COLLISION: Stealing from the Real Simulation and sense making

Exhibition: Friday May 22nd - Sunday June 28th

Opening: Friday May 22nd

Boston Cyberarts Gallery presents COLLISION: Stealing from the Real: Simulation and sense making, organized and curated by COLLISION collective member Georgina Lewis. COLLISION: Stealing from the Real includes 10 artists from the US and Canada.

How do we make sense of our environment parse it, probe it, and enact change? COLLISION: Stealing from the Real examines the transformative power of play and technology’s place within this act. Increasingly computer-mediated, simulation is how we learn about the world and test scenarios, a way of exploring identity, critiquing societal norms, constructing and reframing history or just plain having fun.  Simulation redefines play as a rules-based process that allows artists to mimic reality and push formal, technical, and conceptual boundaries.

Emulating the stylistic tropes of Hayes code era erotica, Faith Holland’s (2014 NYFA Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts) “Visual Orgasms” series depicts metaphors for orgasm with no actual depiction of sex. Four of her brilliantly colored “excessive moving image collages” are on display. Holland’s work calls the bluff of traditional sexual euphemisms by taking them literally with faux-naive exuberance.

To create her 3d printed “clouds”, Erica Lincoln scanned one half of a 3d object and then used software to reverse engineer the form of the corresponding side. Complex visual and formal artifacts arise from the software’s corrective hole fixing algorithms, raising questions about reproduction and representation in the digital realm. Lincoln is the City of Winnipeg Office of Climate Change Artist in Residence.

In “De Solutione Problematum per Motum“, William Tremblay metaphorically pinpoints the emergence of modern science and the beginning of its historical schism with art. Simultaneously absurd, ghostly and mechanical, a replica of Isaac Newton’s wig traces out figures from a set unpublished papers from 1666. These papers document some of Newton’s early mathematical thinking, a transition from the Cartesian geometry of the period to work that would develop into his theories of calculus. Animated by CNC technology (based on Cartesian math), the wig functions as an avatar of reason encumbered by human frailty, yet detached from context and emotion.

Artists include: W. Benjamin Bray, Rob Gonsalves and Anna Kristina Goransson, Faith Holland, Annette Isham, Erika Lincoln, Sarah Rushford, John Slepian, Mark Stock, and William Tremblay.

For more information, visit COLLISION:Stealing from the Real