Data

May 16, 2013
Art|Sci Gallery
CNSI 5th floor

Fallen Fruit presents a set of their Public Fruit Maps paired with their 2010 video, “The Loneliest Fruit in the World.” The maps are one of the collaboration’s signature projects: mapping all the fruit trees that grow in or over public space in neighborhoods around the world to which they are invited. The maps are hand-drawn and distributed free of copyright; they serve as guides for foraging but more importantly as visionary representations of what we hope to see: alternative urban spaces that engender new forms of sharing and thereby create new public experiences. “The Loneliest Fruit in the World” addresses a different kind of public fruit, berries that grow wild in the Arctic. The lingonberry, the salmonberry and the blueberry grow without any human involvement, and for a few short weeks become the site of intense activity as people flock to pick them on all public land. Shot in a residency in Tromsø, Norway, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, the video follows a group of Norwegians through a beautiful, spare landscape; while picking, they negotiate the relation between solitude, gleaning and company.

ARTIST BIO: Fallen Fruit is a long-term art collaboration that began by mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. The collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects, site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world. By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. From participatory performances such as Public Fruit Jams and Fruit Meditations, to ongoing indexical work such as Public Fruit Maps and curated exhibitions that reorganize the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing their collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject, the three artists of Fallen Fruit — David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young — deploy fruit as a lens through which to see the world.

Opening March 7
Lecture @ 2pm
Exhibition Openings: 5-7pm
Location: Lecture @ UCLA Broad Art Center, room 5240, Exhibition @ CNSI Gallery

Exposure is an exhibition of work by Mike Phillips, Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, School of Art & Media at Plymouth University. Mike Phillips is director of i-DAT, a Principal Supervisor for the Planetary Collegium and a supervisor of the Transtechnology Research Groups. His R&D orbits digital architectures and transmedia publishing, and is manifest in a series of ‘Operating Systems’ to dynamically manifest ‘data’ as experience in order to enhance perspectives on a complex world. The year that Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection was the same year Fujifilm moved from film production to beauty products1. This did not just mark a technological shift from film grain to nanoparticles but also a massive cultural shift - a shift from capturing the face on film to the embedding of ‘film’ in the face. The thing that once froze the face in an eternal youthful smile is now the anti-aging nanoparticle that preserves the face we wear. Barthes described the face on film as representing “a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced”2. Now this absolute state is closer to hand and we will walk around wearing our old photo albums as our face, peeling away the frames like layers of dead skin. Our essence, like Garbo’s, will not degrade or deteriorate. ‘Viewed as a transition’ Exposure explores the deterioration of the flesh through the temporality of the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). From the 60th of a second exposure of the Kodak Brownie camera to the 20-minute scan of the AFM - the closer the subject the longer the ‘exposure’. Incorporating data from an AFM scan of a basal cell carcinoma Exposure explores the convergence of ideologies constructed around imaging technologies. Through a subtle interaction the viewer conjures up a dynamic data/image of a skin cancer - over exposed to the sun - or the intense light of the camera flashgun.