About the Exhibition
Opening reception: Thursday, June 26, 5 - 7 pm
Movie screening: Thursday, June 26, 4 pm
The Leonard Pearlstein Gallery and vertexList Space proudly presents BITMAP: as good as new a group exhibition celebrating the history of the digital image, the aesthetics of early computing, and early video-game consoles. BITMAP is highlighted by a landscape of old-school CRT’s, pixels, and 8 bit sound including pioneers of digital art and emerging media artists.
This exhibition, recently presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, combines monitors displaying hacked video games and game simulations which invite users to interact and decipher the modified games. Viewers can also create and print an avatar using C.J. Yea’s online “Flash Applet” and be mesmerized by Mike Berandino’s “Liquid Pixels” as digital images appear and disappear in a mysterious ferric fluid. BITMAP is certain to provide plenty of Generation X nostalgia but rather than simply looking back to 8 bit technology as a curiosity, this exhibit provides a glimpse of firmly established artistic interest in the reuse, hacking, and moding of antiquated technology for aesthetic and artistic exploration.
BITMAP: as good as new was curated by Marcin Ramocki and was originally exhibited at vertexList (www.vertexlist.net) space in Brooklyn, NY in conjunction with Blip Festival 2007 (www.blipfestival.org). It features among many noted artists Daniel Iglesia whose interests to the interaction of sound and video, creating both live performance systems and generative pieces; Marisa Olson who combines performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation to address intersections of pop culture and the cultural history of technology: and Christine Gedeon whose work is an investigation through blueprint drawings and collaged paintings where figures become simple shapes and are reduced to their essence by the absence of all ornamentation, what is left is a summary that provides a type of clarity .
Featured film: 8 BIT is a combination "rockumentary," art exposé, and culture critical investigation, 8 BIT ties together the 1980s demo scene, chip-tune music, and artists using "machinima" and modified computer games. Produced in New York City, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo, the documentary brings a global perspective to the new artistic approaches of the DIY generation that grew up playing Atari, Commodore 64, and other video game consoles. The movie states that in the 21st century Game-Boy rock, machinima and game theory belong together and share a common root: the digital heritage of Generation X.
vertexList is an artist-run space in Brooklyn, founded in 2003, with a mission of supporting emerging media artists. vertexList seeks artwork that is conceptually involved in exposing the codes of post-capitalist culture, both via new and traditional media. vertexList is named after the property of a vector image which holds all numerical information about the image.
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