Untethered

Eyebeam's website describes it as an "art and technology center" that provides the tools and environment for digital artists to experiment with their work and research. Creating work that is relative to current culture, the artists work together to share their ideas with the public. This is the first gallery that we visited that was not only a space for exhibiting work, but for creating it as well. In Eyebeam, curators, artists, and students can work in close proximity, influencing and inspiring each other to create unconventional artwork.

Eyebeam calls their "Untethered" exhibition a "sculpture garden of readymades." That it is; the artists have taken objects and repurposed them. The objects have been "deprogrammed" of their original uses. The artists then came up with new ways to use them, sometimes functional, sometimes surreal, sometimes surprising. Several interesting projects included a wall installation that reacts to its viewers, a piano that plays the internet, and a slew of iPods, PDAs and cell phones transformed into guitars, games, and sound-makers.

Although there were fifteen artists participating in the exhibition, I was instantly attracted to Joe Winter's "Xerox Astronomy and the Nebulous Object-Image Archive." Utilizing an office photocopier surrounded by a mechanical model of the universe, Winter employs robotic arms to illuminate the bed of the copier which continuously observes and records. The resulting photocopies resemble science-fiction-style, nebulous shapes. I would love to see the archive of images that the copier has produced. The format of the images encourages interpretation by the gallery visitors. I also appreciate the fact that the artwork is a machine that creates artwork. The resulting photocopies are endless, one cannot turn them into commodities because they are ever-reproducible.