IMMERSION
LACDA - Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts
102 West Fifth Street - Los Angeles
January 12-February 24, 2012
Stemming from her lifelong work as a painter, Norwegian artist Pia Myrvold creates new work that branches out into a formidable interdisciplinary undertaking using electronic media as a springboard for the intermingling of forms. The pulsing, looping animations and sound are unmistakable in their musical quality, the structure of the installation utilizes large scale sculptural form and there is an architectural aspect as the viewer engages the work by walking through it. The end result is an immersive and interactive environment where the viewer encounters a multi-dimensional interface that is a product of emergent technology.
Throughout her career, Myrvold has embraced these new technological developments and integrated them into her work. She has a large opus of multi-faceted creations of hybrid “in-formations” between various forms of artistic practice—art, fashion, video, performance and interactive technology. With each new hybrid, the artist combines information in a cross pollinated sensory experience that includes intellectual as well as physical interactivity. Ultimately the artist/viewer authorship is blurred through participatory interface design.
This deep awareness of the importance of “interface” is clearly the conceptual force driving Myrvold’s work. The place where her artwork and viewer engage is not the static one-way gaze of viewer and painting. Myrvold’s interfaces blur the common boundary between art objects and their viewers such that they act together to open up the point of connection between them. In this case the boundaries explored are between the individual and the devices surrounding them, a cogent corollary for the way we are immersed in ubiquitous technologies across which data or communication flows. Indeed this work functions as an aesthetic remake of the gestalt effect of smart phones, 3D cinema, digital TV, iPads, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Netflix and the endless stream of connected gadgets that constitute bulk of our current culture.
While engaging with “Flow” the immersive experience of emergent technologies is carefully guided by the artist. The ever-changing abstract images, rhythmic textures and chromatic structures of light are inspired by higher minded aspirations. Myrvold’s ongoing research in 3D virtual space engenders a unique mental and aesthetic awareness, as the artist plays with virtual space alongside actual physical space to illuminate what we have not been able to see in traditional media. We are not put in front of a console as is common in many interactive works; rather “Flow” builds parallel or tangent references between the realms of physical and imaginative presence.
The artist has referred to the words of Charles Baudelaire as a key to understanding this artistic process that lead to the creation of such an ambitious large-scale video installation:
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything; the secret and intimate connection between things, correspondences and analogies.
From ideological Internet-based projects, involving input from the public to determine the specific outcome of “cyber-couture” clothing, to her implementation of advanced computer-generated programming to create ever-changing visual patterns of light, form and color, her work has always been about “interfacing.” The pinnacle of this artistic development can be seen in her projects presented at LACDA.
— Rex Bruce, January 2011
