Emerging New Media Artist at Interaccess

In its 9th year Interaccess’ Emerging Artist Exhibition, turns its lenses onto the ever-increasing distractions made by new technologies. The exhibition is a chance for post-secondary or recent graduates to gain experience and exposure at the professional level while continuing to push the boundaries of new media art. This year the artist include, Roja Aslani, Erin Gee, David Han, Beatriz Herrera, Steve Shaddick, and Blake Williams who works create a distracting, but also compelling, environment full of question to which there may be no real answer.

The exhibition explore the daily split multi-tasking of people when it comes to interacting with new virtual technologies, form excessive email checking to social networking site to updating wikipedia. This type of work exemplifies all the ways people are distracted from focusing their attention and energy in a contemporary technological society. People are closely interacting with a growing number of technologies in their every day life, allowing them to collect mass amount of information, more then any previous generation. Now the question becomes how much of this outpouring of information truly is productive, and how much is useless trivia. The lines between reality and fiction begin to blur and the interactive work of the six artists encourages the viewers to reflect on their own technological interactions, and examine how their behaviors and knowledge has been shaped by it.

The works consist of digital projection, interactive new media sculptures, and enclosed video and sound installations. David Hans’ Looking Glass places the viewer in a state of irrationality. By stepping into the space the viewer becomes an active part in the work, triggering the sound and visual effects. As you stare into the looking glass, the piece distorts and changes your images creating a new shadow character, while the sounds of poetry begin to overlap and create a nonsensical collage of words. The viewer becomes overwhelmed by the distortions in sound and video, exemplifying the fragmentation in new media. All the works challenge the observer to question the information they are gathering through new media and to recognize the technological schizophrenia which is plaguing an emerging digital society.

Show Runs until August 15th, 2009 Gallery Hours:

Wednesday 12 — 5pm
Thursday 12 — 5pm
Friday 12 — 5pm
Saturday 12 — 5pm (during exhibitions only)

For more information about Interaccess visit their website:

http://www.interaccess.org/