Making Now : Open for Exchange

Guest Curator Carolyn Henne on Making Now: Open for Exchange

How do artists make meaningful work in a climate of mass production, outsourcing, material excess and waste? How are these factors affecting the ways in which artists work, what they work for, and how they work?

I undertook this exhibition as a means to conduct research into artists’ changing relationships to production and community. The participating artists are thinking and making in vastly different modes. There is no hierarchy to the styles and forms found among them. Instead, what links these artists is their desire to ask questions about how we make and whom we make with and for. These artists employ both traditional and new media, considering artistic production in terms of social research and exchange. All of their production strategies fall into one or more

of three categories — share, steal or give — by way of materials, resources and information. All of them enlist a wide range of forms in order to think and question our relationship to objects and images. In many of these efforts, the viewer becomes a participant in the work’s production or is a factor in how the object achieves its value. The experience of viewing something you’ve been a part of creates an intimacy rarely elicited between audiences and artworks.

One of the overarching questions is whether these artists are preoccupied with “doing good things” or whether they are more concerned with using co-production as a strategy for making things that mean something to the people they are made for. In the uncertainty of Now, we look to the future. What is the future of making? And how are we shaping its course? Making Now: Open for Exchange examines this future, but it starts with the pronoun we. How are WE shaping the future? Through new and old technologies, the shift really becomes a movement from central authorship to collective investment. WE make experiences together, and these experiences build towards a creative vision.

—Carolyn Henne, Associate Dean, College of Visual Arts & Dance and Chair of the Department of Art

Judy Rushin, ViV, with participants Chalet Comellas and Christina Poindexter, Tampa, Florida, September 2013.

JUDY RUSHIN

Variance Invariance is part of a dialogue that addresses art objects as things that move between individuals and that illuminate and are illuminated by those who produce and exchange them. Like my project, Carapace, I have designed them to be dismantled and reconfigured again and again. These site-specific works have as much to do with their mobility between sites as they do with their destinations. Individual modules are aggregated into compositions for new exhibition layouts, then stacked and shipped, rendering them spatially and geographically untethered. From September 2013 to January 2014, Variance Invariance traveled to a series of individual participants who assembled the work according to their own preferences, documented it in their spaces, and shipped it back to me. By sharing the works privately with individuals and later in galleries and museums — alongside the project documentation — ViV is an experiment in collaborative design and alternative platforms for artistic engagement. At the same time it also affirms the gallery’s role as site for social discourse. My intent is to suggest that other exhibition platforms exist, and both artists and arts administrators are searching for new ways to maintain sustainable and generative practices. —JR

Judy Rushin, mixed media panels of Variance Invariance, 2013-2014, a variable installation

Judy Rushin explores relationships between people and spatial environments through painting and sculpture. Her modular works are made to be disassembled and reconfigured again — site-specific sculptural paintings that can travel well. If practical necessity is the unintended muse of most projects, then Rushin offers the idea of practical necessity as an evocative conceptual and material framework. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally.

Judy Rushin Assistant Professor of Art, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.

Christie Blizard, Spectrogram from living room noise recorded on May 14, 2011, billboard installation on Highway 84 outside Lubbock, Texas.

CHRISTIE BLIZARD

For the last three years, I have been posting work in public places as gifts. Each work has a sign indicating that the piece is free and meant to be taken. I am in the process of giving away all the work I make, and I view the taking of the piece as its completion. I post work wherever I travel, and cities have included Dallas, Boston, Austin, and Reykjavik, Iceland. —CB

Analog Analogue, Ka-LIVE-o-scope at Fountain Art Fair, 2012, projection of interactive installation.

ANALOG ANALOGUE: MARNIE BETTRIDGE, JAY CORRALES, JOHNSON HUNT and ECHO RAILTON Analog Analogue is an art collective comprised of a small team of artists with individual interests who share the belief that making art is possibly more important than looking at art. Analog Analogue flips the relationship between viewer and art, offering immersive spaces for the viewer to engage in and contribute to the art making experience. While all projects are playful, they are analogous to systemic issues or structures.

In We’re Fans a large sculptural installation was brought to life, mirroring the movements of any viewer who stood in front of it. Viewers assumed this was powered by technology, but forays into the rear gallery revealed two artists laboring behind the scenes with rope and pulleys. Patience and trust were explored in Camera Obscura: viewers were led into the dark and invited to wait for their eyes to catch up with the artwork, a pinhole in the wall faintly projecting the outdoors into the gallery. Community and nonverbal communication played out as a cacophonous and beautiful sound piece in which every viewer brought their own beat to Bang on It. They created a panoramic mural of traced presence in Cave Paintings, interweaving the shadows of every person who stood still.

Analog Analogue has shown at Fountain Miami during Art Basel weekend, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, and The Gladstone during Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. They have also been the Artists-in-Residence at 621 Gallery in Tallahassee.

Marnie Bettridge Marnie Bettridge is a member of the art team Analog Analogue. She studied architecture at the Rural Studio, Auburn University, and at Cornell University before getting her MFA from Florida State. In her personal work she chooses to use materials that are either abandoned, or created from the earth. Her work embraces beauty and reminds us that value shifts with time; we mourn the forgotten and need to find peace with the fact that we will all become immaterial. Especially within the collective works, Bettridge feels art is most successful when it encourages bravery, circumnavigation, strange postures, and a certain feeling of getting away with something. She was recently the Resident Artist of 621 Gallery in Tallahassee, and she exhibits with Rockelmann & Gallery (rockelmann-and.com) in Berlin, Germany.

Jay Corrales As a member of Analog Analogue, Jay Corrales photographs, draws, designs, tinkers with electronics, and serves as a general-purpose art laborer. As an individual he does mostly the same tasks — building playful, fleeting animated vignettes that reimagine the meaning and scale of found imagery and self-recorded spaces. He teaches as an adjunct instructor at Florida State University, where he received his MFA. Before that he studied art and graphic design at Flagler College, receiving a BFA in 2008.

Johnson Hunt Johnson Hunt received her BFA in Studio from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and her MFA in Studio Art from Florida State University. She has recently returned to the United States after spending a semester teaching in Florence, Italy. Johnson Hunt works both as an individual artist and as part of the artist collective Analog Analogue. Analog Analogue creates site-specific installations that encourage viewer interaction. Analog Analogue’s most recent exhibition was in Toronto, Ontario, at the Gladstone during Nuit Blanche. Johnson’s current work responds to economic crisis especially in regards to homelessness, the housing crisis, and unemployment. Her work has also been greatly influenced by her recent appointment in Italy and her travels throughout Europe and to Morocco. Johnson Hunt’s exhibition history includes showing at Fountain Art Fair during Art Basel, her third invitation to participate in the Dunedin Fine Arts Center Wearable Art, multiple exhibitions at the 621 Gallery and Working Method Contemporary in Tallahassee, showing at Florida State University, and at Florida A and M University, and having works in the collections of James Madison University, The National Institutes of Health, and Without Walls in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Echo Railton Born and raised in the Niagara peninsula of southern Ontario, Echo has pursued art adventures that have led her to France, the United States and back to Toronto. She received a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and an MFA from Florida State University. She teaches at Ontario College of Art & Design now and works with Analog Analogue, an artistcollective that makes temporary viewer interactive installation work. Through large-scale drawings, minuscule paintings, playful performances and collaborative installation work, she deals with the issues unique to our super-industrial age. Her work encourages viewers to mind the alien world seen through a microscope, and the macro interconnectedness of all things affected by our seemingly insignificant daily choices.

Joseph DeLappe, The gg hootenanny: Gandhi’s Release Party and Global Gaming Singalong, 2010, telematic online performance / singalong.

JOSEPH DeLAPPE

The first ever internet-wide global gaming voicechat singalong, the “gg hootenanny,” a day long festival which featured songs of freedom and protest in celebration of the release of my avatar, MGandhi Chakrabarti, from his nine-month imprisonment /durational reenactment in Second Life. MGandhi was freed from his cell on January 26th, 2010 — 9 months after the start of the reenactment of his 1930 imprisonment by the British (see Twitter Torture). I invited residents of Second Life to join me as their favorite celebrity avatars to participate in a day long series of four one-hour concerts and singalongs using voice chat. Each concert / singalong was streamed live on Ustream, the chaotic telematic combination of voices from around the globe created a joyful and unexpected experience of interaction and song. You really had to be there! —JD

Joseph DeLappe Professor, Digital Media Studio, Department of Art, University of Nevada / Reno, Reno, Nevada. Working with electronic and new media since 1983, Joseph DeLappe's work in online gaming performance, sculpture and electromechanical installation has been shown throughout the United States and abroad including exhibitions and performances in Australia, the United Kingdom, China, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada. In 2006 he began the project dead in iraq, to type consecutively, all names of America’s military casualties from the war in Iraq into the America’s Army first person shooter online recruiting game. He also directs the iraqimemorial. org project, an ongoing web based exhibition and open call for proposed memorials to the many thousands of civilian casualties from the war in Iraq. More recently, in 2013, he rode a specially equipped bicycle to draw a 460 mile long chalk line around the Nellis Air Force Range to surround an area that would be large enough to create a solar farm that could power the entire United States. He has lectured throughout the world regarding his work, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, CBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and on The Rachel Maddow Show on Air America Radio. His works have been featured in the New York Times, The Australian Morning Herald, Artweek, Art in America and in the 2010 book from Routledge entitled Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. He has authored two book chapters, including “The Gandhi Complex: The Mahatma in Second Life.” Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design (New York, Routledge 2011) and “Playing Politics: Machinima as Live Performance and Document,” Understanding Machinima Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds (London, UK, Continuum 2012).

Holly Hanessian, Touch in Real Time: Policemen in NOLA, 2012.

HOLLY HANESSIAN

Touch in Real Time is a project and traveling exhibition that explores the power of touch and its significance in this digitally mediated age. It is a multi-year project that exists at the crossroads of art, emotion, and neuroscience, with an exhibition that showcases ceramic objects created through the intimate interaction of handholding.

Involving both social engagement and scientific research, Hanessian began the Touch in Real Time project in the spring of 2012. From the repetitive act of pressing wet clay between the hands of two individuals, Hanessian has collected handshake artifacts from across the country, including cities such as Phoenix, Houston, Boston, and New York. These unique forms imprinted with the shape and texture of two different hands record the shared interaction.

Working in conjunction with Dr. Greg Siegle and his lab of behavioral neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh, the team retrieved data from brain image patterns using EEG and fMRI tests while handshakes took place to track the bonding hormone, oxytocin, which is released in the human body 10-20 seconds after contact is made between two people. As the project evolved, each handshake became representative of moments in time between pairs of people, connecting individuals and demonstrating the value of touch.

Holly Hanessian Professor of Art, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. Vamp and Tramp, Booksellers, LLC, Birmingham, Alabama. Abecedarian Gallery, Denver, Colorado. Holly Hanessian grew up in the 1970s in the lush suburbs in South Florida. A child of two Armenian parents (who were fourth cousins), she creates work that explores the crossroads of our DNA and the environment, which is influenced by our daily experiences. Her artwork is a hybrid of design, craft and contemporary arts', in various media including installations and artists' books, both of which use text along with other narrative ideas. Images of her artwork are found in books, magazines and here at www.hollyhanessian.com. She is also a member of www.Artaxis.org and www.accessCeramics.org, two internationally juried websites of contemporary ceramic artists.

Lisa Waxman and Jill Pable, Making Self, 2009-10.

MAKING DO, MAKING HOME, MAKING SELF JILL PABLE and LISA WAXMAN

Through research studies conducted from 2008 to 2013, we have explored intersections of the architectural space of home and the human experience. These studies have sought to uncover recommendations that can improve low-income and homeless shelter environments so that these places physically, psychologically and spiritually sustain their users, helping them to dwell in the fullest sense of the word.

What we found led to specific and practical recommendations that we have offered to agencies and organizations with which we have worked, but also have helped us understand a series of fundamental ideas that frame the heart of the relationship between humans and their dwellings. We embody these concepts in the phrases making do, making home and making self.

Making do: Life challenges like old age, poverty and homelessness exert challenges on day to day existence, including those that involve one’s physical dwelling; and yet, people demonstrate substantial abilities to adjust to adverse housing conditions. These adaptations are seen in the choices people make, possessions they keep and traces of themselves that can be seen in the places they dwell. This project celebrates these adaptations and the spirit of those making do.

Making home: To make a home for oneself is to claim a space in the world while crafting a refuge from it. Creating home means taking an unknown place and growing into it, putting down roots, and identifying it as home. To make a home is to continually make choices that mirror one’s internal dialogue. Home can fulfill many needs including self-expression, as well as providing a place to let down one’s guard. In the words of Heidegger, to build is to dwell, and to dwell is to remain, to participate, to fully be in this world.

Making self: Each of us is striving to feed our spirit and that essence of ourselves that lies deep within. This making of self lies at the heart of being human and assuming one’s place in the world. To make a dwelling is to construct and declare this internal identity. The artifacts of home seen in furniture, possessions, art, and clothing offer evidence of who people are, the circumstances they are experiencing and how they would like to be seen by others.

These images were taken during visits to transitional homeless shelters and permanent supportive housing facilities in Florida in 2009 and 2010. One study involved renovating a homeless shelter family bedroom with features that increased the residents’ sense of personal control over their environment. Some of these images depict this new space. —LW & JP

Jill Pable Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Interior Design, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.

Lisa Waxman Professor and Chair, Department of Interior Design, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida

Conrad Bakker, brochure for Untitled Project: Any Thing You Want.

CONRAD BAKKER

The world is filled with things. Things that are made, things that are bought and sold, things that are collected and displayed, things that are hidden or lost, things that will all eventually disappear. These things reveal themselves through their uses and their physical matter, but also through their absence. Consider the pocketknife lost while camping, that coveted designer handbag that was never purchased, that classic rock album thrown away by a careless parent, or that dog-eared copy of Walden that was lent to a friend who has yet to give it back. These missing things create a provocative negative space in our daily lives, a demanding absence, a longing.

Untitled Project: Any Thing You Want is designed to help fill an empty space of longing with a real, hand-carved and painted sculpture, a tangible simulation of that specific thing you want. This simulated thing will stand in for and point to the very thing wanted even as it foregrounds the absence of the real thing. This project is positioned somewhere between a custom carved / painted sculpture-to-order service and a surrogate replacement agency for lost or missing things. In any case and in every way, Untitled Project: Any Thing You Want provides an extended opportunity to think about things.

To receive the official Untitled Project: Any Thing You Want brochure with an application to participate, please email contact information to: anythingyouwant@ untitledprojects.com; http://untitledprojectanythingyouwant.tumblr.com. —CB

Artist / Associate Professor, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign.

Conrad Bakker, Untitled Project: Any Thing You Want: [GF / Jeff Koons’ “Rabbit”1986 (Stainless Steel Bunny)], 2013, silver chrome paint on carved maple.

CONRAD BAKKER

Conrad Bakker makes copies of real things using wood and paint. He places these simulated objects in specific sites and gallery installations to comment upon and make tangible the economies and networks that connect things to persons, places, and other things. Bakker’s Untitled Projects are often located in a variety of consumer contexts that range from eBay and craigslist to sidewalk sales, storefront shops and art galleries, promoting a strange push and pull of fake things performing as real, critical commodities. Conrad Bakker has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, and his work has been the subject of articles and reviews in Frieze, Contemporary, Flash Art, Art Forum, Art World Magazine, ArtUS, Art Papers, Sculpture, UOVO, The Chicago Tribune, Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Shane Aslan Selzer,Untitled (#posingwithplants), 2013, iPhone screen grab of instagram hashtag archive by Shane Aslan Selzer.

SHANE ASLAN SELZER

What We Care For (an FSU Community Garden) asks students to engage with administrators across campus in an effort to create a community garden in the museum composed of Florida State University office plants and co-produced portraits uploaded to the Instagram archive #posingwithplants #livingsculpture and #fsucommunitygarden

Office plants decorate and personalize workspace. Like any relationship they require varying levels of attention and care. Let’s think of them as tiny public monuments. Students and Administrators can archive themselves with their plants by using the Instagram hashtags #livingsculpture and #posingwithplants.

These pages represent a selection of portraits I’ve made, stolen and reposted from the archives of this project planted within the above Instagram hashtags. —SAS

Shane Aslan Selzer Shane Aslan Selzer is an artist, writer and organizer whose practice develops micro communities where artists can expand on larger social issues such as generosity, exchange and failure. Shane is the coeditor with Ted Purves of the upcoming book, What We Want Is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art and the co-founder of The Global Crit Clinic, an immersive seminar which stimulates and supports the conditions for a rigorous idea-based dialogue to develop among peer networks internationally.

Paul Rutkovsky, The Doodle Cart, Mary Williams and Marissa Monivis with their artwork.

PAUL RUTKOVSKY DO A DOODLE AND GET A FREE ORGANIC FRUIT OR VEGETABLE

Recently I’ve been using simple drawing or carpentry tools — pen and ink with occasional color on paper or hammer and nails, collaborating with other artists and making functional structures in wood and steel. The Doodle Cart, a current project, is an example of my work stepping away from the traditional exhibition game plan and more towards the general public. The cart invites participation on a very basic level, encouraging anyone to doodle and in return, receive simple organic whole foods, not genetically manipulated fruits and vegetables with pesticides. The Doodle Cart has been installed and performed at music festivals, community garden events, street fairs, parks, galleries, and museums. —PR

Paul Rutkovsky Associate Professor of Art, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida; Managing Artist / Gardener at Art Alleys, Tallahassee, Florida.

Tim Elverston and Ruth Whiting, Flowx: O2 Flame, 2011, silk, carbon fiber, stainless steel, UHMWPE fiber.

FLOWX TIM ELVERSTON and RUTH WHITING

The collaborating artists of Flowx describe their project as being between themselves and earth’s atmosphere. They have traveled to many areas of the world to complete their ephemeral installations and they state that “within the rules of flight, Flowx is the story of a journey around our planet. We reach out with sensor arrays of silk, like brush strokes that sample the sky. . . . Ideas are tested, and materials communicate through touch. Memories define skills that rise into systems.” Having been a team for over a decade, Tim Elverston and Ruth Whiting project a poetic relationship with their installation locales: “These moments form images that blur the barriers between our dreams and our knowledge. . . . Our visions are driven by sensations and desires. This work captures moments of passion, artifacts of listening, playing, and thinking in the wind.” —TE & RW

Tim Elverston and Ruth Whiting, Flowx in Doha, Qatar, 2011, silk, carbon fiber, stainless steel, UHMWPE fiber

FLOWX TIM ELVERSTON and RUTH WHITING

Timothy Elverston Founder and working artist at WindFire Design, a handmade technologies studio based in Gainesville, Florida. A designer, maker, and artist since his earliest memories, Timothy Elverston's most powerful interests have always revolved around our atmosphere and flight. In 2001, he started a handmade technologies company called WindFire Designs. Elverston is strongly influenced by his collected knowledge of the natural world and the material sciences. His ideas for the future are driven by a mix of desire, experimental data, and cumulative intuition. Solving problems under the strict but generous demands of flight always reveals the path ahead.

Ruth Whiting Creative Director and working artist at WindFire Designs, a handmade technologies studio based in Gainesville, Florida. Ruth Whiting is a painter, whose images are always vividly imagined, and range from tightly-rendered illustrations to gestural, expressionistic skyscapes. With Flowx, she acts as both visionary and documentarian. Whiting’s years of experience, technical knowledge, artistic vision, and training as a dancer serve to sculpt the reality of her art. Steeped in mythology, her work has an underlying, subtly-suggested story that makes it intriguing beyond its formal beauty.

Julietta Cheung, True Exposure (Cool Shade, Kool-Aid), 2012, partial view of installation, dimensions variable.

JULIETTA CHEUNG

True Exposure (2012–13) is an interactive sculptural installation and a performative talk. I invite viewers to question the collective shaping of the buzz term ‘innovation’ and to interrogate the production of a culture specific to the commodification of participation. By treating the task of the viewer/audience as a critical device, I explore how the term has been unmade and remade. Because the topic of ‘innovation’ has been closely associated with design and industry, the ways in which the term is used also extend to the sectors of global trade and politics, and affects how different cultures around the world are viewed through these associations. Marketing and branding practices of the last decade have also linked consumer participation and specific forms of office collaborations to socalled ‘innovation practices.’ By placing this project in an interactive exhibition, I further ask how participation operates in and outside of contemporary art around the implications of ‘innovation.’

The project began with the web search of the term 'innovation' across a variety of on-line news media outlets, blogs and social networking sites. The search results were then copied. In each set of results, ‘innovation’ was replaced by the equally ambiguous term ‘true exposure.’ An alternative lexicography around ‘true exposure’ was further applied to replace recurring associations. These were typeset and laserprinted, and placed within the exhibition space for viewers to read. A performative talk, entitled, “Reading True Exposure,” accompanies the installation. Although this talk is culled from the appropriated material I used in the laser-printed pages, the text is remade again, this time, into a narrative. —JC

Julietta Cheung, True Exposure (Cool Shade, Kool-Aid), 2012, partial view of installation, dimensions variable.

JULIETTA CHEUNG

Julietta Cheung's work seeks to interrogate the contemporary production of the conception of modernity from a textual as well as a thing-based perspective. Often taking literary sources as starting points to artistic investigations, she examines how canonical texts and popular buzzwords are socially co-produced to describe our contemporary notions of progress. Through the vernacular styles and the implied functions of designed objects, she further explores the ways in which people remake and redefine the forms and meaning of the everyday. She interweaves her text-based and sculptural work in installations that solicit viewer interaction, thus, connecting the social aspect of consumption—the use and interpretation of language and objects—to the social space of the exhibition environment. Cheung was born in Hong Kong and grew up in the United States and in France. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the New Artists Trustees Scholarship and the Betsy Karp MFA Award. She has exhibited her work in the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium and Hong Kong.

Joseph DeLappe, The 1,000 Drones Project — A Participatory Memorial, invites the public to create a small scale, papercraft replica of a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) — a drone.

JOSEPH DeLAPPE

The first ever internet-wide global gaming voicechat singalong, the “gg hootenanny,” a day long festival which featured songs of freedom and protest in celebration of the release of my avatar, MGandhi Chakrabarti, from his nine-month imprisonment /durational reenactment in Second Life. MGandhi was freed from his cell on January 26th, 2010 — 9 months after the start of the reenactment of his 1930 imprisonment by the British (see Twitter Torture). I invited residents of Second Life to join me as their favorite celebrity avatars to participate in a day long series of four one-hour concerts and singalongs using voice chat. Each concert / singalong was streamed live on Ustream, the chaotic telematic combination of voices from around the globe created a joyful and unexpected experience of interaction and song. You really had to be there! —JD

Joseph DeLappe Professor, Digital Media Studio, Department of Art, University of Nevada / Reno, Reno, Nevada. Working with electronic and new media since 1983, Joseph DeLappe's work in online gaming performance, sculpture and electromechanical installation has been shown throughout the United States and abroad including exhibitions and performances in Australia, the United Kingdom, China, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada. In 2006 he began the project dead in iraq, to type consecutively, all names of America’s military casualties from the war in Iraq into the America’s Army first person shooter online recruiting game. He also directs the iraqimemorial. org project, an ongoing web based exhibition and open call for proposed memorials to the many thousands of civilian casualties from the war in Iraq. More recently, in 2013, he rode a specially equipped bicycle to draw a 460 mile long chalk line around the Nellis Air Force Range to surround an area that would be large enough to create a solar farm that could power the entire United States. He has lectured throughout the world regarding his work, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, CBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and on The Rachel Maddow Show on Air America Radio. His works have been featured in the New York Times, The Australian Morning Herald, Artweek, Art in America and in the 2010 book from Routledge entitled Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games. He has authored two book chapters, including “The Gandhi Complex: The Mahatma in Second Life.” Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design (New York, Routledge 2011) and “Playing Politics: Machinima as Live Performance and Document,” Understanding Machinima Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds (London, UK, Continuum 2012).

Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy, detail of Packet Switching (Weimer Hall), College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida, 2012, inkjet on polyester on panel, 177.5 x 20.21 feet. Photo credit: Steve Johnson / UF College of Journalism and Communications.

JOELLE DIETRICK and OWEN MUNDY

Packet Switching is an ongoing body of work by Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy that visualizes architecture as fragments affected by economic and communications systems. The title of the series refers to how digital communication breaks files into smaller manageable blocks of data called packets. Each packet is then sent through a network, taking the quickest route possible, and reassembled once they reach their destinations. One jpg image, for example, might be broken into several packets, each of which may travel a different path through the net, even through different cities, before being recompiled into a copy of the original file.

To reference this common process used in networked systems, we wrote custom software to deconstruct a 3D model’s source code and produce unique fragments. We remixed these fragments using an original application created in Processing. The resulting images become limited edition prints, large photo installations, wall-sized paintings, and animations. Our process underscores how incidental fragmentation and automation can streamline markets, but also make them vulnerable to systems failure. The use of architecture specifically points to recent real estate market volatility and considers how communication technologyenabled pursuits of profit margins alters our most basic needs. —JD & OM

Joelle Dietrick Assistant in Art, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. Joelle Dietrick develops two-dimensional and time-based artworks that consider contemporary nomadism and 21st century power structures. With a particular interest in female expatriates, she considers how these adventurous women negotiate their wanderlust with a desire for a home while in competition for boundaryless careers.

Owen Mundy Assistant Professor of Art, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida. Owen Mundy is an artist, designer, and programmer who investigates public space and its relationship to data. His artwork highlights inconspicuous trends and offers tools to make hackers out of everyday users.

Industrial Ring Habitat (2012) by Micah Ganske Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts

My recent sculptures are also derived from similar subject matter, and they are created using 3D-printing technology. This is a process which is, in itself, a harbinger of the amazing things to come. The newest sculptures are inspired by rotating space habitats proposed by NASA in the ’70s. Rather than the Utopian countryside found in the original drawings, however, my sculptures present the more realistic outcome of what our first forays into space habitation will be; my ring-worlds are strictly mining and industrial facilities. The structures within are directly modeled after buildings from the locations in my paintings to remind us that we’ll always be “ourselves,” no matter how advanced our technology may become.

I simply want to make work which engages the viewer in a conversation about what interests me the most: our technological future and destiny as a species. Even though there will be bumps along the way, I believe it should be rushed into headlong. Some of the technology of the future will be used irresponsibly or simply for evil, as has always been the case. However, the progression of science and technology also represents the evolution of our species. Do we need to be smarter? Yes. But we don’t have to wait millions of years to naturally evolve. We can do that through our ingenuity. Creating a body of work that can open a dialog about these ideas is what I am working toward. —MG

Micah Ganske, Tomorrow Land: Greenpoint, NY, 2010, acrylic on muslin, 120 x 168 inches.

MICAH GANSKE

My recent body of work, Tomorrow Land, is a series of paintings and sculptures that contrasts the failures of modern industry with my belief in science and technology to change our world for the better.

The paintings start with the simple juxtaposition of a large shadow over an aerial view of depressed locations. The shadows cast are of things that symbolize what I refer to as “Aspirational Technology.” These are things that represented, or still do represent the progress of modern civilization and the glory which the future can hold through our ingenuity. The locations are towns, neighborhoods and population centers that have been recently abandoned or depressed due to industrial negligence. The contrast of this imagery shows what I’d say is a realistic optimism about what we’re capable of.

Michael Rees, Installation view of Preservation of Finitude, 2013, archival photo on board, steel rod, marble, steel bar and plate, 55 x 16 x 12 inches.

MICHAEL REES

My work for Open for Exchange will be the product of my residency at FAR at the Florida State University. As I write the work is in formation and has only working titles: Stucco Pony and Straight Sister. These are experimental sculptures that employ augmented reality, the MMAP printer designed and built by Windham Graves, and some material extensions like acrylic base coat cement, paper fgr-95, steel or acrylic rods and so on.

My interest is in developing rich semiotic experiences that initiate multiple narratives as users construct the image of the work through their interaction and use of the sculpture. The work becomes the location of fractured narratives that are played across multiple interactive experiences. Equally important are the collaborations between myself, staff including Noah Brock, Windham Graves, Michelle Ray, and the co-director Carolyn Henne as well as students Megan Wilson, Craig Ryan, and Javier Rivera.

The pieces unfold through language and action. This kind of interaction helps make the work a social object. The sense of a community of different agents and personalities who have a similar complex relationship to the formation of the work in different scales is in part the theme of the work. Although parts of it are played out within a reproducible network, idiosyncratic and local experiences emerge as well. —MR

Michael Rees Associate Professor, William Patterson University, Wayne, New Jersey; Director for the Center for New Art at William Patterson University. Michael Rees is an artist working in themes of figuration, language, technology, and the social to weave a sculptural mélange. He has shown his work widely including the Whitney Museum in the 1995 Biennial and again in “Bitstreams” in 2001, the MARTa Museum in Germany, Art Omi, The Pera Museum in Istanbul, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and in private galleries such as 303, Bitforms, Basilico Fine Art, Pablo’s Birthday, Favorite Goods and elsewhere.

Making Now: Open for Exchange

At some point, the concept of what artists are making today became in the mind of the curator Carolyn Henne what artists are making together today. The dimension of collaboration not only further defined the focus of the exhibition, but brought exciting artist teams to the fore. Henne also looked at artists who channeled public participation and insights so that the exhibition could expand to non-artist participants whose interaction was critical to the success of an idea or an art experience. In both situations the concept of the exchange of ideas was paramount.

Carolyn Henne: “That vision is not singular, it doesn’t claim a single voice, instead the vision is multiple like a 3D printer that takes tiny particles and builds them together from a thousand perspectives. Whether contributing online to new improvements in shareware or performing in the public realm, working on green strategies through art, or team-designing projections, there is one underlying commonality — a need to get something done, to make something happen — between us. The value of these works places an emphasis on exchange, communal experience, and making a positive change in our shared world. The artists here function as liaisons between materials, ideas and people. We could think of it as Building Happiness, a quest to use creative action as a better way into the future we are making now.” —Carolyn Henne, Associate Dean, College of Visual Arts & Dance and Chair of the Department of Art