Through the works of five young Israeli artists living and working in New York, the Department of Design and Architecture explores the realm of digital art, shifting from electronic encryptions to material manifestations in the exhibition galleries. The intervention by the viewer challenges the traditional role of the spectator in the gallery, providing an opportunity to interact with the works on view and become instantly transformed into an actor on the electronic stage.
Interactive and mediated art, embracing such fields as digital video art, did not arrive in a sudden flurry of electronic pixel dust. Interactive art incorporates in it’s artistic gesture the passive language of television, the dynamic language of computer and video games, and the typographic and verbal encoding established by such avant garde artistic movements as Dada, Fluxus, and the Situationists. Beginning in the 1960’s with the proliferation of computers and the development of new digital interfaces, new media have collapsed the boundaries between art and design, science and technology.
Liquid Spaces artists come from diverse backgrounds including industrial design, literature, film, classical jazz, architecture, and photography. Industrial designer Daniel Rozin’s works, Wooden Trash and Shiny Balls Mirror, entice the visitor to reflect on and be reflected by their transformative surfaces. Video artist and documentary film maker Tirtza Even invites the visitor to navigate her liquid landscapes through digital intervention, a transforming agency granted by the artist to the user to produce new variations across non-linear pathways. Amit Pitaru, an artist, Jazz musician and software engineer, plays with animated drawings and painted images through computer coding, while architect Ruth Ron and interaction designer Inbar Barak collaborate on an installation that allows gallery visitors to see through walls with Superman-like X-ray vision, into the Museum’s hidden spaces.
The exhibition is curated by Alex Ward, curator of Design and Architecture at the Israel Museum. Exhibition made possible by the donors to the Museum’s 2003 exhibition Fund: Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond J. Learsy, Aspen Colerado; Ruth and Leon Davidoff, Paris and Mexico City; Hanno D. Mott, New York; The Nash Family Foundation, New York; Intel Israel; Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem
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