Immobilité at Google NYC

A new exhibition of digital art will open today at the New York headquarters of Google. The title of the exhibition is "We Write This To You From the Distant Future," a phrase from one of the scenes in my feature-length "foreign film" Immobilité.

As part of the exhibition, a distributed stream of various remixes from the work that you can find at the immobilite.com website will now be recontextualized as experimental art projections inside the Google headquarters in the Chelsea area. The show with the Immobilité remixes runs from August 20 - October 22, 2010 in conjunction with The Project Room at the Chelsea Art Museum.

You can see the digital flyer/postcard here.

Here's the PR that just went out:

Digital Art @ Google: We Write This To You From The Distant Future
Opening: August 20, 6 – 8pm
RSVP required: rsvp@chelseaartmuseum.org

Location:
Google, Inc.
75 Ninth Avenue, 2nd floor

Google and The Project Room for New Media at Chelsea Art Museum (CAM) in New York launched an exhibition program, Digital Art @Google NYC, in June to engage Googlers with the art world and promote creativity with digital technology. The exhibitions and artist talks, which take place at Google, Inc, are open to guests at times indicated below.

We Write This To You From The Distant Future, opening August 20, is a multi-media exhibition of work by visionary creators in the arts and sciences that focuses on a future world imagined and possible to build. Included in the exhibition are Mark Amerika, Rachel Armstrong, Marc Barasch, Ed Bilous, etoy, Mitchell Joachim, Eduardo Kac, StudioIMC-Tunick/Elston/Schiller, Jack Toolin/C5, Marina Zurkow, Google UK, Clean Energy 2030, Andrew Senior, Cordero/Senior/Weston.

The exhibition title is a line spoken by the narrator in Immobilite, a feature length art film shot with a mobile phone video camera by Mark Amerika, with music score by Chad Mossholder. Immobilite evokes questions - how will a technologically advanced world effect what it is to be human and what is the world with advanced technology to become?

Digital Art @Google NYC is curated by Nina Colosi, Curator of The Project Room for New Media at CAM and founder of its public art program, Streaming Museum, which presents exhibitions in cyberspace and public spaces on 7 continents. The programs were inspired by pioneer video artist Nam June Paik who in the 1970s envisioned the Internet, predicting an “information superhighway” as an open and free medium for imagination and exchange of cultures.

According to Colosi, “A natural synergy exists with Google in this partnership. The Project Room’s program showcases artworks and educational programs, which incorporate technology and the Internet in the creative process.”

Digital Art @Google emphasizes the correlation of Google’s mission in organizing the world’s information and making it accessible, with the ability of artists to reflect and synthesize information in the creation of artwork that expresses the contemporary world. The exhibitions and speaker programs will inspire, entertain, and help envision the world in new ways.

The exhibition program was initiated at Google by Josh Mittleman, User Interface Software Engineer, and supported by the Google Community Affairs committee at Google New York City. Mittleman described the motivation of the exhibit, “Art is one of many tools that can help to organize and make sense of the world's information. Digital Art @Google NYC is the first step toward introducing the digital arts community to Google, and to starting a conversation that will lead to a rich, ongoing collaboration.”

The first Digital Art @Google exhibition, Data Poetics, opened June 11 with works by well-known international digital artists, Scott Draves, R. Luke DuBois, Aaron Koblin, Mark Napier, W. Bradford Paley, Lincoln Schatz, John F. Simon, Jr., Thomson and Craighead, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas. The exhibition and artist talks, were open to the public on July 29, August 5 and 12.

The opening reception for "We Write This To You From The Distant Future" will be held on Friday, August 20, 2010 from 6-8 PM. Visitors may attend the opening, view the exhibition, and participate in the artist speaker program taking place at Google, Inc., 75 Ninth Avenue, 2nd floor, by sending an email to RSVP@chelseaartmuseum.org.

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Metadata: Digital Art @ Google, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, New York

Images in my head and out

Trip Journal Remix

First, there's the interview for Bahian TV as part of the promo campaign for Immobilité in Salvador. I'm standing in the media lounge at Semcine while local VJs remix the Immobilité remixes.

I'm saying something like "The manipulation of the image as destiny"

And then: "Remixology as moving visual thinking"

But also going out of my way to suggest that the viewer is "shadowing the psychoacoustic mind of the writer telling the story"

Meanwhile knowing full and well how odd it is to be trading in these images that are spouting from my head but that had been originally captured on ancient mobile phones of another era ...

Thinking to myself: these deep interior projections are somehow manifested as what comes after cinema but are still part of cinematic culture.

Or, to put it another way:

"Immobilité," I say to the audience in the huge theater, "is not a film per se ..."

I say it as if it's part of a dream, a lucid dream, one that I am not necessarily eager to wake up from.

"It borrows from cinema's past but is itself not cinema per se," I go on. "In an ideal world, the work would loop eternally and you would be able to enter and exit the work at will, closing your eyes and opening them on to the film whenever you wanted. But this is not an ideal world."

[Loud applause]

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Metadata: Immobilité, remix, Brazil