The poem envisions a world where cybernetics has advanced to a stage where it allows a return to the balance of nature and the elimination of the need for human labor. It was written after being a Poet-in-Residence at the California Institute of Technology. The music is Sonata Movement (After Beethoven) and was composed by Experiments in Musical Intelligence, a software written by former UC Santa Cruz professor David Cope that analyzes existing music and creates new compositions in the style of the original composers.

Michael Najjar
Invisible city

The video work "the invisble city" is an exploration of the way global cities will develop in the future. Of similar magnitude to the impact of the industrial revolution in the late 19th century, it is now computer networks and the information society based on them which are the main vehicles for change, the key elements transforming the face of our urban living spaces. The digital fusion of panoramic views taken from different angles transforms the landscape into a woven fabric of relationships. The work shows the endless ocean of information, an all pervasive network. A compression of space and time evoking intense and constantly growing global interconnectivity. The megacities New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, São Paulo, Shanghai and Mexico City are appearing in the video.

Claudia Hart
Swing

The Swing features a plump nude avatar, named Machina, whose appearance is loosely based on Baroque painter Peter Paul Reuben's portraits of his wife, and personifies Rococo fleshy decadence. In this multi-channel animated installation, the character swings on a seat suspended from the sky, set inside super Mannerist slow time. Her wooded surroundings ebb and flow at another rate, imitating stop motion, as years pass in a matter of moments. The driver of all of these cycles, but a driver scarcely in control, this female figure is a Mother Nature heading straight for what she suspects might be Oblivion.

Jonathan Monaghan
Motherhship

Jonathan Monaghan creates sculpture and animated video installations that challenge the boundaries between the real, the imagined, and virtual. The video "Mothership" appropriates characters and objects from science fiction, advertising, video games and art history. Funny and colorful, Monaghan's work travels a space between Super Mario's Rainbow Road, the landscape of German romantic painting, and the Technodrome in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Absurdly pulling together disparate populist imagery that evokes value, power and technology, it fuses luxury apartments and medical operating rooms, as well as the London skyline and a sacred cow.