Analog Futures brings together work by artists who explore the materiality of our media apparatus — the machines and electronic devices that deliver images and information to us. In Analog Futures, television sets and computer black boxes, cathode ray tubes and VHS videotape, are transformed into sculptural objects, repurposed and reanimated to reveal the internal electronics that power video monitors, the visual glitches that underlie computer circuitry, and the magnetic tape that mysteriously holds video imagery.
The exhibition links work by two generations of artists who investigate the potential of the media-apparatus-as-object. Throughout the 1960s, pioneering video artist Aldo Tambellini created and exhibited “prepared televisions,” in which the electronic circuitry of TV sets was altered to distort the broadcast image and convert it into swirling and vibrant abstract forms, freeing it from already established televisual conventions. As we move more deeply into the twenty-first century, a younger generation of artists is similarly transforming a range of media technologies. Artists Brandon Barr, Jason Bernagozzi and LoVid resurrect half-forgotten and obsolete media creating a host of new meanings and contexts for these objects: the after-burn of a plasma television screen becomes a ghostly meditation on “dead media”; a pile of e-waste springs to life with glitchy abstractions; a newly constructed wobbulator winks at media history while gesturing towards an analog future.
— Laura McGough
Analog Futures features work by pioneering media artist Aldo Tambellini, Brandon Barr, Jason Bernagozzi and LoVid and a new installation constructed by Wells College students with curator Laura McGough.
Laura McGough is a media art historian, curator, and educator currently based in Buffalo, NY. She has organized exhibitions, screenings, performances and streaming content for arts organizations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia. In 1997, she co-founded the new media collective NOMADS and through this initiative organized a number of early Web-based art projects/exhibitions including Audiophfile, a six-part sound art series, and published MASSAGE, an early multi-media Web-based journal. She received an MA in interdisciplinary studies from New York University and is completing a PhD in the Department of Media Study at the University of Buffalo. Her current research focuses on the live transmissions and the turn to liveness in contemporary visual and media arts.
Brandon Barr is a mixed media artist and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA. He received an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University in Alfred, NY and BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute. He has exhibited his work internationally including China, Brazil and Portugal. Recently, his work was featured in exhibits at the Torrance Art Museum and the San Diego Art Institute.
Jason Bernagozzi is a video, sound and new media artist living and working in upstate New York and is the co-founder of the experimental media arts non-profit Signal Culture. His work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues such as the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabruk, Germany, the LOOP Video Art Festival in Barcelona, Spain, the Beyond/In Western NY Biennial in Buffalo, NY, and the Yan Gerber International Arts Festival in Hebei Province, China. His work has received several awards including grants from the New York State Council for the Arts, Wavefarm and the ARTS Council for the Southern Finger Lakes.
LoVid is the NY based artist duo: Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. LoVid’s work includes immersive installations, sculptural synthesizers, single channel videos, textile, participatory projects, mobile media cinema, works on paper, and A/V performance. Collaborating since 2001, LoVid’s projects have been presented at SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NY), Daejeon Museum (Korea), Everson Museum (NY), Smack Mellon (NY), Mixed Greens Gallery (NY), CAM Raleigh (NC), Netherland Media Art Institute (Netherlands), The Science Gallery (Ireland), Real Art Ways (CT), Bloomfield Science Museum Jerusalem (Israel), Urbis, (UK), The Jewish Museum (NY), The Neuberger Museum (NY), The New Museum (NY), and ICA (London), among many others. LoVid has performed and presented works at: Museum of Moving Image (NY), Lampo (Chicago), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands), MoMA (NY), PS1 (NY), The Kitchen (NY), CCA (Israel), and FACT (Liverpool). LoVid’s projects have received support from organizations including: The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Signal Culture, Cue Art Foundation, Eyebeam, Harvestworks, Wave Farm, Rhizome, Franklin Furnace, Turbulence.org, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, Experimental TV Center, NY State Council of the Arts, and Greenwall Foundation. LoVid’s video works are distributed through EAI.
Aldo Tambellini is an iconoclastic artist, who was a formative figure in expanding art media in the early 1960s. He charted an independent path beginning with paintings then exploring new technologies– hand-painting slides (Lumagrams), films, projections, and videoā€”integrating these new media into a new art form that synthesized visual art, theater, music and dance into visceral, sensory, multimedia installations. Critics and artists recognized Tambellini as an originator of new media art, “Electromedia,” as he coined it. He performed “Electromedia” events in the streets, the churches, and in the theaters of New York generating a sensation. By the end of the decade he established his own club, “The Black Gate,” in collaboration with Otto Piene, advertised as the only club in New York City devoted to multimedia. An intermedia innovator Tambellini exerted a considerable influence on the succeeding generation of new media artists.
