UMaine Hosting Creative New Media Science, Art, Technology Collective from Slovenia
Contact: Raphael DiLuzio, 299-0730, George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — The collective BridA, a Slovenian team of new media artists, will spend two weeks on the UMaine campus, Oct. 13-31, creating a new work as they conduct workshops and public lectures, and creating art from campus resources in science, art and technology, as well as the immediate geographic area and culture of the university.
“The University of Maine is excited to have the Slovenian Artists Collective ‘BridA’ on campus creating a unique artistic work that combines scientific data and methods, new media technology and aesthetic form,” says Raphael DiLuzio, associate professor of new media and coordinator of the event. “As ‘New Visualizers,’ their focus is to creatively combine and convert methods, data and other aspects of science, art and technology into an engaging aesthetic visual art form.”
BridA will give two public presentations, one as an introduction, and the other showing the results of their work. Their work manifests itself as both digital video and audio and analog painting, determined by the data the four-person group assembles. They also will do a gallery presentation of their final work, which includes analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog paintings, at the Clark House Gallery at 128 Hammond St. in downtown Bangor.
Their first public presentation will be Tuesday, Oct. 18, 6:30-8:30 p.m. in the Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium, Room 165 of the Engineering and Science Research Building. The presentation will introduce the collective BridA, their work and process to the university community and general public.
Their second presentation will be Thursday, Oct. 27, 6:30-8:30 p.m. in the Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium. This presentation will show the results of their two-weeks work on a new creative project. BridA will work with data and information gathered from engineering, atmospheric and quaternary studies, spatial information and astronomical sciences disciplines.
Researchers from these university programs will meet with members of BridA during their stay to provide data sets that BridA will use to “visualize science.” According to DiLuzio, one example of BritA’s work is converting scientific data to mathematical equations, then using a computer to designate how paint will is be applied to canvas.
“It’s a truly unique approach to human-computer interface,” says DiLuzio. BridA also converts analog information, that which can be seen, sensed or heard, to digital format, an electronic system of code that represents and reproduces sounds, sights or sensations.
Depending on the outcome of the work, the artists plan to present a second exhibit at the Clark House Gallery on Friday, Oct. 28, 5:30-8:00 p.m.
Members of BridA are Jurij Pavlica, Klemen Brun, Sendi Mango and Tom Kersevan, who met as students at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice in the mid-1990s.
BridA describes its artwork this way: “The sense of transforming gathered information into codified notes or modules is the research of new idiomatic expressions. The sources that would generally be used to form an artwork are mathematically converted into sketches, which are not dependant of our temporary perception and instead are a standardized copy of a chosen source.
“The main objective of the research is to intentionally alienate ourselves as artists from the direct construction of the art piece by using different intermediaries, in this example they are measurement instruments and certain scientific methods of statistical gathering of data from the surroundings,” the group says. “Even though this system might seem limited basing only on the readings we get from the instruments, on the contrary, it gives a completely different view, ultimately the data gathered and elaborated end up forming the artwork that would not be possible in a more classical manner.