Sunday, November 03, 2013

Glitch_Click_Thunk featuring Mark Amerika: my first exhibition in Hawaii

As some of you may know, I have been a part time resident of Kailua, Hawai‘i, for the past 14 years. remixthbook was essentially written there and some of my major works like FILMTEXT were developed during extended periods of time spent on the islands.

Most of my time on the islands over the years has been focused on making contemporary works of art as well as parallel processing experimental forms of practice-based theory. Hawaii makes its presence felt in my first published collection of artist writings, META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, particularly in a critifiction titled Hawaiian Net Art that was previously published on Rhizome.

Now I am happy to remind my readers that I am in the process of having my first major show on the island of Oahu at the University of Hawai‘i Art Gallery. The show is titled CONVERGENCE: GLITCH_CLICK_THUNK featuring Mark Amerika, and opened on October 6th, 2013. The show runs through December 6th.

Here are some capture-as-capture-can iPhone shots from the opening.

The entire University of Hawai‘i Art Gallery press release for the exhibition is located here.

The digital version of the postcard announcement is here.

Here’s a quick summary of the announcement:
CONVERGENCE: GLITCH_CLICK_THUNK, Featuring Mark Amerika
October 6 – December 6, 2013
(opening reception on Sunday, October 6 from 3 to 5 pm)

The inaugural presentation of a series of new media exhibitions/installations at the University of Hawai‘i Art Gallery.

The CONVERGENCE series encompasses and explores the impact of Internet art, digital, electronic, sound and a wide range of new, traditional, and hybrid technologies on communication and art. Developed by the gallery system at the Department of Art and Art History, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM), this extended, interactive installation engages visitors and students in hands-on exchanges between letter-press, litho-process, current computer-imaging, and audio-articulating workshop areas within the gallery.

The CONVERGENCE series’ first installation features noted author, professor, and multimedia artist Mark Amerika and his pioneering combination of animation, video, net art, hypertext, exprimental audio, and graphic layouts. Amerika’s GRAMMATRON (1997) is a landmark icon of hypertext and textual aesthetics in the history of internet art. The installation also showcases a selection of Amerika’s video work as well as multiple screenings of Immobilité, his feature-length “foreign film” shot entirely with a mobile phone.

Contributing in dynamic interaction with visiting artist Mark Amerika is the Lithopixel Refactory Collective (LRC), founded by Charles Cohan, Scott Groeniger, and Peter Chamberlain, professors at the Department of Art and Art History, UHM. LRC will set up a temporary production studio in the UH Art Gallery that is equal parts lithography, digital printing, live audio, print gallery, and shredding facility.

The elements of converging media are reflected in the exhibition’s title. Glitch refers to Mark Amerika’s glitch aesthetics that inform and react to LRC’s contemporary tools for imaging, denoted by Click of point and click computer technology. The traditional, transformative technology of printmaking presses is represented as Thunk — a playful reference to the sound of the heavy machine parts of working printing presses.
My week long visit to Honolulu was packed with events including the installation, the opening, the live performances inside the gallery, my visiting artist talk, my introduction to Immobilité followed by a screening of the entire work, and meeting with excellent colleagues and students from Art and Art History, English, and Library and Information Sciences.

My next intervention into the gallery space will take place later this month as a series of telematic interactions from my post in Paris where I am the International Research Chair at the University of Paris 8.

More on the Paris gig in my next post.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, Glitch Click Thunk, University of Hawaii, University of Paris 8, Lithopixel Refactory Collective