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Home - Art
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Now, Voyager
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Echotrope launches 2010 season of new media
exhibits with
Interact at UNO
by Michael J. Krainak
Echotrope, a nomadic arts group devoted to the creation and display of new media contemporary art, opened its 2010 season this month at the UNO Art Gallery with a new focus. No longer satisfied with just time-based, site-specific art, Echotrope has begun to experiment with what its cofounder Jody Boyer calls “the fourth dimension, the intersection of time and space.”
Interact features interactive video installations by two prominent artists, Lynn Lukkas and Cynthia Pachikara. Lukkas, an associate professor of experimental and media arts at the University of Minnesota, offers “Touch Me/Don’t Touch Me.” The interactive exhibit that uses the viewer’s heartbeat to trigger a corresponding audio-visual response in two gallery rooms.
Pachikara, an associate professor of art and design at the University of Michigan, exhibits two installations. In “Vertical/Horizon(tal),” viewers can interact with, rather than merely observe, moving images of headlights, streetlights and starlight to create a puzzle about spatial boundaries. The second work, “Shadow Catching,” is more passive, but also more familiar since the POV is mostly from inside a moving vehicle while the world goes by in shadow relief.
Overall, Interact is a welcome addition to Omaha’s art vibe because like all significant contemporary art: it challenges traditional notions of what art is; it spotlights process and concept over final product; it requires immediate viewer response and intervention; and it acknowledges new mediums of creativity and communication that Boyer said are not indigenous to any one group.
“It (new media) has become so ubiquitous in our culture,” she said, “the question is how are you going to use all these new tools (cameras, cell phones, YouTube, Facebook) to think and create.” Though Boyer acknowledges the younger generation has an edge as “digital natives,” a term first coined by educational theorist Mark Prensky, “it is not about a specific generation but a shift in paradigm. I think there is this need for connectivity in our society, and that need has intersected with the democratization of technology.”
Boyer and Echotrope co-founder Russ Nordman, associate professor of intermedia and digital art at UNO, have successfully demonstrated with Interact the experimental and alternative potential of film and video in an era dominated by escapist entertainment, “America’s Funniest Videos” and YouTube self-indulgence. There are exceptions of course, in popular art, but it is a pleasure to experience an exhibit in Omaha that sets an example for local artists to use the media in a conceptual manner that explores a time/space continuum.
Viewers do more than enter that “4th dimension” in this exhibit; they help to create it, giving credibility to the belief that a work of art is not complete until experienced. Lukkas’ two-part video installation begins in gallery one with the viewer laying hands on an interface that cleverly uses one’s pulse to activate text messages on an appropriately split screen. Since this installation experiments with how we create, send and receive mixed messages, emotionally and physically, the screen projects such contradictions as “touch me, don’t touch me” and “I’ll let you, I don’t want that” and others on opposing walls, all precipitated by one’s bio-rhythms.
Complimenting this initial activity is part two in the back gallery, another two-channel video featuring the back and front of the artist’s head on facing walls. A touch pad initiates simultaneous movement of the heads as they rotate up to 180 degrees in opposition to one another as if they were doppelgangers, thus reinforcing Lukkas’ exploration of contradictory responses to the same stimulus in a singular moment and place.
Though initially more esoteric, “Vertical/Horizon(tal) slowly warms viewers up as they walk through the central gallery and between the projector and the imagery of cascading droplets of light and moisture. Slowly, viewers realize they have become part of the installation with images projected on them as they move about while altering the dimension of the video as they do. It is a fascinating and surreal effect as these shadow puppets admire their creation free of traditional constraints as viewers.
“Shadow Catching” is less inclusive since the viewer is mostly an observer of the video’s cityscape point of view from inside a car. Nonetheless, it, too, experiments with time and space travel somewhere between the point of origin and point of destination. As an integral part of Interact, it is an oddly enjoyable out-of-body experience that persuades viewers their connection to an exterior and interior world is more voyager than voyeur.
Interact continues at the UNO Art Gallery, first floor of the Weber Fine Arts Bldg., 6001 Dodge St. through Feb. 19. |
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