December 4, 2016 – January 7, 2017 (dates subject to change)
Reception: Sunday, December 4, 3 – 6pm
Curated by Natalie Jacobson
How can we use technology to better connect to others and create new experiences for ourselves? This group exhibition explores this question through works that exploit machine and technology and use interactivity as a form of performance, while looking at the role that potentiality and destruction play within those experiences. Artists whose work often uses technology as a medium are invited to create machines that will generate a gesture, a kind of “drawing” in the form of a mark, sound, light, object, or movement. The public is invited to interact with these machines, either directly or indirectly, within the confines of the Riverside Art Center’s Freeark Gallery or through links on our website, thereby creating the “drawings” over time—and possibly destroying them in the process. The online component of this exhibition will be available throughout the exhibition’s run.
Taylor Hokanson, “ThreeYearContract.” An interactive artwork featuring defamiliarized cellphones.
“Good Machines” draws inspiration from Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization started in the 1960s by Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer that brought artists, engineers, and cutting-edge technology together with the goal of reshaping human relationships to machines, information, and community. Artists who worked with E.A.T. include Fujiko Nakaya, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Forrest Myers, Öyvind Fahlström, Lucinda Childs, Alex Hay, Frank Stella, Michel Auder, John Chamberlan, Nancy Graves, Ralph Hocking, Joan Jonas, Les Levine, Michael Netter, Brigid Polk, Larry Rivers, Lucas Samaras, Richard Serra, Tony Shafrazi, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier and many, many others. Their goals were generous in that they wanted to reach people traditionally outside of the art world, as well as take art outside of the gallery context and insert it into the everyday in ways that opened up new conversations.
Artists in the exhibition are Taylor Hokanson, Eric Lunde, Niki Passath, Jesse Seay, and Philip von Zweck in collaboration with engineer Mark Parslow. The exhibition runs from December 4 – January 7.