At the Harvestworks residency on Governors Island, Alexandra Goldberg and Joseph Morris will collaborate to create new work that uses art and technology to make human phenomena visible. By creating novel interactions with the body and technology, they’re working to explore themes of introspection, subjectivity, and connection between people and spaces. Both are artists with multidisciplinary creative practices that overlap in creating work that engages with immateriality, presence, and material experience. Goldberg’s recent Tactile Performances combine movement, textile construction, and writing to make internal human phenomena of mourning, trauma, and transformation visible. Through an algorithmic light installation, Morris’s new work Space within Spaces exposes and makes visible to viewers infinitesimally small distances between subatomic particles. With their time on the island, the artist duo will combine their practices to create work that probes our relationship with technology and emotion.
Joseph Morris is a transdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. He is an expert craftsman and coder who believes in the possibilities enabled through the integration of technology in the arts.
His emotive machines have been on exhibition in New York, Chicago, Brazil, New Haven, New Mexico and Arizona by galleries and organizations such as Chazan Family Gallery, Creative Arts Workshop, Gibney Dance Center, 4heads, ACRE Projects, Oi Futuro and more.
Joseph Morris has been working with electronics in his art since 2006. He began by taking things apart and putting them back together to make sculptural collages with gears, motors, and moving parts. He started experimenting with software and coding in 2007, and has been integrating technology into his craft ever since. Joseph is a self-taught programmer, technologist, and prototyper through the online, open source community.
He is a recipient of the 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Electronic and Digital Media, as well as a 2017 New York State Council on the Arts Electronic Media grantee. In 2015, Joseph was a Harvestworks New Works Resident and recipient of Pratt Institute’s Faculty Development Grant. He holds an MFA in Art and Technology Studies from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Sculpture from SUNY Purchase College. He is currently a visiting professor and rapid prototyping technician at Pratt Institute, Industrial Design, and teaches classes in physical computing, prototyping, and digital fabrication processes (laser cutting, 3D printing and CNC milling).
About Alexandra Golberg: My practice is a multidisciplinary research practice studying how experiences in the material world can be a portal to our understanding of the immaterial world. While working, I balance intuition with analytical thinking to uncover and learn from visual, tactile, experiential, and theoretical metaphors. My philosophy in this work is to learn to balance dualities such as intuition and analysis, work and play, and structure and flow, so that two elements that may be thought to exist in tension can begin to be perceived, and utilized, as a harmonious relationship.
My research has led me to believe that my priority lies in developing creative practice methods that facilitate a deeper knowing of oneself and their environment. It is in many ways a process of de-conditioning an individual from the constructs that have been picked up over time that do not serve that person, while also reconnecting with the learning and structures that do. My creative practice serves to do this for my own individual needs and creative being and my hope is that the output touches universal truths that may be of interest to, or inspiration, for others. I share my work so that people can gain a tangible understanding of this process. I collaborate with individuals and communities to assist in helping others find their flow within these structures. The goal of this work is to change ones’ perception on their creative practice so that they can access their authentic creative self. If we can achieve this, we are closer to our full potential of healthy body and mind. What we may not be able to understand through thinking we can discover as we strengthen our connections between our mind, body, and eyes.
Alexandra Goldberg
www.alexrachelgoldberg.com
Joseph Morris
www.emotivemachine.net