
https://vimeo.com/990303075
The contemporary media landscape is shaped by streams of instantaneous communication. While the affordances of global interconnectedness on one hand reflect the hopeful promises of yesterday’s tomorrow, embodied by projects such as Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth or Stan VanDerBeek’s Video Drome, on the other hand they reflect a darkened mirror. Opaque systems of capitalization and algorithmic communication demonstrate vast and insidious potentials to shape perception without awareness, and turn the individual gaze inward. Mediated communication and display pervades the contemporary landscape with phantasmagoric affect, blurring the boundaries between real and unreal, disorienting civic engagement.
The arts and sciences have collective roles in shaping the discovery of new worlds with renewed sense of wonder. We navigate the media affordances of our time by orienting our imaginations outward, toward humane futures that cultivate constructive social relations. Empowering such world views requires creative visions of hope and the nourishment of poetics that serve nuance, complexity, and the freedom to dream beyond the crush of information systems, the insidious persuasion of capitalized entertainment, and beyond the media structures that bind thought.
Participating artists include: Rose Ansari, David Bennett, Blinn & Lambert (Nicholas Steindorf & Kyle Williams), Peter Clark, John Colette, Audrey Coombe, Lisa Crafts, Johannes DeYoung, EVPRAXIS, Laura Harrison, Yoon Chung Han, Maiza Hixson, Adam Hsieh, Cheng Guo, Woohun Joo & Kyuha Shim, Lisa Kereszi, Nikita Kolbovskiy, Young Joo Lee, Maxim Mezentsev, Jérémy OURY, Maya Perry, Han Qin, Andrey Rylov, Minka Stoyanova, Tamiko Thiel, Clea T. Waite, Xi Wang, Xiaotong Wen, Yufan Xie, and Weidi Zhang.
Motion graphics and design by Kim Lagunas.
Artworks activating eight architectural LED displays throughout the Denver Theater District will be presented from July 24 – August 4, 2024. Artworks projected upon Daniels & Fisher Tower will be presented Sunday, July 28, 8:30 – 11:30PM MDT.
Introductory Curatorial Statement by Dr. Maiza Laurent Hixson
From AI-generated panoramas of melting polar ice caps to glitchy vintage commercials that satirize Colorado ski ad campaigns, the artworks in New Media Architecture(s) re-signify the commercial Denver Theatre District as an innovative stage for public art. Shown on static and LED screens located throughout the downtown area, over thirty artists mobilize the architectural scale displays as sites for digital imagery that stimulates urgent environmental and cultural discourse. Whereas companies normally promote their own names and products on billboard screens to appeal to individual consumers, in this exhibition, contemporary artists present their dynamic aesthetic visualizations for non-commercial purposes and street-level reflection. Walking, biking, or driving to gaze up at each illuminated display, audiences are immersed in a live urban theater where art, technology, and the body collide to re-perform civic place.
We would like to thank our partner David Moke, Director of Programming for the Denver Theater District and Director of Night Lights Denver; event organizers Johannes DeYoung and Gustavo Rincon; and our jury and selection committee: Rebecca Xu (Digital Arts Committee Chair), Victoria Szabo, Jan Searleman, Melentie Pandilovski, Gustavo Rincon, and Guest Curator, Maiza Hixson.
The artists in this exhibition address the affordances and complexities of pervasive media display in the urban landscape. Presented on architectural scale video displays located throughout the Denver Theater District, these artists find themselves in the mixed company of paid advertisements and programmed marketing, their works randomly activated within a public display system, amidst an assortment of unrelated, countervailing content. Their brief aesthetic interruptions offer moments of reflection, humor, and repose amidst an onslaught of marketed programming, as well as opportunities to consider place-making and the social relations of pervasive media topologies in the contemporary urban space.

Maiza Hixson holds a PhD in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and an MFA in Art from the University of California Santa Barbara. She writes about the performative staging of urban space and analyzes how public art both participates in and often catalyzes resistance against branded narratives of cities and place. From 2015-2017, she was Curator of Public Art for the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission and Co-Director of the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology. She also served as Chief Curator of the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts from 2010-2015 during which time she taught and lectured at Towson University in Baltimore and University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of Louisville.

Johannes DeYoung is an internationally recognized artist who works at the intersection of computational and material processes. His moving-image works have been exhibited internationally at venues such as: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante, Alicante, Spain; Festival ECRÃ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan; B3 Biennale of the Moving Image, Frankfurt en Main, Germany; Hesse Flatow (Crush Curatorial), Jeff Bailey Gallery, Robert Miller Gallery, Interstate Projects, Eyebeam, and MoMA PS1 Print Studio, New York, NY; as well as numerous festival screenings in countries such as Australia, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, Turkey, and Vietnam. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Huffington Post, and Dossier Journal. DeYoung is appointed Associate Professor of Electronic and Time-Based Media at Carnegie Mellon University. He previously taught at Yale University School of Art (2008—2018), where he was appointed Senior Critic and Director of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, and at the Yale School of Drama, where he was appointed Lecturer in Design.

Dr. Gustavo Alfonso Rincon (Ph.D., M.Arch., M.F.A., B.S, B.A.) earned his doctorate in Media Arts and Technology at UCSB. Rincon is educated as an architect, artist, curator & media arts researcher. His academic works have been exhibited nationally & internationally along with serving clients globally. His dissertation “Shaping Space as Information: A Conceptual Framework for New Media Architectures,” led to a Postdoctoral appt. at the AlloSphere Research Facility, affiliated with the Media Arts & Technology Program, California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara.