Catalog

of the Art Exhibition about "Time"
for the Interdisciplinary Tour of the Human Condition
held at Stanford University on October 20, 2011 @ 6:30pm-9:30pm
Stanford Cubberley Auditorium (map)

Wayne Vitale's electronic composition "Splitting Time"

Synopsis:

This electronic sound sketch was specifically composed for Stanford's panel on "Time". A metric technique from traditional Indonesian music, irama, is used to create a continual ritardando of sampled and processed sounds from a bronze gamelan orchestra. The overall rate of musical flow is ever slowing, but at particular points the fastest layer of subdivision is split, while the slowest layer falls away into imperceptibility. The overall musical density thus keeps resetting, and we entrain on a new pulse. The process is akin to changing gears as a car slows down: At a particular point, we're able to downshift. The engine RPMs jump up again (staying within an acceptable or normal range) despite the fact that the speed of the car continues to be reduced. We can also imagine this process visually, like a drawing made on an infinitely stretchy canvas. As the image is stretched, enough space opens up that we can add more detail between the lines. In Splitting Time, looping suggests a perpetual opening up of new layers, all based on the same sequence of tones, in a fractal-like manner.

Wayne Vitale is a composer, performer, and instrument conservator who has long been inspired by the music of Bali, Indoneisa. He is a founding member and former director of Gamelan Sekar Jaya (www.gsj.org), an ensemble of sixty musicians and dancers that has achieved world-wide accolades for its cross-cultural creative work. His recording label, Vital Records (www.vitalrecords.ws), releases critically acclaimed CDs of Balinese music. As a composer, he has created numerous works for gamelan that have been performed by Bali's most prominent orchestras. In 2011 Vitale collaborated with a renowned 25-musician gamelan ensemble from Bali, Indonesia, and with US-based visual, audio, and set designers to create Makrokosma Bali. The work combined new music for gamelan orchestra with projected video and still imagery, ambient sounds, and lighting design in an integrated multimedia set. The premiere series took place at the Asian Art Museum on May 13-15, 2011, in conjunction with the special exhibition "Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance", the most ambitious presentation of Balinese arts in US history.

Peter Foucault's interactive installation "Temporal Line-work"

Synopsis:

The Attraction/Repulsion project is an interactive drawing installation where small sensor driven robots are influenced by audience participation in the creation of a large-scale abstract composition. Previous iterations of Attraction/Repulsion have been installed in exhibitions at the NASA Aimes Research Center (Mountain View, CA), Interaction 10 (Savannah, GA), Kicker Studios (San Francisco, CA), the Richmond Art Center (Richmond, CA), The Lab (San Francisco, CA), Zero1 San Jose 2008, the Art Now Fair (Miami, FL), the Robert Berman Gallery (San Francisco, CA) and Micaela Gallery (San Francisco, CA). In September 2010 Attraction/Repulsion was included in the MAP Project at Zero1 SJ through a generous grant from the City of San Jose. As this piece evolves, the Circumstances of how it is installed change with each iteration and have included video, sound and performance collaborations with other Bay Area artists.
In this work "time" is of seminal importance as the drawings are created over a duration of time which determines the density of the composition.

Bio:

Peter Foucault creates works on paper, videos, and installations that are fueled by his love of drawing and mark making. He has created a series of /Drawing-Projects/, which utilize systems developed by the artist that produce complex abstract compositions. At the root of these projects is a constant tension between control and the loss of control. Viewer interactivity plays an integral part in his drawing installations, large-scale artworks in which participants influence the outcome of a drawing that is created by a small robot over the duration of an event or exhibition. His work is concept driven, and often utilizes objects that reference printmaking and multiplicities.
Foucault has participated in numerous exhibitions nationwide, with recent solo shows at Micalea Gallery, the SFMOMA Caf‚, The Richmond Art Center (Richmond, CA), and Blankspace Gallery (Oakland, CA). His work has been included in group shows at the Smithsonian Institutes' Freer and Sackler Gallery, The Portland Art Center, Ohge Ltd. (Seattle, WA), Works San Jose, and Mission 17 (San Francisco, CA). In 2007-2009 his artwork was included in the Art Now Fair Miami Beach, the Bridge Art Fair New York and Miami Beach and the Scope Art Fair Miami Beach (through Micaela Gallery, San Francisco) and his interactive robotic drawing installations have been presented at The NASA Aimes Research Center, The Lab (San Francisco), and the Zero1 Art and Technology Fair (San Jose, CA). In 2010 Foucault was awarded a Creative Work Fund grant and a grant from the City of San Jose Public Art Program.

Renetta Sitoy's video "Forecast"

Synopsis:

/Forecast/ examines three great natural disasters from the past 10 years: Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti Earthquake, and the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. By using footage from television weather reports that aired during these disasters and reducing the footage to images of the meteorologists' hands, /Forecast/ attempts to bring attention to the simplest of gestures. Interspersed within the video is text transcribed from the news coverage, placing the movements of the hands into the larger context of the disasters by giving them a concrete place in time. In this way, the hands express and capture the mood of the moment, revealing an underlying beauty in a terrifying situation.

Bio:

Renetta Sitoy was born in New York, NY and graduated in 2007 with an MFA in Design + Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was the recipient of the San Francisco Art Institute MFA Fellowship from 2005 to 2007. Using media that include video and animation to examine the human condition, her work has explored topics such as the alteration of time and space, perception, memory, dreams, and the effects of technology on human behavior. Her work has been shown in Atlanta, Baltimore, New York City, Los Angeles, Bulgaria, Budapest, and throughout the Bay Area. She completed a residency at the Philadelphia Art Hotel in 2009 and is currently working on a documentary about the French-born, Oakland-based electronic music artist Laetitia Sonami. She lives and works in the Bay Area.

Robert Edgar's video installation "FbOaRcEkWwAaRrDd"

Synopsis:

This piece is based on footage of the site where the spectator will be watching it. During a day before this event that you are attending, the video camera was set up in this room in which you are standing and physically focused on a 30" X 50" rectangular plane approximately 10' in front of its lens. Visible within the frame are an entrance to the auditorium, two push-to-open mechanical switches, column providing support for the ceiling, which is outside of the frame. The camera was turned on and recorded approximately two minutes of acting by a girl (the cuckoo) and a boy (the wooden soldier). The girl is reading today's news from her iPhone, out loud, as she walks in front of the camera. Today the performance that you are watching consists of a laptop computer running Edgar's program "Simultaneous Opposites" which progressively moves through the video file as it sweeps forward (systole) and backward (diastole) in single-frame jumps. A video projector focuses the file onto a two-sided screen that fills the original 30" X 50" rectangle. The projection to the screen is occasionally blocked by the puppet-like shadows caused by audience members walking in front of the projector. (A documentary of the whole process).

Bio:

Robert Edgar creates and employs software engines to examine mediated artifacts forged at his zone of proximal development. Robert's computer-based art engines include Simultaneous Opposites (2008 - present), The Duchamp Examinations (2006), Memory Theatre Two (2003), Sand, or How Computers Imagine Truth in Cinema (1994), Living Cinema (1988), and Memory Theatre One (1985). Robert holds an MFA from Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts. He grew up in Cocoa Beach, Florida during the birth of the NASA Space Program (1958-1970). Robert is an Instructional Designer at Stanford University, and teaches cinema art at the California Art Institute/Sunnyvale.

Cindy Stokes' photograph "Before: Essence of Toulon"

Synopsis:

The image "Essence of Toulon" is part of a portfolio called "Before". The images in "Before" originated in multiple abandoned places in the seemingly empty spaces of northern Nevada and California between 2007 and 2009. That other men and women once worked and lived in the mines, mills, ranches and ghost towns scattered throughout the region is clear, but their identities and even motivations are mostly lost to time. The weathered buildings and detritus that remain hint at their stories from before now, and the accumulation of time since they were left for scrap. With these abstracts and still-lifes, I've explored fragments of what people have left behind, like unintended artworks etched in wood, cement and steel. The photographs were created using black-and-white film and silver gelatin paper using traditional darkroom techniques.

Bio:

Cindy Stokes splits her energy between photography and computational biology. Her photographic efforts focus on found objects and spaces, with a particular interest in abstraction. While in one sense abstraction obscures the reality of a thing, in another it is more representative of reality since the appearance of something reveals only a small bit of its meaning. Cindy Stokes' photography has been exhibited in numerous venues throughout the US, and she is represented by Richter Gallery of Photography in Nashville, Tennessee. She published a book of abstractions and still-lifes from nature titled Dynamic Form in 2008. When she's not doing photography, Stokes works in biotechnology, using computational models to understand biological systems and desirable characteristics of pharmaceutical products. Presently she's establishing the computational biology program for Silver Creek Pharmaceuticals, a regenerative medicine company in San Francisco. Her photography can be found on her personal website www.cindystokes.com.

Myrrh Reagan's painting "Synchrony 7"

Synopsis:

The series "Synchrony" is a celebration of the interdependent processes that function almost perfectly second by second, hour by hour, regulating cellular activity, feedback systems preserving the balance of the natural world. Examples are the exquisite metabolic processes in every cell turning food into energy in your body. In embryo development, the sequential readout of DNA instructions that regulate, step-by-step, the development of the embryo is quite amazing. And consider the exquisite molecular pathways involved in continuously turning food into energy in every cell. Plants, insects and other animals who have co-evolved are in an intricate dance, using as raw material the waste from their fellow creatures. This is especially apparent in tropical forests. All of them involve feedback mechanisms. How well designed are human feedback mechanisms, say, in the supply chain between a factory in China and a Walmart in Chicago?

Bio:

Trudy Myrrh Reagan grew up around scientists, and felt a sense of wonder at the intricacy of the world of atoms and cells on the one hand, and the majesty of the depths of space on the other. When she incorporated these in her art, few artists were attuned to it. In 1981 she invited those artist friends who were of like mind to start YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology, a national nonprofit artists' association. Many media and technologies were represented. It filled a great need in 1981 when it started for artists to communicate with each other, and for their work to be seen and validated by a skeptical art world. It actively continued for 28 years, holding science, technology and art forums bi-monthly, many exhibitions, and producing a newsletter/journal. For 14 of those years, it met at the Exploratorium. Leonardo/ISAST was a collaborating organization. YLEM still maintains a web site: www.ylem.org. She also conducted a study group on patterns in nature, and has posted the resources it developed on her website: www.myrrh-art.com She produced a body of work under the name Myrrh, using images from science imaging and patterns in nature in a variety of media: relief prints, batik, Japanese shibori, paper marbling, and finally, painting in acrylics on sheets of plexiglas. She is presently making small sculptures from castoff electronic parts. Over a 48-year career, Myrrh has participated in hundreds of exhibits, including Wonderfest at Stanford, 2004,'06,'07, a solo show at The Tech in San Jose in 2006, and a group show at AAASPD in Ashland, OR, in 2010. In 2006, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Northern California Women's Caucus for Art.

Luca Antonucci's serigraphs "First Light"

Synopsis:

5 CMYK color separation screen prints corresponding to their relative time and distance in light | Color calibration system | A pubication that documents the research and process of calibratng images of supernovas visible from Earth
Recently, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field imaging system unveiled the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind that reveals the first light from 13.5 billion years ago. The exposure lasted for eleven and a half days and is as far back as any human eye has seen to the origins of the universe. The transmission of this information involved unencrypting and compositing it using a Near Infrared Camera and a Multi object Spectrometer to gauge the distance, and corresponding color information. This instrumental mediation resulted in both a map, and an interpolation of light waves from 13.5 billion years ago into their corresponding spectrum of color with red representing the furthest light, and blue representing the closest light.
In mirroring the working methodology of the Hubble image, the resulting images have been deconstructed using a CMYK screen printing process resulting in five prints, one for each of the color channels, and one for the composited image. This process departs from the original images intent and information by seeking to access what is hidden within the information and not within the resulting image. The images become reciprocal dialogues revealing multiple truths both in their form and in the mechanics of their production. Much like scans of an MRI, the images reveal privileged views of cross sections within each layer, but also guard against us ever seeing the whole picture.
As a guide to the processes being utilized, a color balance calibration target was also produced that corresponds to the density, saturation, and intensity of color from the original Hubble image that has broken the colors down into their most pure form. The target can then be placed in the frame of any image and balanced to the colors of the first light from the universe, thereby ultimately mimicking the first light of the universe into personal images.

Bio:

Luca Antonucci is a practicing artist and co-founder of Colpa Press. He received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and is currently in an Artist in Residence at the Kala Art Institute for Printmaking. He resides in San Francisco and will be part of a group show at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in January.


Photos