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| X/Y Machina at the Artlink Gallery |
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The
significance of the year 2000 exhibition is that computer art has
finally come of age. This year’s exhibition represents the
entire spectrum of art created with the computer. Also, the catalog,
a special issue of Leonardo, continues to provide an archive of
digital art and a forum for essays on digital art and culture.
The imagery for this year's gallery exhibition ranges from the literal
to abstract. When reviewing the work for inclusion in the show,
juror Victor Acevedo approached the work from a fine art perspective.
He chose images that represented new and unique creative viewpoints
BrucBruce Wands, Chair
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| 75X45 inches |
Eighth Annual New York Digital Salon
X/Y Machina
November 6-December 9, 2000 New York
In 1881 the poet Walt Whitman sings of "the body electric:"
"The expression of the body of man
or woman balks account, The male is perfect and that of the female is
perfect."
"X/Y Machina" is a metaphor, a "re-production," a
composite, conceived as a partial means to explore the perfect female/male
body. A "mechanomorph," a fusion of organism, machine, and gender,
"X/Y Machina" is an attempt to make incarnate the invisible.
As in the poem of Whitman, "X/Y Machina" explores the nature
of chromosomal identities, life/death, ambiguous bodies in contrast and
detail. It is a sensual meditation of the body“s posture, expression,
visceral functioning, homologies and sex.
"The brain in its folds inside the
skull-frame, Sympathies, heart -valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman -- and the man that comes from woman..."
In "X/Y Machina" the body is recomposed as a series of intricate
fragmented imagery, circuitry, joints, vectors and suggestive human/mechanical
bodily analogies: a pipe for intestines, wires for nerves. Like the machine,
the transparent body is broken down into constituent elements, skeletons,
organs and morphed shapes. "X/Y Machina" is a "bricolage"
where boundaries and distinctions are blurred, parts interchanged and
hybrids produced in an amalgam of springs, connected cylinders and cables.
In a re-creation of transfigured Cartesian bodies, ephemeral digital materials
are transformed into a stable configuration that defy the laws of organic
structure and anatomy.
"X/Y Machina" is a perceptual experience, a trans-sexual manifestation.
It represents impulse, and the complementary human desire to manipulate
its own genetic heritage, a fantasy to reveal corporeal hidden mysteries
and, at the end, the dream of creating the perfect body.
"X/Y Machina" is part of the series "Metamorphoses,"
a work-in-progress: an internal deconstruction of ideals and a re-definition
of the Eve/female and Adam/male. "Metamorphoses" began with
the work, " RE-Constructing EVE," exhibited
last year at SIGGRAPH99.
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