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aim v awards invited artists open entry asia_no.w.here
The invitational component of the AIM V: SYZYGY (the human remix) exhibition has been curated by Lynzie Baldwin, AIM director.
  Marsia Alexander-Clarke
UT COELUM
Video Installation
Music by Ethan Nasreddin-Longo
Choir: Local Color
Director: Anna Ancheta
 
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UT COELUM is a powerfully emotional product of video and audio remixing, which creates a unified, captivating experience for the viewer. The original video footage is of Local Color, a 14-woman a cappella choir performing UT COELUM – a composition by Ethan Nasreddin-Longo based on a text by Lipsius. Through extensive post-production work, Alexander-Clarke weaves a multi-layered tapestry of video and audio fragments, producing a sonic well set against a constantly shifting visual field. Twelve monitors display an undulating field of fractured facial features, while the audio remix gives the effect of one augmented murmer, rather than that of individual voices.

 

  Lew Baldwin
duplex
Video Installation
 
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“The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelgänger
any less real.”

_ Alfred T. Kamajian, Scientific American

Combining digital technologies and cinematic illusion, duplex is a rhythmic work of operatic proportion, depicting a parallel universe in which one’s life is shadowed by an alter-ego existing in the same space-time continuum.In duplex, Baldwin asks the viewer to imagine what your alter-ego would be like if he or she were to walk alongside you, paralleling and/or participating in your life. If science somehow managed to bend the cosmic horizon to open a doorway to a parallel existence, the resulting manifestation of any given person’s self might well be far different that one ever imagined. Baldwin proposes that everything is relative, from age to appearance to behavior, dependant upon our perception of both ourselves and of those around us.

 

  Bryan Jackson
The Whippoorwill
Installation
 
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Both repulsive and oddly compelling, Bryan Jackson’s The Whippoorwill speaks to our relationship with broadcast
television technologies and the news media – how they shape our experience of the world in which we live, how we are linked to them, and in what manner they represent human life and death. Based on the artist’s childhood, television-mediated, experience of a 1978 paddleboat disaster in Osage City, Kansas, The Whippoorwill positions the giant Midwest “river cat” as a metaphor for mass media communications – the monstrous gape-mouthed resident of dark, murky waters is often mythologized as a creature that can and will consume a full-grown human being; in much the way that the television is capable of consuming our understanding
of the world. The centerpiece of this unique installation is a grotesque, yet charming resin catfish, hybridized with the details of a simulated-wood TV cabinet. Placed near a shelf-full of desirable little, brightly colored catfish fashioned out of hard candy – the viewer is presented with both the disturbing and powerful potentials of mass media communications as well as the consumable, pleasurable, and somehow addictive qualities of the same.

 

  Lev Manovich
Mission to Earth
C-Prints, 2003, United States
 
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Making its North American debut in the AIM V: SYZYGY exhibition, Mission to Earth tells the story of Inga, an alien who after spending twenty years on Earth, is finally given the chance to return to her own planet, Alpha-1.An allegory about the Cold War and immigration, Mission to Earth utilizes footage of a secret radio telescope built in former Soviet Union in 1971. The film is edited in real time by custom software, rendering each run of the piece different from the last. The software determines the screen layout, number of windows on the screen, and each window’s content, using a script and system of rules defined by the authors. In a great deal of the narrative nearly all choices are left to the software; however in some points they specified exactly what the viewer sees in a particular moment in time.Mission to Earth is the latest edition of the five-year Soft Cinema project, which investigates new creative possibilities at the intersection
of cinema, new media, and architecture. For further information,

visit www.manovich.net/softcinema/

 

  Bruce Yonemoto
Sealed
Mixed Media Installation, 2004
 
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“On the blank screen, a luminous disk was projected without any images of people or landscapes. … I was blinded by the light from the projector lamp and saw in the screen two holes large enough to allow a man to pass through. I put my head through one of them. A panorama of the city was spread out before my eyes. Aragon and Breton had their bellies impaled on two cathedral spires. I understood that they also had wanted to see what was happening behind the screen and the great beauty of their suicide was revealed to me.”

Bruce Yonemoto’s Sealed addresses the condition of humans living in an increasingly digital age, an age in which our bodies are being constantly pummeled
by a blinding, ceaseless stream of light projectiles. Yonemoto posits that the human body has become akin to the movie screens of old – a surface which catches light in order to make visible, real, that which is projected upon it. However it can be nearly impossible, with millions of disembodied commercial images barreling at us, to truly discern the fictive structure of the media, as Robert Desnos does above. Sealed challenges the viewer to examine our contemporary experience of “self”, and questions whether we, as humans living in a society increasingly permeated by communications technologies, have lost our facility of critical expression and become both numb and mute observers of unconscious optics. Yonemoto asks if our natural orifices for the disposal of information input have been “sealed”, leaving us in smooth-skinned, anal-less bodies – bodies which once effectively consumed, digested and evacuated a constant stream of images and other media input, but can no longer do so. Sealed is an eloquent attempt to metonymically “slice open” our screen skins, retaining only those images that define our existence.

 

 
 
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  Created in 1999 by co-founders Janet Owen and Jim Keller, AIM originated in response to the phenomenon of communications, technology, and distribution inno-vations merging together to create global networks and tools, including the internet.  
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Art In Motion Presents AIM V: SYZYGY
(the human remix)


In Collaboration with the:
Armory Center for the Arts

March 7 - June 6, 2004
Opening Reception:
Saturday, March 6, 7-9 pm
Opening Party March 6, 10-2 am

 
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