Curated by Kathy Cleland
Artists: Patricia Piccinini, Troy Innocent
Exhibition Venues:
Artspace, Auckland, NZ: 3-27 February 1999.
Waikato Museum of Art and History, Hamilton, NZ: 30 October 1999 – 22 May 2000.
Troy Innocent – Iconica
ARTificial LIFE showcases the work of two of Australia’s leading new media artists, Patricia Piccinini and Troy Innocent.
Patricia Piccinini’s 11 monitor video installation Horizon presents the viewer with an endless, scrupulously fabricated, perfect moment. Despite the constant motion of the waves in this sea-and-sky-scape, the sun never gets any closer to setting: time is frozen. Horizon deals with definitions of the natural and the artificial, providing a vision of an ideal nature that is distinctly synthetic. Horizon touches on ideas of distance and boundaries at a time when geographical distance, the horizon of traditional global trade and travel, no longer defines the World, having been displaced by a digital horizon, promising calm seas perhaps too perfect to be real. Piccinini’s Sheen offers the experience of acceleration through a computer generated velodrome.
Troy Innocent’s Iconica is an interactive virtual world which has the capacity to evolve, change and mutate through human interaction and its own evolutionary process. Visitors can create, construct and manipulate objects, influence the evolution of societies, and discover new language elements, communicating with the residing life forms through the iconic language on which the world is based. Iconica is simultaneously a cyberspace, a mindspace, an abstract world, and a stylised reality.