Arts & Culture

Closing 3/12: Since the Epoch @ Boston Cyberarts Gallery

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Since the Epoch, an exhibition of artworks by current students in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design is ending today, Sunday March 12, 2017. It will be on view at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery today from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm.

The artworks featured in Since the Epoch are impressively diverse and imaginative. The exhibit includes multiple video pieces, multimedia sculptural pieces, a performance piece, a physical manifestation of a mesmerizing and multifaceted internet ‘gif,’ and a seemingly ordinary book that’s been tinkered with algorithmically.

 

Ben Aron’s The School and Society, 2015 is an algorithmically-generated edited version of The School and Society, an influential book authored by the American philosopher John Dewy in the 20th Century. The text in Aron’s version of The School and Society is riddled with the ubiquitous buzzwords we often find in today’s marketing campaigns. Aron’s algorithm randomly replaces words and phrases in the text with popular marketing phrases, such as “World-class,” “Unparalleled,” and “Innovation,” etc., until the book becomes entirely unintelligible under the many layers of commercialized language.

 

Kristen Shea’s Poetic Visualizations, 2016 stands out in the exhibit as an especially intriguing and thought provoking piece. Poetic Visualizations consists of three short poems, three short 3D videos, and three physical sculptures. These three forms of representations that Shea uses to depict her poetic scenes each occupy separate yet deeply interconnected cognitive spaces.


Shea presents her three short poems about a silk scarf, a concrete life jacket, and a clay fish in three different forms of visualization:

  1. in 3D virtual space, where the objects in each scene are shown engaging in slow, fluid motions in videos projected onto white backdrops,
  2. as physical sculptures that that occupy space in the ‘real world,’
  3. and in the ‘space’ of language, which she strategically makes visual in the form of sentence diagrams that hold the poems in the shapes and lines that follow the logic of the poem’s meanings.

 

Left poem:

Middle poem:

Right poem:

 

Another beautiful piece is Joe Winograd’s Xibaba, 2017 which is a skillfully-crafted physical manifestation of an internet ‘gif.’ Viewing this multicolored, multidimensional piece in person is worth the trip to Jamaica Plain, no matter wherever you are coming from.

 

Since the Epoch ends today Sunday March 12, 2017, and is on view from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery.

The Boston Cyberarts Gallery is located in the Green St. T stop:
141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
Regular Gallery Hours are:
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm.

The next show at the Cyberarts Gallery will be Fresh Media 2017,
An Opening Reception will be held on Friday March 24, 2017, from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm.

 

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