Streaming Now…

October 15, 2023—March 31, 2024

Streaming Next…

March 2024

We Are All Made of Light by Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime)

Monday–Friday: 1–3pm & 7–10pm

Saturday: 7–10pm

Sunday: 1–7pm

Holiday hours may vary

Action Lines, in partnership with Joffrey Ballet and the Adler Planetarium

Action Lines Media, The Joffrey Ballet, and the Adler Planetarium present a new, cutting-edge collaboration of Cosmic Rhythms. Featuring Adler astronomer’s expertise, breathtaking imagery, and bold choreography by Joffrey Ballet dancer Xavier Nuñez, Cosmic Rhythms takes audiences on a mesmerizing journey through the cosmos. Cosmic Rhythms will play on Wednesday nights at 6:15 pm in the Grainger Sky Theater at the Adler Planetarium beginning February 14 through April 17, 2024. A special version of the project will be launched at the 150 Media Stream in March, 2024.

We Are All Made of Light by Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime)

We Are All Made of Light by Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime) presents a visual deconstruction of the artists’ bodies, movements, and identities into floating video fragments. As a way to probe the fragility of our perceptions of ourselves and others, the artists on screen appear to alternate between gestures of reaching out to the viewer and contracting inward. The work combines original analog and digital video footage inserted into an infinitely generative 3D environment composed live and programmed by the duo. Sweeten and Gwilliam’s figures are filled with shifting color spectrums and often move as if battling or shielding themselves from floating 3D objects. They repeatedly appear distorted by video feedback before dissolving into countless particles of moving light.

The work uses as its starting point analog video developed during a residency at Experimental Television Center, interwoven with new video material shot by the artists focusing on choreographed human gestures that are passed through video colorizers. The human figures are then abstracted within the generative virtual 3D space developed by the artists’ custom WebGL application. The video content is fragmented across fields of animated geometries that function as pixels as they spread out into space, suggesting a limitation as to how we are seen as well as how we see ourselves.

As the work slowly transitions from an integrated image to a pixelated array of geometries, details of the artists’ bodies and original video material are brought to the foreground. These geometries act as a microscopic view of a larger organism, each with its own compositional parameters and internal “rules.”  The video blades of 150 Media Stream extend this fragmentation by further breaking down the visual material, forcing the eye to make sense of implied perspective across a broken field of vision.

Over the last decade Gwilliam and Sweeten have used the abstraction of data and visual forms to create works in a wide range of mediums. Their WebGL moving image works are rendered in a browser environment using a custom built WebGL application. The works investigate the effects of physicality and fragmentation, as well as the simulation of light, depth, and scale in a virtual space. At times infinite and at others claustrophobic, the generative works demonstrate the expansive characteristics of the medium and the potential inherent in simulated perspectives: a “camera” stands in for the artist’s point of view, the angles, and trajectories of which are predetermined by the artists and computed by the program. The use of analog video materials is integral to the works, as well as automation and randomization.

Gwilliam and Sweeten made their debut as the collaborative duo in 2011 with the solo exhibit “the optimal value for y” at Microscope Gallery. The artists use current technologies that are further developed or redirected, through the use of original coding, as a means to consider the culture of informatics and the thresholds of image recognition and perception across various mediums. Gwilliam & Sweeten have continued to stress the importance of making their own code in order to overcome the constraints imposed by commercial softwares and to reduce as much as possible the distance between themselves and the mediums they utilize. Their work has been featured in institutional shows in the US and abroad including the solo exhibition “Cryptophasia” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and in the group shows “Processed: To Each Their Own Image”, Center Pompidou, Paris, France; “Day In Day Out” at GEH8 Kunstraum und Ateliers, Dresden, Germany “Altarations”, Schmidt Center Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, and “Dialogics”, Rowan University Art Gallery, New Jersey among others. Their 6-channel video “Breakout” was commissioned by The Parrish Museum for New York City Center, where it was on view for a year. Lisa Gwilliam and Ray Sweeten live and work between Brooklyn, NY and Providence, RI and are represented by Microscope Gallery in New York.

Streaming Next… Action Lines, in partnership with Joffrey Ballet and the Adler Planetarium

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