VISUAL ARTS

A peculiar decades-long collaboration between two gentlemen from different centuries, resulting in a multimedia interactive art exhibition combining historical and new media technologies to create beauty and stimulate a sense of wonder.

Virtual Kinetics, and the Art of the Image attests that technology can be used to both create beauty and stimulate a sense of wonder. By combining historical and new media technologies to create interactive art, artist Dave Gordon achieves effects which are at once magical, beautiful and understandable.

Much of the work presented in Virtual Kinetics, and the Art of the Image represents a peculiar decades-long collaboration between two gentlemen from different centuries, multimedia artist and educator Dave Gordon and Victorian inventor and photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Gordon continues the artistic work of “the father of film” by exploiting cutting edge technologies such as micro controllers and Hall-effect sensors to make Muybridge’s motion studies interactive in a three dimensional environment. Inspired by Muybridge’s images or wholly original, Gordon presents work in this show which lays bare the technology that all digital media uses to display images and mimic continuous motion. While beautiful and educational the work is often provocative, challenging contemporary, as well as Victorian norms.

Gordon, who teaches at Salem State University and North Shore Community College, studied new media art at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is also the curator and creator of the Eadweard Muybridge On-line Archive (muybridge.org).