The Flower Matrix is an imaginary “Alice in Wonderland” world of inversion where the rational order of reason and technology turns in on itself. This magical liminal landscape pushes into the real world as augmented-reality decorative wallpaper.
May 26 – July 23 2017
Fri. Sat. Sun and Holiday Mondays noon – 5 pm
Nolan Park Building 7a
Governors Island New York Ferry Schedule
For her wallpaper, Claudia Hart creates patterns that are also computer codes – augmented “tags” functioning like QR – that permit users, via a custom-designed augmented reality app called “The Looking Glass,” to see fantastical embedded animations. By downloading a free Layar app off the Internet, anyone can look through Alice in Wonderland’s “looking glass” on their smart device to glimpse pulsing invisible flowers harvested from the Flower Matrix. Hart’s wallpapers are covered with animated graphics culled from Internet signage, computer codes, and emoji graphics. Programmed by the artist, her multimedia designs are metaphors that unfold, using computer vision to reveal “magical” layers of new information.
Hart’s Flower Matrix wallpapers recently won the Moving Image Art Fair special acquisition prize and will be touring the US this spring as part of the 21st Century Art Hotel collection.
The audio track for the Flower Matrix is a sophisticated composition by composer Edmund Campion, the director of CNMAT – The Center for New Music And Audio Technology at the University of California-Berkeley with special thanks and support from Jeff Lubow.
BIO
Claudia Hart has been active as an artist, curator and critic since 1988. She works with digital trompe l’oeil as a medium, directing theater and making media objects of all kinds. Hart creates virtual representations that take the form of 3d imagery integrated into photography, multi-channel animation installations, performances and sculptures using advanced production techniques such as Rapid Prototyping, CNC routing and augmented-reality custom apps.
Her works deal with issues of representation, the role of the computer in shifting contemporary values about identity and what might be called the “natural.” Her project is to de-masculinize the culture of corporate technology by inserting the irrational and the personal into the slick, overly-determined Cartesian world of digital design. Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum, Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14. She works with Transfer and bitforms galleries, both in New York. Hart lives in Chicago where she is a tenured professor at the School of Art Institute, in the department of Film Video, New Media and Animation.
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
The Virtual is Liminal: An Interview with Claudia Hart
Swapping Identities. A Conversation with Claudia Hart
This presentation is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts’ 2017 Electronic Media and Film Presentation Funds Grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes.