Oppositestates.com is the online collaborative environment for artists participating in the Binary exhibition. Here visitors can view real-time creation of the artworks. For more information about the Binary exhibition click here.

Hello, this is your exhibition curator coming to you from concept land.

Last year a friend of mine who also studies classical art and is a CGI artist and instructor was talking about render machines.  And it got my mind a-wanderin’.

How do we turn people into a render “machine” and what will happen if we do?

So I proudly bring to you the Wetware Render Machine in which our model, Laura Skokan, will pose over a period of three hours and we drawers – the wetware machine – will make marks, remove marks, and create several drawings of her over the three hour period. The drawings will be a compilation of every individual’s marks, just like a CGI is the compilation of many computers making their marks (albeit via programming, but you get the idea).

At least we hope. At any rate it’s going to be fun, like an exquisite corpse parlor game meets Frankenstein’s monster but for the digital age. With pencils. Oh and ink for Darrell of course.

Now you may find yourself asking what the devil does Alice in Wonderland have to do with a render machine made of people?

I guess you’ll have to come to 2215 W. North Avenue, Chicago, between 7 – 10 p.m. this Friday, October 9, to find out. In the meantime, consider our model Laura to be the white rose…

All the details fit to print...mostly

"Lost"

Observing the themes of collaboration & response which are central to Binary, my film will take the form of an exploration of three collections held by Lauren herself. Through close examination of her accumulations of insects, orchid plants and dress shoes, I’m interested in not only drawing relationships between these three particular groups of seemingly disparate objects, but also, in a broader sense, to acknowledge the impulse to collect and organize.

The nearly universal phenomenon of attraction to certain objects and the subsequent accumulation and organization of these things seems to relate to an extremely basic, almost primitive impulse. Reaction to one’s surroundings through keeping, arranging, touching, looking and repurposing has been a part of the human M.O. since day one. What does this say about us? What questions about our ability to understand our situation does this raise?

Does the collection of things which were once alive bring us any closer to understanding what it means to be dead? Or is it simply a natural reaction to look endlessly at something which can fundamentally never be understood by a living mind?

How, too, does this relate to the simultaneous habit of cultivating living material (plants, pets, etc)? And where do these things meet? How do we use the dead, and how is life created from them? How do the dead attract us? How do the living? How do we use our bodies to attract bodies? How does sex involve itself with use of the dead?

Where do the impulses to hunt, seduce, adorn, feed, procreate and protect meet? And when they do meet, how do we make sense of the intersection? How is it organized? How is it digested? And at what point must we stop looking?

–adjective
1. of or resulting from new combinations of genetic material: recombinant cells.

–noun
2. a cell or organism whose genetic complement results from recombination.
3. the genetic material produced when segments of DNA from different sources are joined to produce recombinant DNA.

–installation
4. an interactive video by Francesco Levato in which poetic texts and animated imagery are dynamically generated via SMS text messaging by gallery viewers.

Origin:
1940–45; re- + combine + -ant

So many decisions! What are their stories? What are their environments?

Our gleaning is progressing as we decide what they are comprised of!