Surveillance in the 21st Century
Gary Hill, Manu Luksch, and James Coupe
September 12 – October 31, 2008

Gary Hill, recognized internationally as one of the most important artists of his generation, has been working with sculpture and electronic media since the early 1970′s. His video piece Blind Spot is a short encounter between the artist and a North African man on a street in Marseilles that is slowed down, forcing the viewer into an intimate relationship with the subject and the shifting emotion seen in his face. The piece was originally commissioned for Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image, produced by Bick Productions and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2003.

Manu Luksch is co-founder of ambientTV.NET, a UK-based art collective with a history of conceiving works that integrate curatorial and collaborative aspects, research, community involvement, and hybrid media installations. Her film project Faceless is a science fiction fairy tale compiled from surveillance video footage recovered under the UK’s Data Protection Act.

James Coupe is an artist and Assistant Professor at the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS). His 4-channel video piece (re)collector is an adaptation of his project in Cambridge, England in April 2007, involving a city-wide network of surveillance cameras programmed to extract cinematic moments from everyday life matching the Antonioni film Blow Up, and a computer algorithm that recombines the footage into a narrative. Each channel shows a unique ‘possible’ film generated from a specific day: over time the story mutates, becoming retold each day, and altering the context of people’s actions.

This exhibition is curated by Misha Neininger.