Past Exhibition
Marina Zurkow and Ben Kauffman: NeoGeo/Landfill Club
September 10–December 1, 2014
Curatorial Statement
New media artist Marina Zurkow fosters new modes of creative inquiry in the sciences and foments citizen science through art. Her artistic research practice suggests new roles for art in the university, and for science in para-academic contexts. In NeoGeo/Landfill Club, she continues her investigation of the ecological impact of petrochemicals through a series of digital animations and a growing installation that invites public contributions of discarded plastic objects.
Developed in collaboration with Daniel Shiffman, NeoGeo simulates drilling for oil, as though drilling through the four floors of the vertically stacked New Media Artspace galleries. Literally "drilling down" for a deep inquiry into the relationship between petroleum ("rock oil" in Latin) and the Deep Time of geological formation, NeoGeo uses mathematical visualization tools, combined with painstakingly hand-drawn fragments of rock, to render the unseen seen. The series of four quicktime movies is based on procedural animations created in Processing, an open source programming language and development environment.
While NeoGeo explores the Deep Time of the geologic record, Landfill Club, co-created with Ben Kauffman, is a social practice project that "drills up" into future Deep Time, looking at long lasting relations between petrochemicals and humans. To acknowledge how these new and evolving forms of chemical and cultural intimacy affect the future of bodies and geology, viewers are invited to adopt a piece of plastic from their personal waste streams, and live with it long enough to get to know it. In the process, participants will learn about its chemical structure and future prospects, before submitting it to a growing archive of objects on display in the New Media Artspace.
Artist Biography
Marina Zurkow is a new media artist who lives and works in New York where she is on faculty at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum; FACT, Liverpool; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wave Hill, New York; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Bennington College, Vermont; Borusan Collection, Istanbul; Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon; Marian Spore, New York; 01SJ Biennial, San Jose; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Creative Time, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Transmediale, Berlin; Eyebeam, New York; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; Rotterdam Film Festival, The Netherlands; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others. She is the recipient of a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and has been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital.
Ben Kauffman is a multi-disciplinary artist and co-founding Artistic Director of the trans-media performance group Manual Cinema, whose work has been commissioned and exhibited by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the University of Chicago, the Detroit Center for the Arts, the Future of Storytelling Conference, and Duke University. He holds a Master's degree from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and is based in Brooklyn, NY.
Daniel Shiffman is Assistant Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He is the author of Learning Processing: A Beginner's Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction and The Nature of Code, an open source book about simulating natural phenomena in Processing.
NeoGeo/Landfill Club is curated by Katherine Behar, Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College. The exhibition is made possible by support from the Baruch Computing and Technology Center (BCTC) and the Department of Fine and Performing Arts.
All images appear courtesy of the artist.
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The gallery is open to the public by appointment during regular library hours. Please contact newmediaartspace@gmail.com to arrange a visit.
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151 E. 25th StreetNew York, NY 10010
Located in the Newman Library
About Us
The New Media Artspace is a teaching exhibition space in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College, CUNY. Housed in the Newman Library, the New Media Artspace showcases curated experimental media and interdisciplinary artworks by international artists, students, alumni, and faculty.
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