Meditations, Illuminations, and Auctions

This year marks Gallery Aferro's 20th anniversary as an art institution pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the Newark, NJ art world, and they celebrated with their annual benefit auction party. This year also marks the 10th anniversary since I first exhibited there. A decade ago, fresh out of graduate school, they afforded me the opportunity to create my very first public art installation, a collaboration with Marc D'Agusto called Venae Cavae (I blogged extensively about that experience here). This was a seminal piece for me, really pushing me to expand my skills in computer vision and push the boundaries of what I thought possible for public art. Much credit goes to Marc for his collaborative vision and networking.

Since that time, Aferro has shown so much support to me, affording opportunities for experimentation, and I've tried to reciprocate. I had the good fortune to contribute work to 3 of their art auctions, joined with Oculus Art Collaborative to create an experimental, interactive sound installation for Object Oriented Ontological Action (O.O.O.A) that had a follow-up exhibition in Brooklyn (which where among the most fun I've ever had in an exhibition, to be honest), and they consulted with me for the creation of their interactive payphone installation and commissioned me to create the infrastructure for their ongoing sound art installation Elevator Music. If you've ever enjoyed music inside their defunct antique elevator, I designed the programmable, motion activated system for presenting their rotation of curated sound art, which is still going strong today, 6 years later.

The PIR motion sensor I rigged up for Elevator Music, still in place

Generally for these auctions I've contributed existing drawings I had in my collection, but I really felt like this landmark anniversary deserved a piece created specifically for the occasion.

Illuminated Meditations

My initial impulse was to contribute something that fits within my longstanding Meditations series of QR code mandalas, but I also really wanted to continue exploring my more recent foray into illuminated manuscripts. So I figured why not combine them!

So I decided to create a QR code mandala that would incorporate an illuminated initial "A" (for Aferro, of course). The beauty of this would be the versatility of the A as the "alpha," the genesis of language in general, and a suitable generic variable for all its multiplicities meanings. At first the QR code, when scanned, would lead to Aferro's website, particularly the page advertising the auction itself. However, by utilizing the custom coded short-link system I developed, I would be able to change the destination of the QR code to any destination the gallery or purchaser desired, even after having drawn the completed code.

Inspired by the drop caps in my illuminated manuscript, I followed similar design motifs...

And because of the reflectivity of the gold leaf, at some angles the QR code comes to the foreground and becomes scannable...

while at other angles the initial comes to the foreground and the code becomes unscannable. This was an intentional effect to promote another layer of interactivity, drawing awareness to the viewer's own bodily position in relation to the piece as they view it.

Bloom

The event was a wonderful time, complete with a hat competition and trivia games, and the turnout was a sight for sore, pandemic-worn eyes.

Lots of donations!

...I mean lots! The back half of the room.

Floor 2!

Hats!

Scannable in situ. Always gives just a bit of peace of mind to double check!

I was very glad to see two bidders before I had to go!

I'm very happy to send off my work to its new owner's home (who's first initial is indeed an "A," as I sort of predicted it might be!), and I'm excited for Aferro's year to come!

Plant Line

I was invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, which set out to create a visual compendium of all the flora of New Jersey's Great Swamp through post-it note illustrations. After receiving the list of plant life to choose from, I settled on the aptly theologically named ornithogallum umbillatum, more commonly known as the Star of Bethlehem.

In the vein (pardon the leafy pun) of my other drawings, I decided to play off of the sacred geometry inherent to the flowers morphology and reconstruct it as a cosmological diagram of sorts.

My drawing shared wall space with hundreds of other artists' renditions of their respective choices to make up the Plant Line exhibition.

Concurrent with the Plant Line were some other really great exhibitions exalting the natural and human-made surroundings of the region, including Jessica Rohrer's Neighborhood Watch, Matthew Jensen's Park Wonder, and Alice Momm's A Conversation with Trees:

And I was honored to discover that of the 500 drawings included in the exhibition, mine had been selected as the feature image for the VACNJ website!

Which just goes to show there is no such thing as a small part. Only small drawings of cosmological significance. Happy to be included in such a fun exhibition!

My Holographic Universe - Part 1/5

Tomorrow I will be embarking on one of the most exciting studio escapades I've had, and I'll be chronicling my journey here.

This year has been very eventful for me so far. Besides my first semester adjuncting and many side projects, I think I had more exhibitions lined up in January than I did all of last year, many of which I have not had a chance to write about yet. I'll get to that soon, but in the meantime...

Tomorrow I leave for the mythical land of Columbus, Ohio to partake in a weeklong Pulse Laser Holography workshop at Ohio State University!

I'm exceedingly fortunate to have been one of 5 artists from around the world selected to play with lasers, beam splitters, emulsion plates, and all sorts of other magical stuff as I learn how to make holograms (not the peppers ghost Tupac kind, nor the shiny credit card/baseball hat sticker kind, we're talking real 3D images projecting form 2D surface holograms here!)

This workshop will give me a taste of the medium and enable me to apply for their residency program in which I can realize a full project/body of work.

If you're wondering where holograms enter into my techno-sublime, relationally metaphysical art practice, my proposal sheds some light:

Workshop Statement 

I’m interested in holography as a technologically mediated expression of the sublime, and a connection between the physical and virtual. In my artwork I have used light and projection to suss out the potentials of mystical experience since the advent of cyber/virtual space, now that postmodernism has put classical metaphysics through the ringer. I became aware of holography as an artistic medium in graduate school in 2012 as I searched for ways to use light and new media to augment our perception of our surroundings and extend our presence into new non-corporeal spaces in a bodily interactive manner. I visited the New Museum’s “Pictures From the Moon” holography exhibition including works by James Turrell, Bruce Nauman and others, and I began to see holography as a perfect representation of the mystical notion of “formless form.”  

Around that time I began creating mandalas - pseudo-architectural images that can be read meditatively as cosmological diagrams - conflated with functioning QR codes as a way to contemplatively interface with the virtual. In my research, I found mandalas are actually traditionally thought of as a sort of hologram. One website notes:

Very many people have the mistaken notion that you actually visualize these two-dimensional designs. Nobody visualizes these two-dimensional designs, so everyone visualizes three-dimensional buildings on this two-dimensional picture. It’s merely like an architect’s blueprint for the building.

Or, if any of you are familiar with science, it’s a little bit like a hologram. For a hologram you have a two-dimensional film that contains all the information of a three-dimensional image, and if the light hits that film in a certain way, you get a three-dimensional hologram, just like that.

Here, mandalas and sacred imagery begin to dovetail with the emerging Holographic Principle in physics, which posits that all the information that comprises the whole universe is actually contained on the two dimensional surface surrounding the outer edge of the universe, which is then “projected” inward much like a hologram to become the multidimensional world we experience. 

As virtual and physical space intermingle and the worlds of cosmology, physics, and metaphysics all converge on the notion of a hologram, holography has become an irresistibly rich medium for my practice. 

If you're interest is as piqued as mine, here is a lecture the HoloCenter recommends as a primer to the topic. More tomorrow, as I chronicle my journey!

NEXT POST: PART 2 >>

New Art for the New Art Group

The New Art Group, a NJ based artist collective, was recently asked to curate an exhibition in which each member invited an artist whose work they felt was influential to their practice. I'm truly honored to have invited by Paul Pinkman to exhibit along side him in the 2015 New Art Group Invitational at the Watchung Art Center!

As I will coincidentally be showing a projection negation project at the Arts Center again in January in Obstructions, curated by Caitlin Albright, I wanted to show a different side of my work for this exhibition.

For()Loop Drawings

I have been working on a new series of drawings turning circuit diagrams from a forthcoming installation into cosmological diagrams, and I thought this might be a great opportunity to give the first two in the series a bit of a test run:

For()Loop Meditation 0.1 (Prototype)
Read more about it at this blog post

For()Loop Meditation 0.2 (Prototype)
read more about this one on this blog post

Projection

Paul was particularly interested in my projection work and how it dialogues with his work, so I began thinking about how I could put together something that would fit in the context of an exhibition otherwise filled mostly with traditional work, as well as something that would be pretty flexible installation wise.

After Without_Within, my exhibition up at Andover Newton Theological School last November in which I mapped a dual-projector interactive installation into 8 frosted windows, I had been toying with the idea of excerpting each window as its own piece. I thought this might prove the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

After much deliberation and a few trips to home depot, I was well on my way creating W(ith)indow 2,  based off the second window in the series of 8. Read about its creation at this post

W(ith)indow 2
click here to read more

In Dialogue

Its been fascinating to me to see how my work dialogues with Paul's. We've had fantastic conversations about our work (and artwork in general), but I hadn't really thought much about the overlaps in our practices until he was generous enough to invite me into this show.

He is showing two remarkable paintings from his Truth/Lies series:

Paul XO Pinkman

Paul XO Pinkman

Though perhaps starting and ending in different places, our practices intersect with very similar relational philosophies. In our work I think Paul and I are both wrestling with contemporary notions of the self, especially acknowledging the layers of mediation between perception and reality (especially see his selfie series). We both embrace the ever present “screens” that facilitate our experiences (spiritual, phenomenological, psychological, or otherwise). Paul’s work, too, is not contented with passive viewer interactions, instead urging viewers to move in and out, back and forth, as the images cohere, fall apart, and cohere again in various layers of physical and pictorial depth. In a way, we both strive physically, temporally, and pictorially, to achieve stability while avoiding stasis.

I hope to see you at the opening (disclaimer: I will be a bit late, but I will be there!). Should be a very interesting show, and the New Art Group is always good for great, thought provoking conversations!

Intro to New Media Art Workshop

FRIDAY 6/26

https://collectivearttank.com/event/intro-to-new-media-art/

Interested in New Media but don’t think you have the knowledge to break in? Don’t know where to start? The days of “creative coding” and “computer vision” intimidating artists are over! This New Media for Dummies style class will prove you can teach an old dog new media (young dogs welcome too)! Walk away with a working understanding of code-based artwork, and a finished project or two to prove it!

No prior programming experience necessary, but a basic understanding of computers is recommended. Bring your laptop and leave with a new medium in your tool belt!

Students should bring: 

– Laptop computer

– Webcam (if you own one) – a built-in laptop camera will work.

Fourfold - A Collaborative Exhibition

What makes up reality? Is the whole a sum of its parts or could the parts themselves each be containers for the whole? What do we make of interweaving, subjective experiences at their most primary, phenomenological level? Martin Heidegger's "fourfold" plies together the seeming dichotomies of Earth and Sky, Mortals and Divinities, as in fact codependent, relationally intertwined aspects of our dwelling in the world.

In “Fourfold” Christine Soccio, John Spano & Eric Valosin likewise ply together their practices to explore the implications of various perspectives on reality. Soccio’s approach is scientific and pattern based, using irregular, non-repeating patterns in her sculptures and light installations to reveal the underpinnings of an emergent coherence to the world. Spano’s view evokes nature’s reaction to the human infestation, using symbols of environmental contamination such as smoke, hazmat suits, and artificial light. Finally, Valosin delves into the mystical, exploring post-secular society using painting, projection, and interactive new media.

Catalyzed by the similarities in their material approaches, the artists press their differences and incompatibilities into close collaboration, together opening a dialogue about a larger worldview emerging from the “Fourfold” around us.

In this exciting upcoming exhibition Christine, John and I have been holing up in the studio together, collaborating on this dual-site show. The main event will be the three-person show in Newark's Solo(s) Gallery, but meanwhile we will also be rotating out each week with solo projects in the site's sister space, R.Jampol Project(s) in the Lower East Side in Manhattan. What's more, the two sites will be virtually intermingled via live stream video projection.

We've been digging into some of the recurrent themes of each of our practices to examine how they might interact with each other. We've begun mashing together our media of projection, sculpture, text, glow-paint, smoke, and interactive technology, and splicing together Christine's use of aperiodic patterning like the Ammann Grid and Penrose Tiling, my interest in mandala forms and alethic negation, and John's interest in public intervention/activist art, eager to see what emerges...

From our initial site visit to Solo(s)

Side room at Solo(s) - we're planning to reshape the hole in the wall and project into this room as part of our collaborative piece.

Another side room at Solo(s) that will most likely house the live stream video from NY

R.Jampol Project(s) in the LES

As all of us work with light based media, the gallery will become a light box of sorts, viewed from outside

In the heart of the Solo(s) gallery will be a multi-layered, multi-room collaborative projection piece. But besides that, the Newark exhibition will also feature individual projects from each of us. I've got an interactive projection negation piece in the works, as well as a pair of site-relavent QR mandala drawings.

More coming soon...

---

A Directory of the other posts about this project:

THE COLLABORATION:

Fourfold - A Collaborative Exhibition - our first site visit and the beginnings of our concept for the show (YOU ARE HERE.)

Fourfold Collaboration - building and installing the main collaborative installation

INDIVIDUAL WORKS:

Fourfold - Meditation 1.4 - Behind the scenes of my site specific drawings for the exhibition

The Threefold Fourfold, In Twofold Fivefold - Behind the scenes of my fourfold projection negation project

FINISHED PROJECTS:

The Finished Fourfold: Collaboration and Multi-Site Exhibition - An overview of the finished exhibition

The Final Fourfold (Four Now...) - Images from the opening reception and other events

To Infinity and Beyond

To kick off 2015, I've been invited to participate in a group show on the subject of infinity. Below is a short chronicle of the development of my project for the exhibition, but if your patience isn't so infinite you can jump here to read the press release, and come to...

GETTING TO INFINITY

@ SETON HALL UNIVERSITY'S WALSH GALLERY

On view 1/20 - 3/15

Opening reception 1/22, 5-9 pm

Infinity was a curious subject to ponder for this quasi-post-human, post-structuralist, relational metaphysician. As I continually aim to draw together contemporary thought and technology with the mystical and phenomenological, I thought back to a book by Brent Waters called From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Postmodern World. He discusses the trans-humanist desire to bridge the gap between the "good" and the "necessary" (the eternal and the temporal) by achieving technological immortality.

Infinity takes on a new metaphysical depth when post-humanism enters the equation. The dissolve of one's self into cyberspace is in some way an extension of our desire for the infinite - infinite space, infinite possibility, infinite dividuals of the self, to borrow from Deleuze (if subtracting his power polemic).

What if our endeavors towards this digitized infinitude were to marry with our other endeavors toward metaphysical infinity - namely interactions with meditative space? This is one of the prime motivators of my practice.

I thought back also to a prior project of mine, Circle, in which a custom designed table and interactive video projection (using a recursive video capture delay, projected back onto the drawing surface being captured) allowed me, in performance, to literally interact with my digital self and synchronize the two dividualized spaces into one meditative act: attempting to draw and erase a perfect circle. 

I wondered if this idea could be translated off of the table and onto a wall so that anyone might be able to interact with it instead of just me in performance.

So I started with the video delay patcher I had written in Max/MSP for Circle, translated it to Processing (oddly I found myself more comfortable tweaking and coding in Java than Max's visual interface), and set up my projector. Originally the camera was aimed at the paper on the desk and then rear projected the image from below. That created the recursive infinite regress, which I really liked not only for its relevance to the topic, but for its aesthetic quality of eventually dissolving the digital selves into the glowing blue mush of the compounding projection light. In this iteration I used the laptop's iSight camera (soon to be replaced by an external webcam) and pointed it directly at the projection

That yielded this infinite regress:

However, what made the Circle experience so magical was that the projected image and the captured image were exactly lined up so the proportions of each iteration in the regression remained the same (no perspective effect, just an infinite compilation of overlays). So I designed this test, using a stock image and Processing's texture mapping function

Top right: original image. Bottom left: testing the shape to be mapped to, which fills the screen. Top left: the finished crop, mapping the cropped image (to simulate cropping to the projection screen) to the whole output screen. Bottom right: empty quadrant of black stuff.

With it, I was able to digitally crop the video capture to the edges of the projection, yielding something more like the intended effect:

Playing around with a two-way mirror. Unrelated to this project, but I wanted to tinker...

With a few more tweaks I was then ready to start considering the physical side of this digital-physical metaphysic... Spoiler alert, the below video has glimpses of what I'm talking about. (Stay tuned! Cue curtain)

CONTINUE TO THE NEXT POST  >>

Without_Within

Without_Within

Eric Valosin

Sarly Interfaith Gallery

Andover Newton 

Theological School

November 2 - December 31, 2014

Reception: Wednesday, 

November 5, 6-8 pm

Without_Within features site specific installations using light, projection and interactive new media, as well as two-dimensional works. These projects reflect the artist's desire to blend old and new media to transform the viewer's perception of a space and immerse the viewer in a participatory, meditative/contemplative environment. The exhibition takes advantage of the Sarly Gallery's architecture to ruminate on themes of interiority-exteriority, and the roles of various mediators for this experience.

Much On Which to Catch Up

Can a title end with a preposition?

...well anyway, I apologize that it's been a while since my last post, and that I've left a few loose ends hanging. This past month has been nightmarish. Just after a whirlwind of exhibitions, traveling, a move, a wedding, and many other "real life" occasions, my wife fell very ill (we're told it's very possible she was about 3 days away from death had we not gotten help when we did). She ended up needing major emergency surgery followed by 10 days in the hospital and a VERY long road to recovery. She's doing very well now, thank God, but the recovery process is a very time intensive uphill battle. Needless to say my attention has been usurped away from blogging for a bit...

I've been keeping as much of a foot in the art world as I can during this time, and I'm extremely thankful for a coincidental break in the action that has allowed me to devote my attention more fully to family right now. I will be trying to catch up on blogging soon, as there is much on which to catch up (and no preposition in sight to end on! ...wait a minute...): My recent installation and accompanying artist talk, discussion forum on Art and Faith, and special contemplative service, as well as 2 very exciting upcoming interviews about my work! Coming up in the fall are still my solo show at Andover Newton Theological School's Sarly Gallery, as well as the continuing ed. class on Art and Worship I will be teaching at Drew Theological School.

I'm looking forward to resuming some normality (not to mention studio hours that don't fall between midnight and the awakening of my bright-eyed, bushy-tailed two year old!). Thank you to those praying for my wife's health. We certainly feel it!

John D. Caputo writes about experience coming alive as experience at all when we reach a limit experience and confront the impossible. This, he says, is the basis for true religion. ...Let's just say things have seemed very religious of late! But that's the beauty of faith. It necessarily exists most when it seems it couldn't possibly, and carries us through to the very experiences that most motivate me as an artist and a human.

Upcoming Events at the Intersection of Art and Faith!

Sunday, Thursday, Saturday...

My recent endeavors coming to fruition

"As Above, So Below," 2014
TRINITY UNITED CHURCH
118 King George Rd, Warren, NJ

3 EVENTS NEXT WEEK:
As Artist of the Month at TUC, the church commissioned me to create an interactive, site specific, new media installation. With this I will be leading 3 exciting events this coming week. You can follow the links below to their respective Facebook Events pages, but more importantly come on out and join me for one or all of them!

1. Artist Talk and Reception
   This Sunday 7/20, Immediately following 10:30 am service (c. 11:30 am)
   I will be speaking about my installation and other work on display, as well as the evolution of my practice in light of the themes of art and faith. All are welcome to join me for the service prior to the talk as well. There will be food and drink (church folks are good about that...)


2. Discussion Forum on Contemporary Issues of Art and Faith
   Next Thursday 7/24, 7-9 pm
   I will be leading a presentation and space for open discussion about the role of art in a spiritual context, and strategies for its effective use within religious institutions.


3. Contemplative Service
   Next Saturday 7/26, 6-7 pm
   I will be facilitating a service of guided and free Contemplation/Meditation aided by my artwork. We will borrow from traditional mystical strategies as well as contemporary phenomenological thought to open ourselves to a new experience of the divine.

 

I hope you can make it out for these events (each at the church address provided above). They are all FREE and open to the public.

* I promise an intriguing set of events regardless of your spiritual leanings, but for my more theologically inquisitive friends, Trinity United Church is an Open and Affirming/More Light congregation (supportive of the LGBTQ community) that combines the Presbyterian and United Church of Christ denominations. It is known for its radical hospitality, inclusivity, and its history of supporting the arts. Every week they welcome guests by saying, "no matter who you are or where you are in life's journey, you are welcome here!"
And so you are.

Continue on to the final post on this project here