Press Release
June 6, 2002

Exhibition information for POST at 1904 East 7th Place, Los Angeles, CA 90021.

Exhibition: e-motion
Curator: Susan Joyce

Exhibition Dates: July 6 – August 3, 2002

Regular Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12:00 noon – 6 PM

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 6, 7:00 – 10:00 PM
SRL performance@9:30PM

POST is pleased to present e-motion featuring new media; motion based works 
by Kent Anderson Butler, Casey Hanrahan, Kristine Marx, Yucef Merhi, Mark 
Pauline, Erwin Redl, and James Rouvelle.

Since the invention of motion pictures a century ago, artists have been 
experimenting in innovative ways, exploring the possibilities of art and 
technology.  Electronic culture has expanded the world of visual art. The 
works in this exhibition represent the use of technology in creative and 
meaningful applications.  In concert with artistic expression, these artists 
employ diverse disciplines such as light, sound, video, performance, 
language, and engineering.  Ideas are transformed into visceral experiences, 
all in some way engage in the activity of motion, and in some instances 
interaction between the works occur.  We are just beginning to scratch the 
surface on understanding the potential of technology and its relationship to 
contemporary art.  With the assimilation of machine to technology, cultural 
transformations take place.  The evolution of electronic culture is a change 
in the dynamics of society, representation and experience.

Kent Anderson Butler - performance/video installation "Immersion" is an 
investigation of the union between two people and represents the process of 
ritual and spiritual experience.

Casey Hanrahan –Using materials such as aluminum, steel, and rivets, the 
artist employs systems of mathematics and design to construct optical 
meditative drawings for the purpose of targets. 

Kristine Marx – video installation depicts situations that are both intimate 
and impersonal.  The banal is experienced as a spatially disorienting and 
isolating event.  The work draws attention to the elastic, permeable boundary 
between self and other, interior and exterior, reality and illusion.

Yucef Merhi – Poetic Words is a work constituted by 4 light emitting spinning 
devices.  When people interact with these machines they will see a word, 
created by combining two words, related to a social, philosophical or 
political issue, like Anorecstasy (Anorexia - Ecstasy).  In Artistotelian 
terms, the words always exist in potency but become poetry in motion when the 
spectators spin the object and feel/interpret the content.  Most recent 
net-poetry project of Merhi can be experienced at 
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/yucef.

Mark Pauline – Survival Research Laboratories videos of machine experiments 
and performances.  SRL was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in 1978 as 
an organization of creative technicians dedicated to redirecting the 
techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away 
from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare.  SRL 
has staged over 50 mechanized performances in the United States and Europe 
that consist of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, 
robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of 
socio-political satire.  Humans are present only as audience or operators.  
http://www.srl.org

Erwin Redl - elevator shaft light installation.  In this body of work, space 
is experienced as a second skin, our social skin, which is transformed 
through artistic intervention. Due to the very nature of its architectural 
dimension, participating by simply being "present" is an integral part of the 
installation.  Visual perception has to work in conjunction with corporeal 
motion, and the passage of time, an additional parameter of motion.  Redl’s 
light installation was recently featured at the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

James Rouvelle – interactive sound robotics.  Robots are sensitive to changes 
in light and sound.  A blue LED at the tip of each responds to its 
environment by either illuminating, holding, or dimming at various speeds.  
Each robot attempts to locate others by emitting, sensing, and responding to 
a sound similar to sonar.  Movement by visitors in the space creates an 
additional dimension of interactivity.