HIGHLIGHTS
The three exhibitions Digital Being: Radio Row, Water Stories, and GUI/GOOEY explore memory, technology, and sustainability across time. In Digital Being: Radio Row, Taezoo Park breathes new life into obsolete machines, reimagining New York’s Radio Row as a digital hub of the past and future. Water Stories at BioBAT Art Space celebrates water’s ecological and cultural roles through multisensory art, urging conservation for future generations. GUI/GOOEY at Plexus Projects blurs boundaries between digital and organic realms, examining how interfaces reshape our perception of the body and nature through digital media.
Support Art Spiel! Your tax-deductible contribution to the 2024 Art Spiel Fall Fundraising campaign ensures that we continue to give artists a voice and bring you the art coverage you love. Make your tax-deductible donation today and help Art Spiel continue to thrive. DONATE
While considering these art and technology exhibitions, it may be interesting to think about these works from an art historical context. How should they be defined to help make connections that can strengthen understanding? What new naming conventions would work to enhance these connections? Would the term ‘Techspressionism’—more earnestly considered circa 2020 to illustrate “an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience”—adequately define many of these works?
What is appealing about the term Techspressionism, coined by artist Colin Goldberg and promoted by the director of Pollock-Krasner House Helen A. Harrison, is that unlike many terms used to describe Art and Technology, it relies on the emotional connection and not the process, think Glitch Art or Augmented Reality Art, to place it within the collectively used categories and movements. It perhaps gets us closer to the heart of it. Wherever you find the definition lands, the following exhibitions all use technology to challenge us to connect with our collective shared past, present, and future.
Digital Being: Radio Row by Taezoo Park at Silverstein Properties 120 Broadway
@digitalbeing
On view through: January 2025
Featuring: Taezoo Park
Taezoo Park’s Digital Being: Radio Row is a walk through salvaged memories. In this comprehensive installation that fills the space Taezoo integrates CRT televisions and other analog devices with digital components to reimagine and create entities with new purposes and identities.
The installation is a nostalgic reconfiguration of old technologies that pay homage to New York’s Radio Row, a famed area of lower Manhattan where from 1922-1966 stalls filled with radio parts and later television components were sold to keep the then new technologies running. You can draw a straight line between Radio Row, with its cathode ray tubes and capacitors, and the beginning of video art. Park channels the energy of a bygone era, reimagining Radio Row as a contemporary marketplace for digital and analog interaction. Digital Being: Radio Row asks you to consider both the past and future of technological artifacts and their impact on our world.
Park’s work offers a glimpse into a world where forgotten machines regain significance. It highlights the rapid pace of technological evolution and invites reflection on the lifecycle of electronics. New naming conventions underscore his exploration of creating connections. Park named these sentient electronics “Digital Beings” and called this process “Digitology.”
Park’s work goes beyond basic upcycling; it draws attention to the hidden stories of these discarded items, addressing environmental concerns while presenting a unique philosophical dialogue on obsolescence. The exhibition invites audiences to engage with these beings as relics with memories of past eras, suggesting that, even as they were discarded, they hold valuable insights into society’s relationship with technology.
Subscribe to the Art Spiel Weekly Newsletter. It Matters to us!
SUBSCRIBE HERE
Water Stories at BioBAT Art Space @biobat.artspace
On view through: May 3, 2025
Curated by: Elena Soterakis
Featuring: Anne Hollænder, Arantxa Araujo, Christopher Lin, DB Lampman, DLX Design Lab, Edrex Fontanilla, Elizabeth Hénaff, Heather Parrish, Keren Anavy, Léonard Roussel, Nathan Kensinger, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Sara Kostić, Sarah Nelson Wright, Seth Wenger, Yan Shao, and Yoko Shimizu
Without water, there can be no life. Water Stories at BioBAT Art Space immerses visitors in the ecological and poetic essence of water, weaving together local and global narratives about one of our most essential resources. Curated with inspiration from the Interstate Environmental Commission’s (IEC) work, the exhibition brings art and science together to explore water’s role in sustaining life and the complexities of conservation. Set within the Brooklyn Army Terminal, it highlights the IEC’s commitment to safeguarding waterways across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
The exhibition features a range of multi-sensory installations and interactive works, from scientific explorations to spiritual and poetic interpretations. Artist-in-residence Yoko Shimizu’s installation transforms data from water samples into sound, inviting visitors to hear the life in water. Ranjit Bhatnagar and Anne Hollænder’s Water the Sounds engages through analog instruments and haunting vocals that resonate with water’s sacred qualities.
Another standout is Yan Shao’s Algae Chorus, which gives voice to algae and underscores its crucial role in our ecosystem. Scope Collective’s CHANNEL is the culmination of environmental sampling, bioinformatic analysis, field recording, multi-scale media generation, and waiting for things to grow. This piece builds on work commissioned by Open Source Gallery last summer and has grown into the expansive BioBAT space.
Beyond the gallery the exhibition includes year-long public programs and community events, encouraging visitors to engage as citizen scientists and deepen their connection to local waterways. This exhibition thoughtfully captures the beauty, mystery, and critical importance of water in our lives. As visitors experience water through art, they are invited to reflect on its scarcity, the fragility of ecosystems, and the necessity of preservation—an urgent message in the face of climate change.
Memory schematic by Iz Nettere at Plexus Projects. Photo courtesy of artist.
GUI/GOOEY at Plexus Projects @plexusprojects
On view through: December 19, 2024
Curated by: Laura Splan
Featuring: Alexander Miller, Angela Ferraiolo, Anne Yoncha, Aurora Mititelu, Colin Ives, Danielle Siembieda, Diana Sanchez, Elaine Whittaker, Eric Souther, Fiona Bell & Lauren Urenda, Gregory Gangemi, Iz Nettere, Jacklyn Brickman, Jonah King, Jullian Young, Karen Ingram, Lee Tusman, Lisa Jamhoury, Luca Lee, Mathias Chumino, Michael Trigilio, Patrick Stefaniak, Petra, Rita Raeva, Sana Maqsood, Sara Bonaventura, sarahsarahturnerturner, Sebastian Thewes, Space Type (Kevin Yeh, Lynne Yun), The Ex-Utero Collective (Ionat Zurr, Cynthia White, Cristin Millett), Ursula Endlicher, VOLUMES (Anna Oxygen, Fawn Krieger), WhiteFeather Hunter, Woo Haran, Yorgos Papafigos, Yvette Granata, and others.
GUI/GOOEY traverses the intricate boundary between digital and biological realms. This second edition of GUI/GOOEY explores how technological representations affect our understanding of our relationship to nature and to our bodies through computational, digital, and virtual tools, showcasing perspectives from artists in over twenty countries. Splan’s curatorial vision brings together diverse works that probe the spaces between the virtual and the organic, between bits and bodies, with installations both online and in the gallery for public engagement.
The exhibition’s title itself—GUI/GOOEY—is of course referencing the Graphic User Interface (GUI) that mediates our interaction with the digital, while evoking the gooey materiality of the biological world. Each piece in the exhibition invites viewers to question how digital interfaces reshape our perception of our own physicality.
There are many fine examples in this show. Iz Nettere’s work Memory Schematic, created in collaboration with neuroscientist Ida Mommenejad, was created to explore the form of memory in neural networks that, while lacking synapses, still exhibit predictive abilities. Angela Ferraiolo’s Shell, Gray-Scott No. 4_0690 presents a rhythmic dance of cells and pixels, blending visual science and art to seemingly comment on the blurred boundaries between biological systems and digital algorithms. WhiteFeather Hunter’s piece Lipstick delves into a bio-digital art approach using AI-rendered digital image created using Dall-E 2, prompted by the artist’s mashup descriptors exploring hybrid more-than-human corporeal intimacy: pink ovulation slimy humanoid mushroom pair mycelium dirt connection alien realistic photo.
This show successfully forges a dialogue between digital and organic forms, questioning our reliance on interfaces and the ways technology is infiltrating our most elemental understandings of nature. Through its multifaceted lens, the show reimagines the boundaries of human experience and the constantly evolving interface between the virtual and vital.
Make your tax-deductible donation today and help Art Spiel continue to thrive. DONATE
About the writer: Michele Jaslow is a NYC based independent art curator, writer, and art appraiser with a focus on contemporary and ultra-contemporary art. Michele holds an MFA Cranbrook, BFA Purchase, and post-graduate NYU New Media. She will be participating in the upcoming National Coalition Against Censorship’s annual curatorial discussions to explore strategies for curators as they work with politically outspoken artists and political art in an ever-changing landscape. @radarcurator