Dike Blair, Jennifer Bolande, Bill Komoski, David Robbins, Oliver Wasow
curated by Jeff Rian
The world beyond our immediate environ is experienced through the sea of images, sounds and (captioned) events generated by the various communications media. We receive this information through our senses, by way of external systems which have been created to serve us but which we actually conform to in the way we perceive the environement. This mediated environement serves as an extrasensory filter which blends with our personal senses as if to extend our consciousness into the periphery.
The most distinguishing feature of the art created in this sensorium - as opposed to the art generated in a wolrd preoccupied with a more handmade form of self-expression - it the way artists can express the environement itself. In that sense, this extrasensory environement can be "played back" by artists who act as conscious receivers and interpretative transmitters.
The power of this enveloping barrage of signals is such that we accept the information, the noise, whether sonic or imagistic, as if it was somehow "naturalized" to the environement. The artist can, if so disposed, regather and co-opt this mediating force in the same form that it is found and re-present it as if to reorder and symbolically govern the flux.
The audience is both subject and object of these forces, and are, in effect, reflectors of it so that the shared memories and experiences of artist and audience are integral to the content and the meaning of the work. The "art" is essentially formed by memories and familiar associations which are immanent to the media experience and which extend beyond all boundaries. (There are no boundaries in the mediascape!) Through the media the complex of deployed signals (of every sensory variety) are turned into tokens which pervade a world that now exists outside the hegemony of history and cultural boundaries, and which can be "played back" against each other like in a game of cards.
Jeff Rian
Sonnenfelsgasse 8
1010 Wien
