Presented by the Project Room for New Media at the
Chelsea Art Museum
Perfect View exposes sublime landscapes across the United States creating connections between diverse geographical regions and cultures through the use of new media technology, known as 'geocaching’.
On view through September 2 by appointment. Contact nina@chelseaartmuseum.org Artist talk: August 26, 6-8pm
The Project Room for New Media at Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, is pleased to announce an exhibition of experimental geography created by Jack Toolin/C5. Perfect View is part of the C5 Landscape Initiative, a suite of four projects that address the perception of landscape in light of GPS technology. The Perfect View exhibition will feature six large-scale triptychs, video documentation, expedition artifacts, and the interactive C5 GPS Media Player.
Jack Toolin is an artist whose work spans new media. He been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002 Whitney Biennial); San Francisco Camerawork; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Foxy Production, New York City. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and an adjunct professor at the Polytechnic Institute at NYU.
Perfect View is a project initiated in a request made to those who participate in the growing activity of ‘geocaching’ (known as ‘geocachers’) to capture the beauty, serenity and sublime quality of selected landscapes around the United States ranging from riverbeds to rocky outcroppings. The process of geocaching includes placing ‘caches’ in hidden locations to record the latitude/longitude coordinates, which are publicized on the web and enabling others to seek out their positions.
The triptychs documenting the sites consist of large-scale photographs, satellite imagery, and computer-generated renderings. These three technologies provide for distinctly different ways of representing topography, which insinuate the viewers experience and interpretation of the landscape. Video documentation presents interviews with three of the ‘geocachers’ who contributed sites to the project – their enthusiasm insights into both the communal aspect of the activity and the rewards of exploration. The C5 GPS Media Player presents some of the expedition routes – in the form of GPS tracklogs – from Perfect View as well as photographic and video documentation associated with them.
Perfect View delves into our increasingly technological methods of exploring, evaluating, and sharing our experience of topography. While ostensibly about landscape imagery, Perfect View addresses parallels between technological and philosophical developments during the Enlightenment and modern technology. Not only does current technology enable multiple, simultaneous representations, it permits peer-to-peer sharing, linking vast geographic regions and cultural differences. Technology is often seen as antithetical to nature, Perfect View represents a respectably large community of users who engage with GPS technology precisely for the fascination of exploring little-known areas in the natural world.
The Project Room for New Media and Performing Arts at CAM is an incubator of new ideas, showcasing groundbreaking concepts in all art mediums, and the intersection of the arts through technology. Initiated in 2003 at Chelsea Art Museum by curator, Nina Colosi, over 350 international emerging and established artists have been presented in exhibitions, performing arts, symposiums, meet-the-artist programs, and workshops. Many of these artists are also exhibited in the innovative public art project, Streaming Museum. theprojectroom.org
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