Transfers and Actions is an exhibition presenting two artists, Ellie Harrison and Casey Reas, who, in different yet convergent ways, work with transactions, translations and transformations. Both of these artists, using divergent methods, use the base of action which is translated to code and instructions which is then transmitted back, again, into actions and images.

The course of events, methods, translations, and transformations, acting upon our existence and actions, are significant and elemental for the state of the communication society in which we find ourselves today. The pieces by these artists for this showing at Mejan Labs  create and expose these models of codification, digital conversions, economical transactions, data collecting and data processing through which we are embedded and which come to form our very lives and thoughts.

Three years ago Ellie Harrison exhibited an installation-piece called Daily Data Display Room. It consisted of numerous toys, everyday items, and video monitors that Harrison imparted life to by the straightforward and witty means of letting the objects themselves change and alter according to their interactions to the artist and her own moods, states and inclinations. Over time, this personal data collecting became her main artistic methodology, however, now she counts herself as a “recovering data collector”.

At Mejan Labs she shows two new pieces. The History of Financial Crises is an installation with eleven popcorn machines that together will replay the financial crises during the last one hundred years, compressed to the opening hours of Mejan Labs. The second installation is a coca-cola can that will perform a dance every time Harrison will make any economical transaction herself.

For Casey Reas the digital code is an artistic tool as easy to use as a lump of oil paint or clay. Maybe even easier, since code is always exact and detailed. It performs exactly within the perimeters of what you instruct it to do, and will do this repeatively over and over again without deviation.

For Reas there is no significant difference between his method and the instructions which the American artist Sol LeWitt left for his gigantic wall paintings. These paintings consisted of simple fields of colour and lines and instructions were created to implement and contain the creation of each piece. Within the instructions of LeWitt painting became logical, reduced to a number of forms and colours and the instructions became a programming that generated a process ending in the “work”.

This process is fundamentally important. Reas underlines this aspect of the work by the action of the pieces as well as with the sly moniker, he applies to the piece, Processing. The soft ware, created together with Ben Fry, and its unfolding is both driving and highlighted as the very foundation of the piece, shown here at Mejan Labs, although this work, as process itself, is a continuation of a elaborate set of pieces called Process which has reach the hefty number of 18.

To further underscore the individual elaboration of each Process piece, to every version there is a text, that describes what Reas aims for. These texts are instructions or descriptions, similar to those of LeWitt. The text Reas then translates into his language, the Processing soft ware. The soft ware transforms the code to images, projections with moving images. The projections can then be transferred even further to prints and reliefs. Text is translated to code, the code generates a process, the process is a moving image and the image becomes a physical piece.
 

See documentation at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imvz1yEdirE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_lAW-9KUlI