From Reality and BackFrom Reality and Back
25.1 - 4.3 2007 A growing number of people are choosing to live a sizeable part of their lives in different computer games, such as World of Warcraft, or virtual worlds such as Second Life. Digital technology has given us an extension of the human mind and affords a realm where dreams, wishes and perversions can only be entered on the virtual level.
The dynamics between the real and the virtual, or between what is imagined or hallucinated, has always been an area for artistic research, expression and creativity. Reality changes from one state to another, from that which we see and experience towards other dimensions within us.
From Reality and Back is an exhibition that aims to investigate what is created when virtual simulations meet the physical world. In what ways have various digital technologies altered the distance between reality and the virtual? From this perspective the exhibition creates a survey of the possibilities that digital technology offers but also of the general approaches of artists.
For a period of five weeks Mejan Labs will be transformed into a production laboratory and an open studio where we have the opportunity to follow the working progress of a selection of different artists, including Michael Frumin (US) and Ralf Baecker (DE), who have been specially invited for the exhibition.
Michael Frumin developed the software tool OGLE (OpenGLExtractor) in the R&D OpenLab at Eyebeam, a New York-based art and technology centre. With OGLE you are able to grab any figure from a virtual 3D-environment, e.g. Second Life, and easily transfer them to other 3D-environments or realise them as objects through a technique called Rapid Prototyping.
Ralf Baecker lives and works in Cologne. In his project Nowhere he has built a milling machine that takes input from a search engine on the Internet. The search terms entered into the search engine are transferred to the milling machine which elaborates different landscapes with canyons, hills and rivers.
The exhibition also includes a huge 3D scanner where members of the audience themselves can be scanned and transferred into a virtual environment created by Jens Evaldsson, a student at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Although bearing the clear mark of technology, the digital model of an individual audience member is nonetheless an exact representation of human body. See also www.shadowspace.se
Read more about Michael Frumin at: http://research.eyebeam.org/people/michael-frumin.
Ralf Baecker at: http://no-surprises.de/cms/
Mejan Labs will run the scanner, for full body scanning, on following dates:
25 January at 5-8pm
26 January at 11am-5pm
27 January at 12-4pm
2 February at 11am-5pm
9 February at 11am-5pm
10 February at 12-4pm
23 February at 11am-5pm
24 February at 12-4pm
2 March at 11am-5pm
3 March at 12-4pm
 |
|
From Reality and Back
|