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Friday November 2, 2008, 7-9 PM FREE
Harvestworks Artists In Residence Kenseth Armstead and Nurit Bar-Shai discuss their recent projects in the Harvestworks presentation room, 596 Broadway #602, NYC

Armstead will explain the development of his installation Spook Experiments:  A Dialog, as well as describe its various components. About the installation he writes:

"In the summer of 1781, James Armistead Lafayette was the sneakiest man in America.  He earned this dubious distinction providing intelligence to America’s first Director of Central Intelligence, George Washington.  Against impossible odds, James succeeded, liberating our insurgent forefathers from the colonial oppression of the British. Spook is a multimedia installation project, in-progress, based on James’ true story as a slave caught in the middle of the American Revolution as an invisible double-agent."

Nurit Bar-Shai’s project  "Nothing Happens", is a networked online performance in which viewers work together to make a series of objects tip over. The performance consists of three acts, which are centered around staged environments - a high shelf, a cluttered tabletop and an empty floor. Each scene contains a central protagonist, respectively: a cardboard box, a glass full of water and a wooden chair. In all three acts, web-enabled physical devices, controlled by viewer’s clicks, make these objects tip over. When this happens, the performance is over.

The website acts as a go between, allowing physically distant observers a chance to participate. In one direction, the site displays live video stream in real-time of the current act as it unfolds. In the other direction, users are able to click a simple interface in order to manipulate the scene. Web-enabled physical devices translate every click into a minute but noticeable physical change in the scene. In the case of the shelf act, a small-motorized device rotates with each click, pulling the box off of the shelf, until it tips over. In the case of the tabletop, each click causes a miniature device to push the glass over until its content spills. Finally, in the chair scene, a small mechanical device responds to clicks by expanding, tipping the chair further back.

Every users click thus effects the object to move in small steps. Each change is recorded as a snapshot-image, creating not only an archive of the work – so that viewers can browse through the entire history of the performance both during it and after its conclusion – but when each performance is concluded these images are combined to a collective creative result: a stop-motion-animation sequence.

The key aim of interactivity in this performance is to create an immediate understandable form of interaction, so that each click of a user is rightfully perceived as progressing the scene further. My aim is to make the scenes last for at least one thousand clicks, if not more, so that a sense of time is drawn out. The expected duration of each act of the performance is between one and two weeks, although actual timing depends on user participation. http://nuritbarshai.com/nh/nh.php. For the online real-time performance log on to: http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/nothingHappens

 

About the artists:

Kenseth Armstead has lived and worked in New York City since 1990. His video and installation works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bronx Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem and MIT. They are in numerous collections including the Centre Pompidou and African-American Museum in Texas. Grants he has won include NYSCA (Individual Artists Film & Media / New Technical Production), Pollock-Krasner, NYFA and the Hanks-Cosby Fellowship.  He received a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and an MS in Integrated Digital Media from Polytechnic University. He participated in the Skowhegan School and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. In 2006-7 Armstead was Artist in Residence at Harvestworks, the Castle Trebesice in Prague and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program.  Currently he is planning to exhibit the completed Spook installation at the Chateau Blérancourt, Musée National de la Coopération Franco-Américaine (fall 2009).  

Nurit Bar-Shai is a New York-based artist. Her main interest lies in exploring tensions between the mundane and the uncanny in everyday life. Emanating from her profound creative roots in fine arts, Bar-Shai employs video and new technologies to explore fundamental questions of presentation and representation, to reframe the familiar and turn audiences into foreigners in their own ontological domains. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as 3rd ward, the Brooklyn Museum, Team galley in New York, OK-Center in Linz, and international festivals and screenings. Bar-Shai received an Honorary Mention in the 2007 Prix Ars Electronica and was commissioned an art grant with Turbulence.org, funded in part by the Greenwall Foundation. She held residencies at ETC, the Makor Steinhardt Center and at Harvestworks. Bar-Shai currently teaches at the Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP), Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.