In Pictures: Tending Networks Symposium

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Garden city goes digital with conference

Christchurch will play host to a spectrum of digital artists, musicians, programmers, and designers this weekend for Tending Networks, the yearly symposium for the Aotearoa Digital Arts network. Highlights include a keynote and new work presented by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the Seoul-based masters of flash who first came to light with their cheeky, minimal work "Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site" shown above.

Stella Brennan will be discussing her most recent work, "South Pacific", a poetic micro-narrative overlaid over satellite imagery which I've previously reviewed.


Eddie Clemens, now based in Christchurch on residency, will be talking about his Pinball Lanterns installation in the Auckland Central Library space. Douglas Bagnall will show us how to "take the tedious work of experimentation, abstraction and learning out of the process of making art" via his myriad machine creations, which range from A Film Making Robot to Te-Tuhi Videogame machine and Cloud Classifier. Finally, cyber-performance group Avatar Body Collision will most likely focus on UpStage, working between countries, and the nuances of the virtual theatre.

Full Symposium programme here.

New Hye-Rim work at Art Basel Miami

Hye Rim Lee recently sent word about new work in the Art Basel Miami Beach show - the US counterpart to the parent show in Switzerland. "My 3 new work Crystal City, a digital print series 1, (c-type print, 72 inch x 72 inch), Candyland, a series of digital print (70 cm x 70 cm, c-type print) will be at Art Miami Basel, Kukje Gallery stand." Lee showed earlier in the year here in Auckland at Stark White gallery, before heading off to a residency in New York.

Hye Rim Lee at Starkwhite

Candyland consists of a series of stills from 3d models, highlighting some of the artists themes - a perfect manga face, a nipple, red lips against an untextured polygon skin. Obsession/Love Forever is comprised of four 3D DVD animations featuring dissected body parts of TOKI trapped in a perfume bottle. The latter is a fictional character created by Hye Rim, which represents and explores the idealised female form dominant throughout manga, anime, and video game genres, and extending heavily into the mainstream culture particularly in Asia. Technically and aesthetically Hye Rim as employed conventions of these genres in her work. Animations entice with pastels straight from the pages of beauty magazines. Glass bottles shimmer and emit slow-motion perfume sprays. The artist has setup particle systems - typically used for smoke and fire effects in CG and video game work, Hye Rim repurposes them here to create swirling, glistening pixie dust and more seductive effects. On until the 30th of August at Starkwhite.

Digital flipbook: Project lomo at Cross Street

"Shoot from the hip", state the originators, a couple who discovered a cheap, small Russian camera one day in an Austrian thrift shop. Cross Street featured a show based around the cult phenomenon known as lomography tonight. Sharing a common aesthetic of grainy, highly saturated, blurred shots, and a common philosophy of shooting everywhere and anywhere, lomography has spawned a number of imitators, organisations, and online photo groups.

Joshua Lynn digitized a dozen or so of his rapid-fire sequences of everyday events and screened them on an appropriately old skool computer system in the space. Masking tape on the floor reading "controls" pointed to the page down and up keys, which flicked to the next sequence. Making concrete the implied temporality of the rest of the photography, their motion was sometimes real (a stranger walking on the street) or hinted at (shifting focus and lens flares animating a sunset).