Scott Draves: Pioneer of Generative Art

Scott Draves: Pioneer of Generative Art
May 13th – June 5th, 2011
Opening: Friday, May 13, 7pm – 10pm.

What is the relationship between man and machine? Is open source a sustainable way to run a creative society? Can digital creations have the subtlety we know in the natural world? These are the issues addressed by Scott Draves work; he creates art by writing software that runs an internet distributed supercomputer consisting of 450,000 computers and people, creating images as a form of artificial life, each with its own genome, generated by thousands of numbers that define how it looks and moves. The first versions of this algorithm date from 1992.

Draves created a new collective intelligence–the Electric Sheep–in 1999; it has been evolving and developing since. The system is based on a open source screensaver that anyone can download and run. All the computers work together to render the animations, or "sheep" (it takes an hour to render each frame, or one day of work per second or animation). People contribute their creativity and aesthetics, via open source, crowd source, and by voting. Sheep with favorable votes mate with each other and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm. Hence the flock evolves to satisfy its human audience. This popular open source version makes designs that are the basis for his fine art.

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gradually melt the sky a curatorial project by Mark Skwarek + Will Pappenheimer

gradually melt the sky
a curatorial project by Mark Skwarek + Will Pappenheimer
Augmented Reality tour of works in the show Sat 4/30 at PACE GALLERY at 12:30 sharp- see the parade to hope in action!
Devotion closed for 4/30. Go to the parade instead!
April 8th – May 1, 2011
Opening: Friday, April 8, 7pm – 10pm.
Opening night live performances by Jeremy Bailey and Mark Skwarek at approximately 8pm.


The title of this exhibition takes its cue from the 1964 artwork-poem “Tunafish Sandwich” by Yoko Ono. The text imagines a performance event which is at once cosmic and mundane, an action painting and a protest. The artworks in this exhibition employ a recent developing technology dubbed “augmented reality” to overlay, intervene and challenge the physical world in much the same conjectural spirit as preceding Fluxus and Conceptual works.

As the influence of the virtual expands, integrates and maps itself across the material, strange objects, banal byproducts, ghost imagery and radical events appear in our homes and spatially across the landscape. Closed social systems lodged in physical hierarchies are layered, then pried open by popup media available to armies of networked creatives. AR, as this technology is abbreviated, invites artists and viewers to consider coexistent spacial realities in which anything is possible anywhere. Subliminal, aesthetic and political suggestions play themselves out as techno-disturbances in a substratasphere of online and offline experience. The cell phone or the CRT, are immaterial witness to these ephemeral dimensional objects and relational post-sculptural events. The fact that this current technology is primitive, amplifies its potency, with the extra possibility of actualization tacked on to the conceptual gesture.
Will Pappenheimer, Jan 14, 2011

Artists participating:
eteam, Jeremy Bailey, Kristin Lucas, Sander Veenhof, Tamiko Thiel, LoVid, Christopher Manzione, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes, Lily Honglei, Will Pappenheimer, Virta-Flaneurazine, 4 Gentleman, John Cleater, John Craig Freeman, Mark Skwarek, Phoenix Perry, Patrick Lichty, Alan Sondheim, Damon Baker, Arthur Peters

Opening night live performances by Jeremy Bailey and Mark Skwarek at approximately 8pm.

Weekly excursion performance tours to augmented reality sites in Chelsea, Newtown Creek, Greenwich Village and Union Square. Info, times and itineraries to be published on the two websites below:
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