By popular demand, San Francisco-based media designer and artist Aaron Koblin returns to Gray Area Beacon (GAB) for a second showing of his solo exhibition, which was first displayed at GAB’s inaugural launch party in late-April.
Koblin will lead a walk-through discussion of his featured work following an introductory talk by GAB cofounder Peter Hirshberg about the history of computer art.

Koblin’s Redux show features four digital pieces that explore how communication, online collaboration, and digital labor marketplaces map on the shifting terrain—both physical and virtual—of a globalized world.

Two of his pieces at GAB—New York Talk Exchange and Flight Patterns—are visualizations of large, abstract data sets that trace and illuminate human networks and interaction.

Recently featured in the New York MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit, New York Talk Exchange animates the flow of information—measured in volume of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) traffic—between New York and cities around the world. The magnitude of a city’s glow scales with the volume of digital communication flowing from it.
Flight Patterns, which won the National Science Foundation first place prize for Science Visualization, traces the path of airline flights in the United States in color and form. The result is a beautiful weave of color filaments that delineate the shape of the US.
The other two pieces in the show—Sheep Market and Ten Thousand Cents—are large scale digital drawings compiled by anonymous online laborers around the world through the Amazon Mechanical Turk digital labor marketplace, which pays workers a nominal fee to complete tasks that computers are unable to do.

Full press release is available here in pdf format:

http://grayareagallery.org//jette/GAB_Koblin.pdf 

PROGRAM

6:00 -7:00 p.m.: Mixer/Refreshments

7:00pm Peter Hirshberg “History of Computer Art’

By the late 1970’s computer graphics and painting systems became widely available--- dealing a terrific setback to the possibility of computer art. The paint brush, an old medium, had been replicated on computers, a new medium. The brush had been replaced…with the brush. Not a breakthrough.  Marshall McLuhan often observed that old media are the content of new media until we get around to figuring out the real meaning of a new medium.

Before we all lived with computers, before there was the crutch of computer graphic systems, artists who wanted to create in the computing medium had to invent something entirely original---a bona fide new idea---  and then build it from scratch with code and hardware. 

Followed by Artist Talk with Aaron Koblin

Followed by Artist reception with music by Alland Byallo (Kontrol, liebe, detail)

10:00 p.m - late: After-party with music by Cosmo Vitelli
(Paris, France (astralwerks))