The Passage of Mirage -- Illusory Virtual Objects

Curated by Christiane Paul and Zhang Ga

September 14 - October 16 @ Chelsea Art Museum, 556 West 22nd Street, NY, NY 10011

The exhibition "The Passage of Mirage" explores concepts surrounding the "virtual object" and the issues of representation that have been raised by it. While the coalition of virtual and object seems contradictory at first glance, it dialectically illuminates the complex relationships between the virtual and the real that unfold in new media art. In classical optical theories of the 18th century, the word "virtual" was used to describe the reflected image of an object. Today's digital image does not require a physical object to represent a physical reality; rather than reproducing reality, it encodes data and therefore alludes to an expanded concept of objecthood.

New media art both connects to and expands the dematerialization of the art object that occurred in earlier art movements. The new media object is a process in flux that is potentially interactive, dynamic, participatory and customizable and often oscillates between its inherent ephemeral nature and its material components or people’s desire to objectify it.

"The Passage of Mirage" features nine projects that address these issues by portraying the virtual object as a process, a data structure (or carrier thereof), or as an encoded reality. The artworks expand notions of the traditional art object, sometimes quite specifically with regard to more established art forms such as photography, film, or painting.

The works of Jim Campbell and Thomson & Craighead, for example, offer different approaches to processing the medium of film. Campbell's "Accumulating Psycho" continually collapses the frames of the entire 1 hour, 50 minute film (while the sound remains intact); by contrast, the artist's "Night Light" visualizes "Psycho"'s sound level and the brightness of the image throughout the film. Thomson & Craighead's "Short Films about Flying" is an edition of unique cinematic works that were generated in real-from existing data found on the World Wide Web: each "movie" (replete with opening titles and end credits) combines a video feed from Logan Airport in Boston with randomly loaded net radio sourced from elsewhere in the world.

John Gerrard's "Watchful Portrait" and Carlo Zanni's "Oriana" both transform a portrait into a "living" process that is networked or responds to haptic sensation; and Wolfgang Staehle's and Vuk Cosic's works present a "live" version of a photograph or painting. In very different ways, the idea of the object as data carrier unfolds both in W. Bradford Paley's "Code Profiles" and Eric Paulos' "Limelight," a sculptural object that doubles as automated threat detection and indication system.

While still informed by the aesthetics of more traditional media, the artworks in the exhibition are media objects that are process-oriented, reactive, or open to (real-time) data processing and intervention.