David Stout & Cory Metcalf Exhibit, Zane Bennett Contemporary Art Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

DAVID STOUT & CORY METCALF

Cory Metcalf and David Stout share a diverse set of technical and aesthetic skills that include backgrounds in media systems programming, performance, choreographic composition, music composition, video production, animation, writing, drawing and painting. The pair utilize this diverse skill-set to explore the artistic potential of generative systems in the wake of a steady increase of digital processing power. These technological developments provide unprecedented complexity in the design of recursive audio-visual structures. Stout and Metcalf have extended the pioneering work with real-time analog systems by earlier video artists, coupled with a new means for the direct trans-coding of image into sound and sound into image. Their emphasis on new media methodologies including algorithmic programming, artificial life and networked performance systems underlies a strong belief in the power of kinetic forms of expression. The resulting works are viewed as artifacts generated by artistic concepts embedded in the design and behavior of the software itself. This emphasis on ephemeral events and unique, often unrepeatable, aesthetic experiences also serves the artists’ creation of more traditional art objects, prints and installations.

The underlying ideas behind these works are predicated on a deepening investigation of the dialogue between art and science related to network dynamics, artificial intelligence, genetic modeling, information theory and ecological thinking. This is reflected in our increased understanding of the intricacies connecting dynamic global systems as a re-imagination of contemporary creation myth. The potential to move beyond an illustrative metaphor by employing a genetic engine capable of generating an evolutionary synthetic cinema, recasts the artist as a co-determinant within a dynamic system. This does not so much eliminate the artist’s hand as it extends the artist’s reach. The lineage supporting this inquiry can be seen in historic examples including Father Louis Bertrand Castle’s, Occular Harpsichord, Luigi Russolo’s Manifesto - “The Art of Noise”, the visual and written works of Wassily Kandinsky, Woody & Steina Vasulka’s lexicon of analog/digital video synthesis, Norbert Wiener’s contribution of the science of cybernetics, John Cage’s illuminating experiments with indeterminate process and the legacy of the “Happening”, which embraced the power of immersive experience and helped loosen strict disciplinary boundaries and the hold of linear models of dramatic structure often imposed upon the time-based arts. The result is a daring creative exploration that weds contemporary conceptual strategies with a sensuous sonic-visual language mindful of modernist aesthetic traditions.