Saturday, March 12, 2011

Blink!

I guess I don't need to blog anymore.

"the artist formally known as mark amerika" is doing it for me.

Apparently, they saw me at the opening of Blink! at the Denver Art Museum.

It's a great show and I'm thrilled to be a part of it (my contribution is the 2003 digital video / surround sound art piece CODEWORK, now included in their permanent collection).

The electronic media art scene in Colorado is really starting to feel its organic oats.

The Blink! exhibition helps contextualize the history of electronic media art in Colorado by featuring an array of international artists as well as artists from Colorado (some with international reputations, some not).

There were scores of college students at the opening and they seemed to really dig it and are perhaps conferring with each other right now on how this validates their current trajectories into interdisciplinary media arts practice.

What's cool about this show is that many people from around the Rocky Mountain region are now becoming exposed to this kind of work in a mainstream museum context.

The prior exhibition in this space was King Tut.

By far the best experience for me on opening night was this: not having seen my CODEWORK exhibited for about seven years, I decided to go inside the installation and watch it loop through from beginning to end. It takes about eight minutes to experience the whole thing. After it had looped through once, someone called out my name inside the installation. They introduced themselves as a museum patron and queried me about what it was like seeing the piece after so many years and then they introduced me to their (probably) five year old daughter who was sitting on one of the raised bean bag chairs.

"I have been trying to go see the rest of the show for awhile now," he said, "but when I asked her if she was ready to go, she said 'I want to stay inside here forever.'"

Hearing that was as cool as my work being in the exhibition itself.


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