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Flow Interrupted

Hyde Park Art Center Chicago - February 1 – March 1, 2010

Exhibition Reception: February 14, 3-5 p.m.

Flow Interrupted explores abstraction in the context of new media art. The artists in this exhibition deploy code, animation and video editing techniques to create works that celebrate the elegance of mathematical form and unpredictability of seemingly organic systems. The legacies of previous mediums are the foundation of New Media Art and are ever present in these works. Claudia Hart’s Dream and Aaron Higgins’s comp3(terra) evoke the language of painting; in Harts case perhaps a dream of painting. Drawing, particularly the tradition of doodling, comes alive in Brett Ian Balagh’s Chora. Artifacts of minimalism and process art are undeniably embedded in the surprising works of Flow Interrupted. The element of control, both as a process and format is an intrinsic component of the exhibition. Many of the artists have produced generative compositions - where artists develop code, which sets up a system that follows its own course. The artist in essence gives up control of the final piece. The systems created are simpler than systems found in nature yet reflect the chaos of day-to-day life.

Participating artists: Brett Ian Balogh, Luis Felipe Carli, Grégory Chatonsky, Claudia Hart, Aaron M Higgins, Terry Nauheim, Alessandro Perini, and chdh collective (Nicolas Montgermont, Cyrille Henry, & Damien Henry)

Black Box Gallery & other spaces
Gallery Hours:
Monday – Thursday: 10am – 8pm
Friday – Saturday: 10am – 5pm
Sunday: 12pm – 5pm

Dream, Claudia Hart, (Chicago), 7 min 3D animation.

Dream is a fluid environment evoking x-rays and the style of medical imaging as well as biological elements. Semi abstract, the animation suggests cells, blood vessels and a range of the visceral emissions that come from bodies. Dream is also a way of imagining a digital body, on the edge of the abstract or the graphic, yet with the slow time and space of a painting or a dream or a dream of painting.

Chora, Brett Ian Balogh (Chicago), 3:00 min 2009 .

Chora is a generative meditation on the impermanence of form for HD video and 4-16 channels of audio, whose inspiration comes from the tectonic activity of the Pacific Ring of Fire. The work puts the viewer at the center of a minimal audio-visual composition that is constantly in motion. Rather than sound and image simply being accompaniments to each other, they are instead projections of a veiled system of forces created by a computer simulation. Through sound and image, the work aims to create for the viewer a liminal space between the virtual and the actual through which the viewer can envision new forms.

Propagation Seems Good Here Tonight,Terry Nauheim, (USA/NY), 9:14 min, 2009.

Animated drawings correspond with shortwave radio transmission recordings. Imagery alters between illumination and dimness as if to sift through an atmosphere of random noise in the universe. The visuals for the animation were generated through a combination of vector and hand draw­ing. They are inspired by graphics from selected QSL cards from the Library of American Broad­casting at University of Maryland. The drawings are animated by custom algorithms; values such as opacity, scale, and position are controlled by the amplitude, frequency, and duration of various audio streams. The shortwave radio signals were recorded using a ZENITH T600 trans oceanic shortwave radio in Chelsea, New York between March 20 and 21, 2009.

‘Organized Complexity’, Luis Felipe Carli, (Brazil), 48 sec., generative video.

Based on circles where each form senses other circles within its environment. Interplay between circles defines graphic behaviors of each form. Compositions emerge both organized and spontaneous.

Adaptation, chdh collective (Nicolas Montgermont, Cyrille Henry, & Damien Henry), (France), 7:14 min, generative, 2008

Work is based on generating expressive movements, with black and white abstract structures. The collective chdh's work is based on a symbiosis between sound and image, and between minimalism and industrial creating a single, cold but organic universe.

Viaggio in una città invisibile (Travel through an invisisble city), Alessandro Perini (Italy), 13 min

Letters and numbers are deployed to create abstract landscapes and city scapes, beautifully done, modest audio that works beautifully. The video was inspired by Tamara one of the “Invisible Cities” by Italian writer Italo Calvino. Tamara is a city built with signs. Tamara deals with a semiotic speculation that pervades "Travel through an invisible city, the video explores the fiction of language.

Dislocation II, Grégory Chatonsky (Paris, FR), 2006, 16 min

Dislocation II is a series of photographs, videos and sculptures representing house and office's furniture in various state of disintegration. This work is inspired by the increasing aestheticization of destruction in the mass. When a destroyed object isn't recognizable any more? This series questions the abstraction and the representation by slowing down to the extreme the dislocation of the objects.

comp3(terra), Aaron M Higgins, (USA, Indiana),2009,2:54 min

This body of work seeks to merge sensibilities of painting with those of video. Exploring ideas of abstract expressionism, Higgins employs techniques that further manipulate the footage to resemble something altogether different than that of
the original. Thinking purely of space, color, and movement of form, he composes videos as if they were, in a sense, a time-based painting.