Some photos I took at Cody Trepte's show (for Alan Turing), at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts' Gulf & Western Gallery, 721 Broadway. More about the show is here. At the top is a "binary cross stitch" similar to the one Trepte had in the Infinite Fill Show a while back. The middle image is an essay by pioneering computer scientist and codebreaker Turing with everything but the 1s and 0s removed (detail of a 33 page installation). The bottom image, another detail, is the negative space (spaces between words) in another Turing essay. The show is a non-standard take on "computer art" in the gallery context. The formal vocabulary is reductive (or accumulative) minimalism a la Yayoi Kusama's airmail stamp paintings, and while the subject matter is the language of both the computer and the computer scientist, it's treated not in a literal way but rather as an absence, or anti-content. As the press release explains, Turing was gay and accused in the not so swinging '50s of "acts of gross indecency." His "sentence" was an "experimental hormone therapy" consisting of estrogen injections to "reduce the libido." He died a couple of years later, apparently a suicide, but with questions lingering. Trepte's work is thus not the typical Buzz Lightyear computer-fetish celebration but rather an examination of the repressed, fragile, elegiac back story to the "machine that's changed our lives."
The exhibition's up through Saturday, Jan. 6. Gallery hours are 10am through 7pm weekdays, and noon to 5pm on Saturdays.
tom im struggling with this stuff a bit...
cos i want to see computer art that isn't exhibited on a computer, and while this isn't computer art i dunno it seems superficial. with a process like this, why mess with turing as a subject?? to me it's arbitrary output is completely at odds with turing's work - an extremely insightful approach into the nature of numbers with [in his mind] applications towards the understanding and hopeful emulation of human consciousness.
maybe it's an idol worshipping thing cos to me turing is pretty much the Biggest Playa In Da Game and anything made about him would probably seem like it hasn't done enough. but in this case i feel like i wouldn't gain anything from seeing the work and much of it [according to the press release] actually seems to misunderstand its own subject matter.
btw i think he did dream in code: i've read that turing was comfortable doing base-32 arithmetic in his head. talk about a nerd!
I'm reminded of the joke about the old man in the powdered wig found in Beethoven's crypt carefully erasing musical scores. "What are you doing in here?" someone said. "Decomposing," he said.
But seriously...
There's 2 bodies of work here that kind of get smeared together. The cross stitches ask us to look at code as pure form and are not particularly "deconstructive." The erased texts are meant as a kind of protest mingled with process art and are also pretty seductive as objects.
I usually gripe about art that relies on a back story to be complete but in this case I'll give the artist his "repressed history of computing." John Nash was also gay, or bi, but you'd never know it from A Beautiful Mind, the movie. It's freakin Russell Crowe and his wife is Jennifer Connelly!
I'm for this show because Turing was all about meaning and look where his talent got him. Compulsory hormone treatments! If someone wants to highlight his texts in a combination fan tribute and act of negation (a la Rauschenberg's erased de Kooning drawing), I think there's room for that.
The peripheral stuff of computing, the things on paper, the markings, have their own presence and constitute a kind of mute, parallel language that an artist can illuminate for the rest of us. A bit like JG Ballard calling corporate memos and charts the true literature of our age.
I guess I'm saying there's different ways to pay homage to Turing. But it's true his virtues are largely left out.
jesus - who let the dogs out on the beethoven punchline? that was ripe. more jokes AND paintings of american mammals in the future please!
gotcha with the homage thing, i guess what im saying is i find the back story - creative guy who's repressed homosexuality got him killed [sickening as it sounds to non-Republicans] - historically a bit common. i think his theoretical ideas, ideas that have little to do with binary numbers per se, are far more worthy of inspection through art practice especially since they are still little understood by most artists who use modern day Turing-complete machines [i.e. every computer on the planet].
That will be *your* show. Looking forward to the front story.
oh, yeah...good point :)
another turing inspired/ focused work that was in nyc almost a year ago: story teller, by tom jennings
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Some photos I took at Cody Trepte's show (for Alan Turing), at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts' Gulf & Western Gallery, 721 Broadway. More about the show is here. At the top is a "binary cross stitch" similar to the one Trepte had in the Infinite Fill Show a while back. The middle image is an essay by pioneering computer scientist and codebreaker Turing with everything but the 1s and 0s removed (detail of a 33 page installation). The bottom image, another detail, is the negative space (spaces between words) in another Turing essay. The show is a non-standard take on "computer art" in the gallery context. The formal vocabulary is reductive (or accumulative) minimalism a la Yayoi Kusama's airmail stamp paintings, and while the subject matter is the language of both the computer and the computer scientist, it's treated not in a literal way but rather as an absence, or anti-content. As the press release explains, Turing was gay and accused in the not so swinging '50s of "acts of gross indecency." His "sentence" was an "experimental hormone therapy" consisting of estrogen injections to "reduce the libido." He died a couple of years later, apparently a suicide, but with questions lingering. Trepte's work is thus not the typical Buzz Lightyear computer-fetish celebration but rather an examination of the repressed, fragile, elegiac back story to the "machine that's changed our lives."
The exhibition's up through Saturday, Jan. 6. Gallery hours are 10am through 7pm weekdays, and noon to 5pm on Saturdays.
- tom moody 1-05-2007 4:11 am
tom im struggling with this stuff a bit...
cos i want to see computer art that isn't exhibited on a computer, and while this isn't computer art i dunno it seems superficial. with a process like this, why mess with turing as a subject?? to me it's arbitrary output is completely at odds with turing's work - an extremely insightful approach into the nature of numbers with [in his mind] applications towards the understanding and hopeful emulation of human consciousness.
maybe it's an idol worshipping thing cos to me turing is pretty much the Biggest Playa In Da Game and anything made about him would probably seem like it hasn't done enough. but in this case i feel like i wouldn't gain anything from seeing the work and much of it [according to the press release] actually seems to misunderstand its own subject matter.
btw i think he did dream in code: i've read that turing was comfortable doing base-32 arithmetic in his head. talk about a nerd!
- p.d. (guest) 1-06-2007 6:51 am
I'm reminded of the joke about the old man in the powdered wig found in Beethoven's crypt carefully erasing musical scores. "What are you doing in here?" someone said. "Decomposing," he said.
But seriously...
There's 2 bodies of work here that kind of get smeared together. The cross stitches ask us to look at code as pure form and are not particularly "deconstructive." The erased texts are meant as a kind of protest mingled with process art and are also pretty seductive as objects.
I usually gripe about art that relies on a back story to be complete but in this case I'll give the artist his "repressed history of computing." John Nash was also gay, or bi, but you'd never know it from A Beautiful Mind, the movie. It's freakin Russell Crowe and his wife is Jennifer Connelly!
I'm for this show because Turing was all about meaning and look where his talent got him. Compulsory hormone treatments! If someone wants to highlight his texts in a combination fan tribute and act of negation (a la Rauschenberg's erased de Kooning drawing), I think there's room for that.
The peripheral stuff of computing, the things on paper, the markings, have their own presence and constitute a kind of mute, parallel language that an artist can illuminate for the rest of us. A bit like JG Ballard calling corporate memos and charts the true literature of our age.
I guess I'm saying there's different ways to pay homage to Turing. But it's true his virtues are largely left out.
- tom moody 1-06-2007 8:00 am
jesus - who let the dogs out on the beethoven punchline? that was ripe. more jokes AND paintings of american mammals in the future please!
gotcha with the homage thing, i guess what im saying is i find the back story - creative guy who's repressed homosexuality got him killed [sickening as it sounds to non-Republicans] - historically a bit common. i think his theoretical ideas, ideas that have little to do with binary numbers per se, are far more worthy of inspection through art practice especially since they are still little understood by most artists who use modern day Turing-complete machines [i.e. every computer on the planet].
- anonymous (guest) 1-07-2007 4:55 am
That will be *your* show. Looking forward to the front story.
- tom moody 1-07-2007 8:58 am
oh, yeah...good point :)
- p.d. (guest) 1-07-2007 2:33 pm
another turing inspired/ focused work that was in nyc almost a year ago: story teller, by tom jennings
- spd (guest) 1-09-2007 11:39 pm