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Cyber
artists on campus
The Photographic Resource Center at BU will sponsor two events during the Boston CyberArts Festival. The first is a solo show entitled Robert Arnold: New Media Works, which runs at the PRC from April 25 to May 4. Until recently, Arnold, a COM associate professor of film, has produced short videos that appeared primarily at film festivals. “A lot of my work now plays with the relationship between still and moving images,” he says. “I think the PRC saw me as a bridge between where they’re coming from with photography and this sort of new terrain of cyberart.”
The exhibition will include three of Arnold’s recent works, including Morphology of Desire (1999), a looped video composed by scanning hundreds of romance novel covers and morphing the images into one another. Each cover has two figures in various heated poses; with digital editing, Arnold meshes them together into a moving image. “There’s this completely contradictory perception that they are still pictures -- in one instant the female figure is a redhead; as her head is slightly turning she’s a brunette; as she continues to turn she’s a blond. Nevertheless, it seems like a couple in continuous motion throughout.”
Also featured is Triptych (2000), a 10-minute video Arnold shot and edited as a visiting professor in Poland. The camera frame remains fixed throughout the video on a busy urban intersection where trams, cars, and pedestrians are passing by; the line of sight is divided into three spaces by two large trees. “With digital editing, I took all of that material and played with the three spaces defined by the two trees,” Arnold says. “A yellow tram passes behind the first tree and emerges as a green tram.” The effect is a playful manipulation of time and expectation. The third piece, Zeno’s Paradox (2003), is a twist on the famous Greek philosopher’s suggestion that motion and change are impossible. Arnold will discuss his work at the PRC on Thursday, May 1, at 2 p.m.
As part of its Word and Image series, jointly sponsored by the New England School of Photography, the PRC will also host a lecture by Dorothy Simpson Krause, a painter, collage artist, and printmaker whose art incorporates digital mixed media, and Mark Orton, a software entrepreneur, on Wednesday, April 30, at 7:30 p.m. in the Photonics Center, Room 206. Krause will discuss her work, and Orton will show virtual artist books he has translated into a multimedia presentation. Orton has been working with Krause on an electronic representation of her artist’s book Vengeance Is Mine.
The Boston University Art Gallery is presenting an online exhibition entitled Transcodex during the Boston CyberArts Festival. It is an innovative look at how the digital revolution of transcoding, the ability of numerically encoded data to change across media, manifests in contemporary art. The exhibition’s Web site, www.transcodex.net, will be accessible after April 26.There will be a free opening reception on Saturday, April 26, from 6 to 8 p.m., at the gallery.
18
April
2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations