Congratulations to Jodi Stuart, for her Third Place win in CENTER’S Excellence in Multimedia Award for her project, Super Synthetic. The Excellence in Multimedia Award recognizes outstanding photo-media artists and storytellers working in a variety of media processes and subject matter. The award supports a project that utilizes photography, video, installation, or other elements that expand on traditional methods of displaying and experiencing photography. Winners receive an opportunity to be part of the Winners Exhibition at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, complimentary participation in Review Santa Fe, and an Online exhibition at VisitCenter.org
Juror Carrie Levy – Creative Director, The New York Times shares her insights:
As technology evolves so does the definition of multimedia art. However, it’s not the tools that make lasting art, it is how the artist uses these tools to express experiences and ideas. Reviewing the work for the CENTER Multimedia Award has been both creatively challenging and enlightening. Today people are not only being creative with media processes, they are reinventing new ways to share and tell facts and stories. The work that caught my attention are artists who are pushing multimedia forward in unexpected and imaginative ways, and at the same time touching pressing issues that both define and divide us.
Jodi Stuart’s work Super Synthetic is a departure from the typical definition of multimedia. Stuart’s work starts with pixelated 2D images of computer glitches from a public satellite feed. From there she creates 3D plastic models representing the chaos and beauty of haptic feedback. These sculptures are hard to describe, and are oddly splendid. Stuart’s sculptures make us question the images that are being repeated and coded behind the scenes of everyday technological advances. Most people do not realize that these processes exist and her work makes us experience the sublime in visualizing technology.
Carrie Levy started her career as a photographer and photo editor. Today she is a Creative Director who concentrates on experiences and storytelling with emerging technology tools. Carrie has worked as a creative lead at Airbnb, Instagram, and Apple. She has worked at various prestigious publications including Wired, GQ, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and more.
Super Synthetic
Barthes wrote that a photographic image invites the viewer to ‘take-on’ the body of the person holding the camera, or in other words to assimilate their point of view. My work plays with the effects of ‘taking-on’ the disembodied cameras of visualizing technologies. Where the person presumed to be behind the camera is either absent or non-existent.
I use ‘camera-less’ photography to create pixelated digital images, which I combine with 3D forms. My 2D images are assembled from a public satellite feed, observed over time, while capturing the diagonal bands of signal distortion. These distortions happen when the signal is interrupted and the algorithm continues to print color pixels with no input. Each square of my 2D images equates to one pixel. Even though the resulting image is in essence a computer glitch, there is a feel of harmony or pattern that looks purposeful, designed, human. The ‘wire-frame’ aesthetic of 3D computer modeling informs my plastic relief forms. By combining 2D and 3D elements I aim to activate the space between to engender optical/haptic effects.
Through Stuart’s practice, she explores aspects of virtual culture in relation to its aesthetic of hyper-stimulation and sensory overload. Stuart’s works play on aspects of the virtual versus the physical, using the tools and materials of high-tech/digital culture combined with the handmade and tactile. Stuart aims to create works that simultaneously allude to craft traditions, weaving, knitting, basket making ; as well as virtual space, neural networks.
Through Jodi Stuart’s practice, she explores aspects of virtual culture in relation to its aesthetic of hyper-stimulation and sensory overload. Stuart’s works play on aspects of the virtual versus the physical, using the tools and materials of high-tech/digital culture combined with the handmade and tactile. Stuart aims to create works that simultaneously allude to craft traditions, weaving, knitting, basket making ; as well as virtual space, neural networks, cloud computing, and biomimicry.
