Screengrab 2010

I have a unique opportunity to visit the eMerge Media Space gallery at James Cook University quite often, due to the convenience of it being located right next to where a lot of my classes are held. Every year the gallery has an exhibition titled “Screengrab”. It’s their flagship exhibition for this space, as it exemplifies exactly what the eMerge Media Space is all about: New Media. Each year a different theme is kept in mind when selecting artworks for show. This years theme is “Network”

Increasingly we live in a world which is marked by boundaries of difference. Our actions are categorised and labelled for reference, sing posting and evaluation. The network breathes and crackles beneath these spaces, it makes the virtual tangible.

The network overcomes these boundaries by supporting difference, tolerance and equity between individuals, machines and their actions. The network is a production tool for artisans, calibrating tool for media communicators, and an ecological template for our continued survival and reinvention. It is much a social mechanism as it is a cultural barometer for these plugged-in data intensive times.

-From the exhibition catalogue

You walk into the space aware that you will be seeing screened works, as the titles suggests, but also because of the darkened room and curtained-off door. At once you are greeted with the largest piece, an interactive projection called “The Southern Ocean Studies” by Tom Corby from the united kingdom. The piece is collecting open data from the waters around antarctica and displaying them on the projection in a form that looks somewhat like water currents flowing around the antarctic continent. The artist has used a video game console and controller to give viewers the chance to zoom in and out, and pan around the different currents. This allows you to see much more detail, or take a step back and watch from a broader perspective.

The other stand-out was “Movie Mirrors” by Ali Miharbi. The piece works using a laptop with webcam, and some custom software. The webcam sees your face, the expression, the shape, and other subtleties, and pulls an image from it’s vast library of faces from films that matches your face. A kind of ‘celebrity mirror’ if you will. While it changes you also see flashes of yourself, indicating the real you.

As a treat, I am able to show you a piece from the exhibition online, as it is available freely on vimeo. Fluid network is a realistic (in one sense of the word!) demonstration of what the network does. It sums up the theme of the exhibition perfectly and won the exhibition’s new media arts prize. I won’t spoil it for you, so please watch it for yourself.

There are too many works to mention in detail, but some of the art on show were visual observations of data like that from the stock market, or commentary on socialism and the network. Once piece that didn’t seem to fit in was “multimedia head” but it’s possible the piece was chosen for other values than just matching the theme. In fact, it did somewhat match, just not to the same degree the others did. It probably made the exhibition a little more lighthearted and humorous as some students made their way in to the gallery telling the others: “Hey, come and see this guy tape gadgets to his head!”.

I strongly encourage anyone to visit the eMerge Media Space as the gallery team really do put on a good show, especially for their annual screengrab exhibition.