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 their 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.
Moving beyond computational mathematics, 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 freedom to dream beyond the crush of information systems, the insidious persuasion of capitalized entertainment, and media structures that bind thought.
The artists in this exhibition will 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, participating artists will 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 will 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.
Johannes DeYoung (US) is an internationally recognized artist whose practice explores themes of animism at the intersection of computational and material processes. His works have been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums in countries such as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Taiwan, and the USA, as well as being featured in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Huffington Post, and Dossier Journal. He is 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 founding Director of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, and at the Yale School of Drama, where he was appointed Lecturer in Design.
https://www.johannesdeyoung.com/
andDr. 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 research scholar. His academic works have been exhibited nationally & internationally along with serving clients globally. His work with DigitalFutures has gained a global audience with a yearly program along with a series of free summer workshops. 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.
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 research scholar. His academic works have been exhibited nationally & internationally along with serving clients globally. His work with DigitalFutures has gained a global audience with a yearly program along with a series of free summer workshops. 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.