NYAB Event - “Eyebeam: Off-The-Grid” Exhibition

“Eyebeam: Off-The-Grid” Exhibition

Governors Island

This event has ended.

Seven Eyebeam artists whose creative practices are intimately intertwined with emerging technologies, will spend two months working in an environment that feels as though it is from another era. Eyebeam Off-The-Grid, on Governors Island, is a project to critically investigate cultural change and emergent technologies within a situation far outside the urban comfort zone of wired high-speed life. The island is without a dedicated internet connection or much cell phone coverage and is accessed only by ferries which run on the hour. It is the perfect place for Eyebeam to go unplugged.

The project is comprised of two phases: Open House and Exhibition. In the Open House portion, artists will open their daily practice to the public, inviting visitors to see firsthand research and creation of works that play on homespun narratives of digital labor and intimacies of interior architectures. During the Exhibition period, the artists will present public works that take full advantage of the isolation of the island.

All activities will take place on Governors Island in House 15 (follow the link for ferry schedule and directions).

OPEN HOUSE August 2 – 30

Claudia Hart
During her stay at Governors Island, Hart will be working on a high-tech version of a traditional American craft: the handmade quilt. Hart will be producing several new quilts during her residency on the Island. Each quilt is navigable using hand-held devices, which deliver animated and text-based content by means of a custom augmented-reality application.

Nancy Nowacek
During her time on Governors Island, Nowacek will continue revising the Citizen Bridge prototype, and plan a water test toward the end of the month. Concurrently, she will collect data about the currents in Buttermilk Channel to apply to the project’s engineering and installation.Over the course of the month, visitors to Building 15 will be able to see Citizen Bridge 4.0 at various stages of construction, and watch the data archive of Buttermilk Channel grow.

Chris Woebken, Sascha Pohflepp and Andreas Nicolas Fischer
The trio will spend their time on Governors Island commissioning a series of computer simulations that will run within a meticulous virtual recreation of Building 15. The individual simulations are being created by a selection of 3D artists who form part of a community that is exploring the aesthetics of simulation in the context of contemporary computer graphics, often disseminating their work on social media rather than in an academic context. Island Physics will turn Eyebeam’s house on Governors Island into a testing-ground for alternate realities, simulating the impossible in a living room. The work will be publicly exhibited on August 23rd and 24th.

EXHIBITION September 6 – 28

Torkwase Dyson
Solar Day is a sculptural installation by Torkwase Dyson addressing the intersection of and mutual relationship between sunlight, interior architecture, space, belonging, and periodicity. Site-specifically located in a mildly sunlit room with east facing bay windows, Dyson experiments with the physical phenomenological conditions of the sun’s behavior during 20 solar days.

Ingrid Burrington
LittleNets is a show of alternative networks, offering different ways of being and making online. Rather than wire Eyebeam’s temporary Governor’s Island space with internet access, LittleNets sets up site-specific mesh networks with things that might be useful to have on a remote island–-simple communication tools, artworks, and games. Visitors to the island can view and contribute content to these networks. LittleNets will also host workshops to teach people about different kinds of networks and how to build them (dates to follow).

Marisa Olson
Marisa draws on the site-specific context of Governors Island’s history as a former military base, fusing it with the history of personal entertainment technology’s origin as (de)militarized inventions. This intervention will play out in two forms, firstly by echoing the dystopian fantasy of the deserted island by creating a micro-flotilla of defunct & discarded electronic equipment meant to resemble the floating landfills these previously-beloved tv’s and boomboxes would otherwise occupy. The sculpture will be accompanied by a mobile photo series entitled “Rescue Complex,” capturing the often uncannily delicate mise-en-scene of technology abandoned on the streets of New York.