The Gund Gallery is opening at Kenyon College this fall with an inaugural exhibition called Seeing/Knowing. It’s open from 29 October 2011 to 4 March 2012. The exhibition includes works from myself, Diana Cooper, Andreas Nicolas Fischer & Benjamin Maus, Michael Joaquin Grey, Eduardo Kac, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Benjamin Maus & Julius von Bismarck, Emma McNally, Julie Mehretu, Nathalie Miebach, Matthew Ritchie, Camille Utterback, Jorinde Voigt, and Marius Watz.

Curated by Gund Gallery director Natalie Marsh, the inaugural exhibition Seeing/Knowing explores the experience of information in contemporary art. After 50 years of new media culture—the world of TV, the internet, and virtual reality—and 50 years of new media art—creative computer-based and digital expression—technological ways of thinking have permeated the creative processes of artists working in all media. Gathering together works of art from multiple continents, Seeing/Knowing offers a global view of the expanded ways that art represents thought.

I recently asked the question, “Why do you write your own software rather than only use existing software tools?” on Twitter. These answers came back:

@sansumbrella (David Wicks)
writing is the most direct interface for describing systems and interactions.

@peregrintook
code is a medium; many tools constrain you to narrow subgenres. Knowing the fabric and pigments of the medium permits exploring more.

@voxels (Michael Edgcumbe)
so I can understand why the choices underlying the design seem like the most elegant solution

@barrythrew (Barry Threw)
Because the tools don’t exist to accomplish what I want to do. There is nothing more I would like than not to have to write software.

@robmyers (Rob Myers)
to learn, to gain understanding, to not be limited by affordances, and to be able to share all of this

@simonski (Simon Gauld)
why? because programming is a creative expression itself

@vormplus (Jan Vantomme)
because it’s easier to iterate through ideas and compositions. “Industry standard” tools don’t allow me to do this.

@brainSteen (Christopher Warnow)
When code goes through my hands, it has my gesture in it. Else it would be like painting with another cold dead hand holding a brush.

@eskimobloood (Andreas Köberle)
With other peoples software I can replicate other peoples dreams, with my own software I can dream my own.

@manovich (Lev Manovich)
Because writing software is a form of thinking and making theory; its a big part of cultural analytics strategy

@AlexKarasev (Alex Karasev)
Somebody has to write those tools! Not me; I just write “glue pieces” filling the functionality gaps. Some folks write to stay current

@miskaknapek (Miska Knapek)
1. it’s much more fun 2. existing software doesn’t conform to my way of working/desires 3. i want to be free :)

@admsyn (Adam Carlucci)
I use existing tools to make things that don’t exist yet (or I hope they don’t, anyway)

@madronalabs
Why do you write rather than just reading words other people have written?

@lankybutmacho
That’s the beauty of Processing for me: coding as exploration/research. Also, then the product can be concise & elegant without bloat.

@lennyjpg (Leander Herzog)
adobe is a cheeseburger, processing is like crack. it should have a warning on it. i gave it my hand and it ate my arm.

I spent the summer collaborating with a fantastic team to produce the Data Wall for the newly opened IBM THINK exhibit at Lincoln Center. There’s a short video on YouTube that shows the wall in motion. The wall is explained by IBM as follows:

Visitors approaching the exhibit are drawn in by striking patterns displayed on a 123-foot digital wall. The wall visualizes, in real time, the live data streaming from the systems surrounding the exhibit, from traffic on Broadway, to solar energy, to air quality. Visitors discover how we can now see change, waste and opportunities in the world’s systems.

Writing in The New York Times, Edward Rothstein wrote:

Anyone walking past Lincoln Center during the last few days, and glancing downward at its new access road, Jaffe Drive, would have seen what seemed to be a slightly eccentric art installation. A long band of animated colored lights would snake across a 123-foot-long wall of LEDs as a digital clock counted backward. Then that band might suddenly twist and wind around itself, erupt into curves, contort into waves, and, just as unexpectedly, subside again into temporary linear calm.

Or else, if you watched long enough, the wall might go blank, and when lighted again, would resemble a kind of elongated container. Bluish lights would pour inside it, mounting and sloshing about like some kind of luminous liquid, until the entire wall’s array would be filled to overflowing. And then the “liquid” would seem to spill from the sides, dripping down in cascades as the container emptied.

I was invited by Mathew Cullen and Javier Jimenez of Mirada to put a team together to develop the software for the Data Wall. We were fortunate to hire a group of extremely talented and skilled artist/designer programmers including David Wicks, John Houck, Jonathan Cecil, and Rhazes Spell. David served as the technical lead and was the primary developer of the Air Quality module. Jonathan developed Solar, John developed Finance, and Rhazes developed Traffic. As a team, the five of us worked closely with Mirada creative directors Jesus de Francisco and Kaan Atila and our clients at SYPartners, Nicolas Maitret and Susana Rodriguez. In addition, we worked with excellent concept artists to visualize the project and partnered with New York City organizations and researchers within IBM to collect and process data.

I started work in April 2011 with meetings with IBM and their partners about the data and the narratives around it. The storyboards and scripts were refined during the entire project, but they were defined enough for the developers to start programming in late May.

The wall is massive; it’s 123-feet wide and 11 feet tall. The scale is magnified by its location. It’s at ground level and in a walkway that only allows the visitors to get about 20 feet away from it. The resolution of the wall, however, it very low for the size; it’s 3696 pixels wide and 320 pixels high. The visual quality of the data visualizations were optimized for this platform.

The Data Wall has a strong tie to the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts. I’m a professor in the department and John, David, and Jonathan are graduates of the department’s MFA program. Rhazes is in his second year of the MFA program.

There’s more to say, but that’s all the time I have for now. If you’re in New York from 23 September to 23 October 2011, I hope you’ll visit. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

I’m exhibiting the Maharam Digital Projects version of Process 6 (2010) in the Deep Surface exhibition in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibition runs from 24 September 2011 to 2 January 2012.

Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern is the first major exhibition to examine the re-emergence of ornament and pattern over the last 15 years. Deep Surface celebrates its reinvigoration as a communicative, functional, and desirable form of cultural expression, across all of the disciplines of design.

The exhibition comprises of six thematic sections and features 72 remarkably inventive works from 42 international designers and artists, including such seminal works as Marcel Wanders’s Knotted Chair, wallpaper by Paul Noble and Vik Muniz for Maharam Digital Projects, and fashions created from reconstructed second-hand clothes by Junky Styling. Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern is organized by CAM Raleigh.The breadth of the work—drawn from the fields of graphic design, industrial design, fashion, furnishings, architecture, and digital media—speaks to the pervasiveness and relevance of pattern and ornament today. Its hybrid languages are the aesthetic equivalent of the fast-paced and complex exchanges of our contemporary world.

The Ornamental Structures exhibition runs from 20 August to 30 October at the Stadtgalerie Saarbrucken. It features work from myself, Gabriele Basch, Silke Brosskamp, Wim Delvoye, Margret Eicher, Parastou Forouhar, Bernard Frize, Horst Haack, Zhenchen Liu, Bjørn Melhus, Mariella Mosler, Alke Reeh, Diet Sayler, Marten Georg Schmid, Stoll & Wachall, Philip Taaffe, Karsten Trappe, Jorinde Voigt, Marius Watz, and Mark Wilson. I’m exhibiting Process 4 (Installation 3).

The amazing Eyeo Festival took place last week, 27-29 June 2011, in Minneapolis.

Eyeo brings together the most creative coders, designers and artists working today, and shaping tomorrow – expect an amazing three days of talks, labs, demos & events fueled by the people and tools that are transforming digital culture.

I was busy with two presentations and a workshop:

The Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University generously funded a Processing development workshop from 17 – 20 June 2011. Ben Fry, Dan Shiffman, Andres Colubri, Jer Thorp, Patrick Hebron, and myself worked together to clearly define the 2.0 release.

I have two projects in the File Type exhibition curated by Chaz Evans and Lorelei Stewart. The show runs from 17 June to 30 July at Gallery 400 in Chicago. I’m showing the following:

Pre-process Hex, 2005
Unique hand-bound book, 60 pages
Inkjet on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag
6 x 8.5 x 1 in

Pre-process Execution, 2005
Inkjet print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag
12 x 36 in
Collaboration with Ben Fry

The organizers write:

The specificity of work in electronic media warrants investigations that refine categories past “the digital” or “the internet.” File Type is an exhibition which analyzes the cultural character of digital file formats such as the .pdf, .tiff, .jpeg etc. These and many other file types contain narratives that give specific bodies to the often invisible entities that construct electronic culture. Formats and file types represent ways that artwork in digital or internet media create particular standards of representation. What is often regarded as the minutiae of computer science have now become the parameters given to cultural agents. Or to put it in different terms, computer science is now a direct player in the construction of cultural identity, intentionally or not.

File Type explores the kinetic relationships that construct a network of electronic exchange. How have file types worked their way into, or in many cases have become, our cultural metaphors? What are the politics of implied aesthetics hidden within file formats that are regarded as transparent? What are the effects of expediency in using different formats in communication and exchange? Or perhaps most importantly what is the relationship between electronic formats and artistic practices, electronic or otherwise? Are these adjuncts and extensions of artistic practice necessarily a breakage from non-electronic media, or are they possibly fluid and interchangeable?

The artists in the exhibition include Mike Andrews, Jon Cates, Channel TWo (Adam Trowbridge + Jessica Westbrook), Anthony Discenza, Constant Dullaart, Eric Fleischauer, Patrick Lichty, Ei Jane Janet Lin & Miao Jiaxin, Kristin Lucas, Todd Mattei, Jesse McLean, Chris Meerdo, Casey Reas, Steve Ruiz, and Siebren Versteeg.

Benjamin Bratton organized an amazing symposium from 2-3 June 2011 to kick off his Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. I gave a presentation titled “The Agency of Code” and participated on a panel with Ricardo Dominguez and Elizabeth Losh:

The Agency of Code: Form, Tool, Policy
Casey Reas, Ricardo Dominguez, Elizabeth Losh

The motto of the open government movement‘s digital vision is “government as a platform,” that is, government not only as an information producing and gathering entity but as a ubiquitous and democratically re-programmable machine for making the world-as-information as generally useful as possible. In this, self-governance becomes (depending on which project is invested) the cybernetician‘s dream of infinite leisure, infinitely rationalized labor and/or one of infinitely autopoetic social systems. But “State as a codebase” has an equally ominous promise for when it works as for when it fails: as both a society of control and as a fragile infrastructure. Further, the globalization of information computing technology produces new modes of citizenship and sovereignty in its image, decoupling Modern logics of state and geography. Here it is “platform as governance,” and the agency of code refers not only to how a social domain formulated through software introduces specific biopolitics, but also to how the literacy of programmability becomes technique to modulate that domain.

The list of participants included Benjamin H. Bratton, Adam Bly, Jordan Crandall, Teddy Cruz, Rene Daalder, Manuel de Landa, Hernan Diaz-Alonso, Ricardo Dominguez, James Fowler, Kelly Gates, Elizabeth Losh, Ed Keller, Charlie Kennel, Norman Klein, Peter Krapp, Geoff Manaugh, Lev Manovich, Metahaven, Naomi Oreskes, Casey Reas, Larry Smarr, Vernor Vinge, Tricia Wang, McKenzie Wark, and Molly Wright Steenson.

I spent the majority if April Fools’ Day reading about Dada for an essay that I’m writing. For a quick laugh, I imagined a twenty-first century equivalent called DATA, a movement of artists who embrace the Dada ethos, but who work with software and data. During the following day, the more I thought about it, the more I thought there might be something to it. The idea of DATA (based on Dada ideas) might be a way to group together related work from the last decade into a coherent narrative. I’ve only done about fifteen minutes of work on the topic; it’s half-formed and raw. We’ll see what time and other opinions bring. I’m not going to do more with it for now, so feel free to tear it apart or to build on it. Even if the name DATA is entirely wrong, I think there’s something beyond the name that might make sense.

I’ve started a list of works to think through the idea:

[V]ote-auction, Ubermorgan. 2000-2006. (Or something more recent)

http://www.vote-auction.net/

Invisible Threads. Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg. 2008.

http://www.doublehappinessjeans.com/

My%Desktop. Jodi. 2002 (Or something more recent)

http://mydesktop.jodi.org/

net.art generator. Cornelia Sollfrank. 2003?

http://www.obn.org/generator/

The New York Time Special Edition. Steve Lambert and Andy Bichlbaum (The Yes Men). 2008

http://visitsteve.com/made/the-ny-times-special-edition/

No Fun. Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG. 2010

Carnivore. RSG. 2001-present

http://r-s-g.org/carnivore/

Electroboutique. Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev. 2005+

http://www.electroboutique.com/

Satromizer OS. Ben Syverson and Jon Satrom. 2010

http://satromizer.com/sOS/

Cory Arcangel. Data Diaries. 2003 (Or something more recent)

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/

Something from G.R.L. and/or F.A.T.