Streaming…

Marina Zurkow
Sound design: Scott Reitherman
Animation assistance: Ewan Creed

OCTOBER 4, 2021 thru JANUARY 31, 2022
Read more below

An infinitely scrolling landscape of construction and collapse, THE CONTINUOUS MONUMENT depicts a self-generating world of disassembled body parts as a site of spectacle. Tourists mingle, stare, and idle within a landscape of scattered oversized limbs in candy-colored variety. The artwork employs a collection of algorithmic systems in the development of this tableaux including crowd simulation, building assembly, and music generation. What emerges is an endlessly expanding vertical landmark in constant limbo.

The title pays homage to a 1969 artwork by the experimental architecture group SUPERSTUDIO. Their anti-architectural proposals used grid systems as a way to mediate space, often critiquing the dehumanizing tendencies of urban planning in the modern age.

Your work with its op art illusion and flat, abstract depiction of figures seem to hint at our digitally mediated daily existence with a sense of alienation, irrationality and darkness. Could you elaborate on this simulated world you are building and its representations in the real, physical world?

This is an interesting time to be a digital artist. I feel myself bordering multiple dystopias and utopias simultaneously – some of them are technological, some of them are biological, and some of them are social. As an artist, my job is to put form to those borders and potentially conjure something that is present but invisible otherwise. Living in downtown Chicago for 2 years during the gestation and construction of THE CONTINUOUS MONUMENT gave me an opportunity to witness those borders in the same physical space as 150 MEDIA STREAM. There was a pandemic, there was a social uprising, there was an emptiness and subsequent technological prosthetic that came to replace civic space…. creating this piece in this place at this time became an opportunity to articulate a facet of this moment of place and time – something I still do not have words for.

Peter Burr is an artist from Brooklyn, NY. A master of computer animation with a gift for creating images and environments that hover on the boundary between abstraction and figuration, Burr has in recent years devoted himself to exploring the concept of an endlessly mutating labyrinth. His practice often engages with tools of the video game industry in he form of immersive cinematic artworks. These pieces have been presented internationally by various institutions including Documenta 14, Athens; MoMA PS1, New York; and The Barbican Centre, London.

Previously Burr worked under the alias Hooliganship and founded the video label Cartune Xprez through which he produced hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs showcasing a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His practice has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship. For the past 2 years he served as a visiting artist in the Film/Video/New Media/Animation department at SAIC.

OOzy is the newest work in Zurkow’s ongoing series Oceans Like Us.

OOzy brings into view a sensual—but harsh—mix of kelp, marine organisms, human aquanauts, mermaids, plastics, and oil, who cycle and snake through the 150 Media Stream along the riverside.

An ocean is not a body—and it is. It is also a shipping superhighway; a resource for food and minerals, and rare earth; a space of mystery, adventure, fantasy, dream, and myth; a space to be mapped, measured, and known; and “Earth’s” greatest engine—that maintains, reflects and affects the regulatory systems of the planet.

The works in Oceans Like Us aim to parse these often conflicted frameworks for thinking with and about oceans, offering opportunities to both make strange and increase affection for these complex liquid spaces, to offer contemplative connection time to the ocean as a fundamental life-source, a system in dire need of love and protection.

Your work uses software technologies and animation to reflect on urgent environmental issues. What do you think is the relationship between our growing sense of existence in a simulated world and our footprint in the real world?

There’s an ongoing dilemma for me in using technologies—perpetrators of environmental damage at every stage, from mining, to fabrication, to dissemination, to their disposal —to invite viewers to connect to their real world environments, and to environmental “wicked messes.”
Currently, technologies are a predominant mode of receiving/exchanging informational and emotional content. To avoid using technologies is materially rigorous, but if my aim is communication at any scale beyond the intimate, there must be a way in which I acknowledge the materiality of the technologies themselves, and try to fold this acknowledgement into the work, either directly or indirectly. For instance, in this piece of writing.

Animation is an invitation to suspend one’s disbelief. One can be simultaneously suspicious of the form, and open to its enchantments. Animation can portray the everythingness of the environment: the ugly, the polluted, the fantastical, the extant—the undulations of this world we live in as animals among many species, and also the world(s) we make, and the world(s) we break.

Media and participatory practice artist Marina Zurkow connects people to nature-culture tensions and environmental messes, offering humor and new ways of knowing, connecting, and feeling. She uses life science, materials, and technologies including food, software, animation, clay and other biomaterials to foster intimate multispecies and geophysical connections. She works as a founding member of several collaborative initiatives, including Making the Best of It: Nimble Foods for Climate Change, Dear Climate, Climoji, and Investing in Futures.

Zurkow’s recent solo exhibitions include New York City’s MTA Arts & Design, bitforms gallery, New York and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; Zurkow is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is currently a mentor at Bennington College’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action, and a professor at ITP/Tisch School of the Arts. She is represented by bitforms gallery and resides in the Hudson Valley, New York.

Words from the artist: AN EXPERIMENT

Protocol: Becoming Ocean (and Material Worlds)

Set the length of time you are able to engage with this 3-minute work

There are four movements in this protocol.
After PART 1, which has a set duration, divide the remaining time evenly—or not.

For instance, if you have 10 minutes total to be with OOzy, you would divide this time up between the sections.

I suggest you use a timer with a chime.

Note:
Please take these instructions as metaphorically or literally as you like. For instance, the instruction to “get in the water” might mean, focus your attention on the screen, on the wateriness of it; or you might have brought a portable foot bath along with you. Swimming or floating might be gliding back and forth through space, bringing the screen world into your body; or it might mean lying down on the floor to rearrange your perception. All of these might be happening only in your imagination, too, so nobody knows what you are up to.

Becoming and Ocean (and Material Worlds)

PART FOUR
Be the water.
Churn. Murmur. Release any hold or grip you may have on the realities and stories of this video experience, of the dry materiality around you. Become oceanic.

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