Blue Swimmer is the latest piece from Louisa Armbrust that uses games and sports to examine ideas about play and creativity. Armbrust uses games and sports as a helpful matrix for thinking about the creativity involved in trying to follow a rule. The installation is located in THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL Building 10b, part of Wave(form)s – an Exhibition of Electronic Art on Governors Island.
Louisa Armbrust: Blue Swimmer
Wave(form)s – an Exhibition of Electronic Art on Governors Island
May 27 through September 25, 2011
Fridays, 11am to 4:30pm
Saturdays and Sundays, 11am to 5pm
FREE
The artist gives talks about her work on Sat, Aug 13, 2011, at 1:30pm and 3:30pm.
Location:
THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL Building 10b
Governor’s Island
Free ferry service from Manhattan and Brooklyn:
http://www.govisland.com/html/visit/directions.shtml
Blue Swimmer by Louisa Armbrust is an interactive video installation that uses video and sound to bring to life stop-motion photographs from a 1950’s competitive swimming manual. Using Max/MSP and Jitter, the installation reanimates these beautiful but outdated images, creating an immersive environment where the viewer influences but does not control events.
Blue Swimmer is the latest piece from Louisa Armbrust that uses games and sports to examine ideas about play and creativity. Armbrust uses games and sports as a helpful matrix for thinking about the creativity involved in trying to follow a rule. As Ludwig Wittgenstein argues in his Philosophical Investigations, it is not possible to have a rule for following every rule. So instead we play, exerting all our creativity, to find an action that meets with our interpretation of the rule.
The original images upon which Blue Swimmer is based were created with the photographic technologies of their time to attempt to convey, as omprehensively as possible, the rules for performing a butterfly stroke or a competition dive. These images exquisitely demonstrate the distance between lived experience and the carefully orchestrated representation of experience, aligning them poetically with the task of exploring the gap between the rule and its resulting action.
Supported by the Jerome Foundation through the Harvestworks Artist In Residence Program.
Programmed by Gene Kogan, with help from Kyle Kaplan.