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Chelsea Art Museum's blog

In collaboration with a network of museums and visual arts institutions both national and international, The Chelsea Art Museum seeks to present important, but relatively unexplored dimensions of 20th and 21st Century art, particularly focusing on artists that have been less exposed in the United States than in their home countries.

Social Object: Sculpture and Software by Michael Rees

January 21st, 2010 6:00pm - 8:00pm

A brief talk about the project by Michael Rees with Don Guarnieri.

Social Object: Sculpture and Software is an interactive software installation that includes correlated physical objects with virtual objects. Interacting with this artist authored software creates screen based experiences that construct virtual objects from which physical objects can be derived. The work explores the relationship between language and form and creates a framework for virtual and physical play.

The exhibition includes the Sculptural User Interface (SUI) application, along with objects made from the SUI using contemporary automated sculpting processes. The SUI is a language to form synthesizer, a concrete poetry machine. The software generates 3D forms by merely typing letters on the keyboard. Many letters, words, sentences, turn into many kinds of shapes can be combined in many ways to create a rich user experience. It can also export to physical objects through CAD (computer aided design) CAM (computer aided machining) processes.

Social Object and The Sculptural User Interface are inspired by Joseph Beuys' ideas about Social Sculpture, Duchamp's readymades recapitulated by Joseph Kosuth as the readymade made ready and how that might relate to the open source software movement. It is also inspired by truism that "code is poetry".

Produced by Don Guarnierri. Alphabets from: Anj Ferrara, Adam Nowicki, Geoff Flash, Randy Illum, Sarah Menchise, Pablo Morillo, Michael Rees, James Stewart, Alex Vicenzi, and Ray Vikete.

Michael Rees' work traverses a wide range of activities and efforts. He has shown at the Whitney Museum in the 1995 Biennial and again in 2001 in the exhibition BitStreams. He has had numerous exhibitions both in the United States, Germany, Turkey, and Spain. His work has been exhibited in New York galleries and in private and public collections. It has also been exhibited in museums and university galleries throughout the United States. Rees works in a broad continuum of sculptural practice. His work utilizes performance, animation, video, installation, sculptural objects, computer software programs, and interactivity.

Social Object: Software and Sculpture is made possible by grants from the National Foundation for the Arts, the Creative Capital Foundation and the Tribeca Film Institute's Media Arts Fellowships. Special thanks to Chris Burnett, Donald Guarnierri and Kristofer Schlachter.

The exhibition was curated by Nina Colosi.