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Museum And Gallery

Power surge

The Boston Cyberarts Festival launches everywhere, Gabriel Orozco and Benjamin Buchloh converse at Harvard

By RANDI HOPKINS | April 9, 2007

Inaugurated in 1999 and now in its fifth biennial incarnation, the 2007 Boston Cyberarts Festival arrives April 20 to blanket the town with an onslaught of music, dance, and visual-art events and exhibitions loosely connected by their common use of computer technology. The festival will make its presence felt through May 6, and as always, it refrains from trying to put too fine a point on what “cyberarts” is; that’s left for you to figure out. Offerings range from experimental film and video (“40 Years of Video Art, 1963–2003” at Boston’s Goethe-Institut; Clea T. Waite’s hemispherical film “Moonwalk: Work-in-Progress” at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), music (“Freex to Geex II” at Berklee College of Music; “The Puzzle Master” at Brandeis’s Spingold Theatre Center), and dance (Cathy Weis’s Electric Haiku: Calm As Custard at the Institute of Contemporary Art; “Xavier Le Roy” at Green Street Studios and MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies).

On the visual-arts front: as of this writing, 27 exhibitions are listed on the cyber-program. “Brian Knep: Aging” (Judi Rotenberg Gallery starting April 21) offers video and interactive work by a talented computer-scientist-turned-new-media-artist who was inspired by scientific inquiry into the aging process. “Memory of a Looking Glass” (119 Gallery through May 19, with a reception and performance April 21) will see sound artist Andrea Pensado and visual artist Greg Kowalski create a motion-triggered video and sound installation that’ll allow visitors to explore a chamber of mysteries. “Works Selected from Aspect Magazine” (Axiom Gallery through May 6) presents four artists whose work has been featured in Aspect, a bi-annual DVD magazine of new-media art. These are just the tip of the techno iceberg; the festival’s Web site is the true cyberati’s portal to what all’s coming.

A bit off the cyber-path, but highly interactive nonetheless, is the work of Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, who’s been known to engage our thinking about subjects ranging from games and geometry to mortality using objects as diverse as a deflated soccer ball, a decorated whale skeleton, and a trisected car. On April 18 at 6 pm, Orozco speaks with art historian and critic Benjamin Buchloh at the Sackler Museum as part of Harvard’s M. Victor Leventritt Lecture series.

On the Web
Boston Cyberarts Festival: www.bostoncyberarts.org
Judi Rotenberg Gallery: www.judirotenberg.com
119 Gallery: www.119gallery.org
Axiom Gallery: www.axiomart.org
Arthur M. Sackler Lecture Hall: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu

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