Red Eyed Sky Walkers: Silver Series

Red Eyed Sky Walkers: Silver Series

Networked environment

Gateways: Art and Networked Culture exhibition
May 12 to September 25, 2011

Watch the trailer on Vimeo.

The work of Jenny Marketou Red Eyed Sky Walkers: Silver Series 2011 is a networked environment created on site and set in the courtyard in front of the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia. The environment which according to the artist touches upon the vital role of the viewer in directly incorporated in the process of the development of her work consists of the fluid, shifting and ephemeral ecology of 49 Silver Mylar reflective meteorological balloons which are attached on the ground by several yards of transparent plastic tethers. As guests at the museum are sitting under the shelter of the balloons they can hear the mesmerizing patterns of the wind as it blows through the Mylar surface when the balloon touches each other creating a real condition for a sharing experience and rest.

But aside from the silver balloons the environment features nine wireless network video cameras, which are attached under some of the balloons. The nine cameras survey all the aerial activity between visitors and the environment and aided by the Internet they transmit live streaming video to the gallery space, which is located on the 5th floor of the museum. There through a software specially designed for this project enables the artist to seek audiovisual material and other data from global networks of social media like wikileaks, youtube, tweet, flicker arranged in thematic archives which range from images of our self, video reportage, images which convey enforced and repeated rules and codes in the control of crowds, in political and economic upheavals, in administrative apparatuses and military technology, and this heterogeneous and fluid context of images is simultaneously reassembled, manipulated with the streaming video from the cameras and displayed as a single video projection divided into nine channels.

In the spirit of transparency the artist like a contemporary documentarian wants to make us look through the collective gaze of the culture of reality TV, embedded journalism and you tube the uncertain state of images and other universal networks created out of audio, visual and electronic communication which have been normalized and to ask us to critically question the profoundly ambivalent about rhetorics of truth and strategies of authenticity in those images.

Jaron Lanier in his text, You Are Not A Gadget, calls for a more humanist approach to
the way we participate in network culture. Red Eyed Sky Walkers: Silver Series speak
to this desire and reveals the human in the networked interface.

Red Eyed Sky Walkers: Silver Series at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia (European Capital of Culture, 20011) has been commissioned by Kumu Art Museum and sponsored by Goethe Institute for Gateways: Art and Networked Culture exhibition curated by Sabine Himmelsbach from May 12 through September 25, 2011.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition is published edited by Sabine Himmelsbach


http://blog.goethe.de/gateways/index.php?user_language=en

http://www.crumbweb.org/

http://www.goethe.de/ins/ee/tal/etindex.htm?wt_sc=tallinn

http://www.ekm.ee/kumu.php