FUSE will celebrate its 10th anniversary with the biggest FUSE event in its history with FUSE: DISRUPTION, joining forces with the 21st International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2015), one of the world’s most prestigious global festivals presenting work at the intersection of art and technology, to bring you the works of 50 top local and international artists. Expect to experience intriguing ways in which these artists synthesize art and technology: the first global online protest software, a robot made of mud, a remotely controlled graffiti drone, a 24-hour James Franco TV channel, 3D-printed masks that protect identity, a compass for mountains and water, a software that trades human emotions as stocks, glitched Kindles, death metal music made from the sound of car chases, and many more. Altogether, these artworks investigate the contemporary moment through the lens of political, social, environmental, technological and aesthetic disruption.
Additionally, FUSE: DISRUPTION will take over the Robson Street plaza and the Robson Square Ice Rink with music performances and video projections programmed by New Forms Media Society, as well as art installations and dance activities, offering the extraordinary summer FUSEexperience both inside and outside the Gallery space.
Some highlights that are not to be missed:
The Electronic Disturbance Theater, a renowned pioneering group of art activists, presentsFloodNet—the first global online political protest software that successfully implemented electronic civil disobedience, launching a new era of hacktivism since 1998.
TZ’IJK is a blind, deaf, and speechless autonomous robot made from mud by Paula Gaetano Adi and Gustavo Crembil. Motivated by Latin America’s cannibalistic and hybrid nature, TZ’IJKproposes an alternative and disruptive approach to the development of embodied artificial life forms and advocates for the integration of high and low technological materials and cultures.
URME Surveillance is an interactive project that creates photorealistic, 3D-printed masks of artistLeonardo Selvaggio’s face, transforming his identity into a defense technology that protects the public from facial recognition software. When these masks are worn by the public, they trick the surveillance cameras into identifying the wearers as the artist.
Marisa Olson’s Blue Sky, a video sculpture housed in the gilded carcass of an obsolete Mac computer tower, offers a feminist critique of disruption as a corporate meme, in which disruption connects equally to rupture and faux-utopian progress. In the video the artist is shown working in a studio environment to create a handmade blue sky.
Kubrick or Korine™ (Alex Munt and Justin Harvey) launches a TV channel conceived for cultural producer, icon and visual artist James Franco. Part project and part product, 24 Hour Francoencases the Hollywood image-flow within avant-garde form and speaks to the comingling of art and celebrity in the global image economy.
Amelia Marzec’s New American Sweatshop is an installation that models a manufacturing plant where people hand-build semi-functioning prototypes out of post-consumer waste, investigating what our technology could look like in a future where the American dollar is worthless.
Created by Winnie Soon, gif project How to get the Mao experience through Internet… runs on a computer screen through a browser. With its specific characteristics of grainy texture, continuous looping and cinematic sequences, the artwork questions how the digital format might reconfigure the experience of a public space and the public figure of Mao Zedong.
Scott Kildall’s internet art and sculpture EquityBot treats twenty-four states of human affect as tradable commodities, “investing” in emotions such as anger, joy, disgust and amazement. It then links these emotions with actual stocks to make investments using a simulated brokerage account.
Andres Wanner’s Signature Strokes is a series of performative interventions in which a remotely controlled drone paints ephemeral graffiti in public space. The title is a play on signature strikes—drone killings based on suspicious behavioural patterns thought to be signatures of terrorists.
Taking up notions of fragments and nostalgia, By the Road is a sound sculpture created by Bjørn Erik Haugen. The soundtracks consist of the sound from car chases in famous movies translated into death metal music.
During the evening, FUSE-goers can also see the following exhibitions:
Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums
Material Future: The Architecture of Herzog & de Meuron and the Vancouver Art Gallery
How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth? An exhibition by Geoffrey Farmer
Residue: The Persistence of the Real
Beyond the Trees: Wallpapers in Dialogue with Emily Carr (In conjunction with ISEA2015)
Tickets: $20 (+tax) | Free for Gallery members
Website: http://vanartgallery.bc.ca/events_and_programs/fuse.html
