Mediated Realities is a group exhibition curated by DM student J. Susie Hwang, including work of DM students and alumni, Alicia Dolabaille, James Franco, Laura Swanson, Michael Tauschinger-Dempsey, Mikhail Mansion, Niu Miao, and Sophia Brueckner.

The work featured in this show explore the bounds of perception.  They play with the ideas of reality, our perceived notion of, and in some cases, highlights the limitations imposed upon our ways of sensing.   Various pieces allude to the ways our behaviors are mitigated by our environs, and how experiences cannot be fully conveyed through the translation of image or text.  In several video pieces, the pictures the viewer perceives are vastly fabricated, though not apparently so upon first viewing.  Technology often plays a factor in perceptual mediation, and many pieces point to this issue.  Others take a more fanciful look at phenomenology, and create playful pieces that may take on larger and sometimes thornier concepts. Works range from sculpture, time based/video, multimedia, and the interactive.

Mediated Realities opens on Friday, January 27, 2012 from 6 pm to 8 pm at the Cohen Gallery in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts at Brown University, 154 Angell Street.

It will be on view through Friday, February 17, 2012.  Hours are Weds. to Fri, 11am - 4pm, and Sat. 1pm-4pm.

Hapax Phaenomena is a collection of historically unique images discovered by Google image search from collaborators Clement Valla and John Cayley. The fragile and tenuous Phaenomena are organized into subcategories within the five folders; 1_discordant_wonderfulness; 2_nondurable_megabyte; 3_inventive_monetarism; 4_patriotic_leaseback; and 5_diatomic_roach. Each Phaenomena is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, a screenshot of its moment of global and historical singularity taken by one of the artists.

The Download is a new program through which Rhizome shares one work per month with our membership for free download. Part curatorial platform, part incentive to budding digital art collectors, the Download highlights great new works and encourages members to display them at home-on any screen, computer, or suitable device.

Click Here to access The Download

"Identical twins Kirk and Nate Mueller sat side-by-side in identical leather chairs wearing identical GANT gabardine suits fiddling with identical Le Pen pens. It was chilly December afternoon just before the New Year at the Fort Greene offices of Studio Mercury, a boutique design firm made up entirely of alumni from the Rhode Island School of Design’s hyper-exclusive Digital + Media graduate program."   Read More

Stephan Stoyanov/Luxe Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural New York City solo show of Anne Morgan Spalter, a new-media pioneer who initiated and taught the first fine arts new media courses at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1990 and Brown University in 1992. Spalter’s exhibition, Traffic Circle, is a milestone in her two-decade odyssey in integrating art and technology. Spalter draws on centuries of work in the landscape genre but brings a new perspective on the modern landscape. With works created exclusively for this exhibition, Spalter introduces geometrically patterned video works generated from footage she shoots in traffic, from aerial perches, at airports, and on the highway. Several pieces feature iconic New York City landmarks such as Rockefeller Center. The rhythmically structured compositions isolate or abstract features and motion of the landscape, highlighting the passage of taxis down 5th Avenue, for example, and the soaring of planes on takeoff. Inspired by her mathematical background and interest in Islamic art, she uses a symmetrical kaleidoscopic framework to brings order to complexity. Spalter’s art has explored the concept of the “modern landscape” since first shown publicly at the deCordova Museum in 1992. She draws on her travels and her digital photographic and video database to create still and moving pieces. Works are realized as prints, intimate screen-based works, and large-scale screen and projection works: her work was shown this past summer at Big Screen Plaza’s 30-foot LCD screen in New York City as part of Leaders in Software Art (LISA) and at the RISD Museum of Art’s Open Call Video Art Screening Program. In the past two years, Spalter’s art has quickly been embraced and collected by museums such as Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, as well as renowned private collections in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, including those of art connoisseurs Bobbie Foshay and Dick and Pamela Kramlich. Spalter lectures around the globe about her art work at venues including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University. She has been widely discussed in print publications and TV interviews, ranging from the New York Times to USA Today. This past summer she was featured by Dubai as an artist inspired by the region in July 2011 supplements to The International Herald Tribune (worldwide), The Guardian (UK), Le Figaro (France) and Suddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). A triple major B.A. graduate from Brown University (Mathematics, Visual Art and Independent Studies) and an M.F.A. in Painting from RISD, Spalter is also the author of the text The Computer in the Visual Arts, used at schools from Harvard University to Pratt Institute. Roger Mandle, current Director of the Qatar Museums Authority and former President of RISD, described this book as “a seductively articulate and illuminating introduction to the rapidly expanding world of the computer and art, design, and animation.” The book has been required, referenced and cited in hundreds of art and design classes and books on digital art, new media and art history. In 2008, after a decade of contributions to digital and visual computing as Artist-in-Residence at the world-renowned Brown University Computer Graphics Research Group, Spalter left to pursue full-time art creation. While at Brown she worked with or was advised by many computer science and humanities luminaries, including Andy van Dam, a computer graphics pioneer and cofounder of SIGGRAPH, and Alvy Ray Smith, cofounder of Pixar and NYIT. She has been on numerous committees devoted to the digital arts ranging from SIGGRAPH’s Lifetime Achievement Award to the Digital Art Museum’s Advisory Board. She is represented by the Stephan Stoyanov/Luxe Gallery in New York City, Catherine Rubin in Paris, and Candita Clayton in Rhode Island. In addition to her visual art, Spalter is also a martial artist. She received her black belt last year, at age 45, and competes successfully in tournaments. She and her husband have a twelve-year-old daughter. Anne Spalter Studio Contact: Oliver Diamond—curatoroffice@yahoo.com Anne Spalter Press Contact: Gladys Ndagire—gladys.a.ndagire@gmail.com Studio Visits: annespalterstudios@gmail.com

Statement by the jury: QR Type is a work that merges technology, information design and a spatial concept in a surprising and intelligent approach. Highly appealing in its aesthetic implementation, it creates an additional level of human communication for the established QR Code which, based on a sophisticated concept, thus acquires an outstanding identity.