As we mentioned in the October Fellows Notes, Boston Cyberarts Festival founder/director George Fifield has curated Act/React, an exhibition of interactive installation art at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
So if you’re planning on being in Milwaukee sometime before January 11, go and see and re-, inter-, or otherwise act with it. The show is worth another mention here not just because it was curated by the brain behind a groundbreaking arts and new technologies festival, and not just because it looks, in the modern parlance, massively righteous (or was that modern 20 years ago, back when I was?), but also because it features an artist from these parts: Brian Knep (who’s appeared on this blog here and here). Brian is premiering his piece Healing Pool, a project of Creative Capital.
George and Brian are both contributors to an exhibition-specific blog called, forthrightly, the Act/React blog. Commenting on why he’s excited about the show, George writes:
Being director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival exposes me to other intersections between art and technology including electronic music, digital literature and dance and technology. But the growing use of interactivity in the arts has always been a main interest of mine…
… in many ways, this is my dream exhibition. I’ve followed the field of interactive installations for many years and have known and supported the work of most these artists before. Many of them are friends of mine. It was fascinating to watch the seismic shift that occurred when artists moved away from techie interfaces to allowing the audience to intuitively interact with the work with their own bodies.
His description “allowing the audience to intuitively interact with the work” is such a good description of Brian Knep’s installations. In his own post, Brian writes of some of the practical challenges of realizing such an intuitively interactive piece.
Anyway, good on ya, gents. And how massively righteous is it to know that when an art museum elsewhere in the country puts on a cutting-edge, interactive exhibition, innovative folks from our fair land are called on to participate?
Image: Brian Knep, HEALING #1 (2003), Computer, custom software, video projectors, video cameras, vinyl flooring. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
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