Open your mouths and say ahhh for that appetizing pill that is seriously experimental art. Thanks to the folks at Washington Project for the ArtsCorcoran, you can get your fill tonight from 7 to 9 p.m. in Corcoran's Hammer Auditorium when they conclude their Experimental Media Series with Night #3.
It’s difficult to exaggerate just how far from the canvas we have come, and somewhat serendipitous that WPAC has chosen to present experimental media as part of the continuing ColorField.remix celebration, because back in the mid-1960s and 1970s, when the Washington Color School thrived in D.C.’s art scene, there was a rising anti-technology sentiment among counter-culturalists and artists. Today, digital art reigns supreme – it’s almost rare to see contemporary art that hasn’t been manipulated in Photoshop 10.0. That being said, work in the Experimental Media Series is inspired by Color Field artists or serves as a twenty-first century reinterpretation of the movement.
Shown: Wobbe F. Koning, Multi Dimensional Eye Virus 2.2, 2006
META, whose piece stole Night #2 a few weeks ago, is an experimental artist who dabbles in "generative computational processes" and can blow your mind. He pairs mathematical abstraction (imagine the visual representation of algorithms) with arousing, warm digital rhythm. Kolveiler is a multicolored deluge of HTML color values, a kaleidoscopic motion picture of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, scored by a Casio chord gently humming in the background. At times, META’s work seems to come straight from the looms of traditional African raphia textiles and sometimes is suggestive of digitally rendered sand dunes; Kolveiler is perfect anthropological robot art.
If you are prepared for a flurry of pixels, doppler swirls, and muffled, synthesized sounds, don’t miss this last night of the Experimental Media Series. Night #3 will feature the work of Alan Callander, the favored winner of the project’s $500 Honorable Mention prize, along with 15 other favorite artists from the first two nights. Although some of the pieces chosen for Night #2 were little more than mildly amusing screensavers, if any of the selections for Night #3 are even close to META’s Kolveiler, it's worth attending. It's free and open to the public.
WPAC's Experimental Media Series - ColorField.remix, Night #3, will be held at The Frances and Armand Hammer Auditorium, Corcoran Gallery of Art (New York Avenue entrance), 500 Seventeenth Street NW.