02/28/08
Text: Donari Braxton
New York’s Chelsea arts district can often seem like a drab terrain of pretense, wealth, and starfuckery. On one block, you can find a free glass of champagne-flavored drink in the company of gallerists who fretfully wonder if you’re somebody. On the next block, there’s a wrap-around queue for $20 Heinekens at Bungalow 8, downed alongside Page-Sixers wondering if you’re somebody. But if it’s the exceptions we’re scouting for, they are indeed hiding in this corner of Manhattan—take Eyebeam, one of Chelsea’s pillars of sense and sensibility.
Handcuffing art culture to its wayward wayward bed-fellow, nightlife, Eyebeam kicked off its second installment of MIXER last Saturday night. This bi-monthly installation-cum-dance party is an ad hoc marriage of art and music, with London’s D-Fuse headlining the event. The concept behind MIXER commingles the come one, come all glee of a downtown dance party with Eyebeam’s signature interactive technologies. Granted, the kink and kitsch isn’t all there yet. The crowd, perhaps stunned by the double-helix of interesting art and catchy tunes, seemed to interact awkwardly at times—a rave-reminiscent psychedelic pas seul over here, an introspective tug of the goatee over there—but remember, this only Eyebeam’s second run at what’s already proven to be a blossoming series, and for what’s it worth, the place was packed.
Most memorably is that amidst all the quick-stepping and drinks, actually poignant graphic art existed. The most remarkable on Saturday night was Zach Lieberman’s Drawn, a multifunctional interactive software program which allowed any attendee to doodle over white paper; they could then use their fingers to swish, swirl and spin the digitalized images, and also watch as their drawn figures interacted with the booming music, creating, in the words of the artist, “the illusion of paint coming off the page.”
“What's interesting about the Drawn project to me,” explains Lieberman, who’s an Eyebeam R&D OpenLab Fellow, “is not necessarily the sound, but the silence… It's only when you start to play with the ink, then sound erupts.” Originally designed in, and for, performance collaboration with musician Pardon Kimura, Lieberman latterly modified the software to make it both algorithmically linked to the motion of objects as well as installation-friendly, and the adaptation emerged elegantly via the large graphic screens hoisted about the gallery, where each magically personalized multimedia print could be seen in gala.
Suffice to say there’s a statement here. Perpetually on the cusp, Eyebeam continues to find bold new ways to mix performance art and installation art, each of which has “its weaknesses,” as Lieberman points out. “There is something nice about doing both, and I wind up taking things I learn from one field into the other.” United art stands, indeed.
MIXER is a bimonthly event at Eyebeam, 540 West 21st Street, Manhattan. Visit www.eyebeam.org for further information.
