exhibitions - remembrancer

Remembrancer: An Installation by
Alberto Gaitán
April 14 - May 26, 2007

Curator's Office is pleased to present an innovative project in the micro-gallery opening April 14 at 6:30 in conjunction with Washington, DC's city-wide ColorField.remix project:

Remembrancer, n.
One who, or that which, serves to bring to, or keep in, mind; a memento; a memorial; a reminder.

Media artist Alberto Gaitán is internationally known for his sophisticated and challenging sound work. In Curator's Office, Gaitán creates an installation entitled Remembrancer. The exhibition runs from April 14 - May 26, 2007. An opening reception for the artist is scheduled for Saturday, April 14 from 6:30 - 8 pm in conjunction with the joint ColorField.remix receptions at the 1515 14th Street Arts Building.

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Over the first four weeks of the exhibition, three networked machines with robotic arms will deposit paint little-by-little on three panels. The amount of paint placed at a given moment shall be controlled by a computer program that will be interpreting data from gallery-installed sensors and from Internet sources. Along with the daily changing accumulation of paint, a field of sound will be similarly generated in response to the same data. The completed work--an accretion of overlapping monochrome fields of color and sound--will be exhibited over the last two weeks of the exhibition. The machine-mediated process provokes questions of authorship and translation.

Remembrancer confronts the loss inherent in transformation, the distortions introduced by the medium onto which--and the assumptions in effect when--memory is transcribed, the inevitable simplification of phenomena that accompanies acts of observation, and the spacial, temporal and cultural resonance of events.

Alberto Gaitán is a composer and sound artist who is also a programmer and systems consultant. He helped conceive the notorious Washington Project for the Arts Ritz Project in 1982. Since 1985, he has been a core member of the international public art collective, Art Attack. In 1988 he founded NegEntrope, an electro-acoustic ensemble and co-founded SLURrr in 1994 with composers/performers Doug Quin and Mike Wingo. He founded selforganizingsystem, a post-media ensemble combining audio and video with computer aided interaction. He received the Best of Arlington Community Award for New Music in 1997 and has been commissioned numerous times in America and Europe to create sound installations such as Loci (1998 - Arlington, VA) and Loci 2.0 (1999 - Aachen, Germany). He served as a NEA panelist in 1995 for the New Forms Regional Grant Program.

Check out www.selforganizingsystem.org

The artist would like to thank the following individuals for their support of this project: Ken Ashton, Gareth Branwyn, Craig Cahoon, Thomas Edwards, Brock Emerson, Sal and Anatole Fiorito, Steven Funk & Chris Hamlin-Beight, the Gaitán families, James Huckenpahler, Andrea Hull, John Maurer, Tom McGuire, Breck Brunson, Byron Peck, Andrea Pollan, Jim Sanborn, Solarbotics, Victoria Straub, Making Things LLC, Clifford Wheeler, and Joe Wills.