ELO 2012 Media Art Show

Curatorial Statement

 
 

In the two very private rooms off the hallway we chose two large installations each, like Will Luers, Roger Dean, and Harriet Smith’s “Film of Sound.” I find idea that visitors to this exhibit can move through the space and encounter art at every twist and turn a compelling quality of the MAC.


The Arts Monongahela, located just a few doors down from the MAC affords a large ground level window where we plan a looping video of featured artist Alan Bigelow.  The size of the space and the fact that the gallery had already planned another show means that we have made  Bigelow’s Retrospective is the only art featured.  We anticipate visitors on the sidewalk seeing the video in the window to be compelled to learn more, to come into the space, and to engage with the art. 


The WVU Downtown Library, excited about the possibility of showcasing electronic literature, provided several spaces for computer stations.  The variety of rooms and their diverse features for displaying art inspired us to choose “evolving forms” as the library’s theme.  We feature two retrospectives––Judy Malloy’s and MD Coverley’s.  Like Coverley, Malloy is a pioneer in the field.  She has worked in both desktop and mobile media; her work, “its name was Penelope” (1993), will be shown at the gallery along with its new mobile iteration.  We have organized the space so that each of these two female artists will have a proverbial “room of her own.”  The library also features computational and generative art as well as video art that also represent the theme by four other artists.  It is worth mentioning that Roderick Coover, Nick Montfort, and Scott Rettberg’s video installation, “Three Rails Live,” is planned for the stairwell where the sound from the work will resonate throughout the area.


Colson Hall entails one large area that affords a great amount of wall space.  The venue’s size makes it possible to offer, like the MAC, a broad cross section of electronic literature. Our intent in offering  one public and one academic space with this focus reflects my earlier sentiment: We want to make elit accessible to as many people as we can, including the general public.  Thus, Colson Hall showcases, along with the retrospective of  J.R. Carpenter, elit art and installations as diverse as A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz’s “playable” animations, “Afeeld,” and Caitlin Fisher’s augmented reality narrative, “Circle.” 


The commissioned work by Jeff Knowlton, renown for the first location aware narrative “34 North 118 West,” that will be featured at the Hazel Ruby McQuain Amphitheatre is, as of this writing, in the works.


Finally, the ubiquity of apps and of mobile devices has understandably resulted in the growth of mobile and geolocative electronic literary  works.  We received six submissions of this type––all were accepted for the show.  Thus, we are featuring downloadable mobile works, like Steve Tomasula’s “TOC” and Serge Bouchardon’s “ChangeEverything,” at all venues.  We are also featuring Laura Zaylea’s “Velcro and Cupcakes” ( as mentioned previously), a work involving QR codes that will be tied to a particular geographical space around Morgantown.


In essence, we have avoided laying out the elit at the various venues by genre and, instead, focus on large themes.  As importantly, we allow for the affordances and constraints of the various spaces to drive our choices about where to place art and how to place it.  In this sense the media art show aims for site specificity to highlight the works’ media specificity.



Back to Page 1



 

In the original “Call for Works” Sandy Baldwin, my co-curator and the Chair of the conference, and I listed several broad areas of electronic literature for acceptance to the show. These areas included both the usual suspects (hypertext poetry and fiction, interactive fiction, flash poetry and fiction, as well as other forms of elit; net art pieces; video; and animation) and the not-so-usual suspects (sonic art; experimental or conceptual multimedia works; and locative works). Of the 106 submissions received, we accepted a total of 43 works, which (as is reported throughout this website) are spread across five venues in Morgantown. Additionally, we invited five artists to exhibit their works as part of a “retrospective” look at electronic literature, and we commissioned a special work of locative media.


The decision to spread the show across numerous sites rather than concentrate it in one (or even a few venues––as I did the ELO 2008 media art show, “Visionary Landscapes”) was driven, in part, by the theme of affordances and constraints, (which I will talk about later)––but also because I want to promote electronic literature beyond the usual ELO conference audience in order to inspire growth. I have also been very interested, in the last 10 years, in connecting academic and nonacademic pursuits as a way of building support for education, particularly for higher education and media art.  Taxpayers may not support what they do not know or understand unless we show them the value of our work.  Placing art at two downtown galleries and the public amphitheatre makes sense from this perspective. Since we are also donating the commissioned piece to the city, we are leaving a legacy to the citizens of Morgantown as a show of appreciation for their support and continuing to build good will between the university and city.


The process of selection required Sandy and I to organize the submissions into10 categories that differed somewhat from those announced in the Call.  There was a distinct difference, for example, between mobile and geolocative in that some works, like those created by Jason Edward Lewis, are housed and read on a smart device while others, like Laura Zaylea’s (pictured) are geographically dispersed across space.  We also received several entries derived from live performances, such as Alexandre Saemmer’s “Böhmische Dörfer” and Dan Chen’s “The Airline Corporation.” Many works, like Philippe Bootz’s <<petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction" (small brush to dust off fiction)>>, involve computational or generative practices.  We invited 30 artists and scholars to jury the work according to their areas of expertise.  The result are the 43 works presented at the show.


Once the works were selected, we reorganized them by affordances of the venues.  The MAC offers a large 1st floor gallery space as well as several interesting nooks and rooms for special installations.  So, it makes sense to focus this venue (along with Colson Hall, another large space), as one of two sites that displays a broad cross section of electronic literature. Jason Nelson’s Retrospective as well as six computer stations featuring net art are placed in the main gallery, while Jim Bizzocchi’s contemplative “re:cycle” is set in the elegant, twisting stairway. Upstairs in the long, rather eerie, hallway we put two works that provoke a strong emotional response from the viewer:   Josephine Anstey and Dave Pape, “Office Diva” and Yong Hun Kim’s “10000 Faces at Funeral” and “10000 Faces at Birthday Party.”







 

Pelayo Mendez’s “ACTIEOP” featured at the WVU Downtown Library

      Artists      Venues       Exhibit Events        Curatorial Statement          Credits         Conference

Part 2:  Layout of the Exhibit