OSU Museum of Art to host lecture, roundtable conversation featuring digital artist Jason Salavon
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
The Oklahoma State University Museum of Art is pleased to announce the following lecture and roundtable conversation by Jason Salavon, a nationally-renowned contemporary software artist breaking ground at the intersection of art and technology.
Thursday, April 23, 6 pm
Guest lecture: On Visualizing Culture
Student Union Theater
Friday, April 24, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm
Roundtable Conversation: Divergent Paths in the Digital Arts
OSU Museum of Art (720 S. Husband Street in downtown Stillwater)
Visual art, information technology, and daily life converge in Jason Salavon’s work. He uses software processes of his own design to transform masses of source images – real-estate listing photographs and high-school yearbook portraits for example – into generalized images that take form as photographs, video installations, or continuous, real-time feeds on the Internet.
One such work, Rainbow Aggregator (2012), is on view in the Student Union as a result of a 2014 collaboration between the OSU Museum of Art, the Student Union, and OSU alumni Carl and Marilynn Thoma. The artwork is a continuous, real-time representation of “trending topics” sourced from popular Internet sites such as Twitter and Google. Based on current online keyword searches, tags, and posts, Salavon created a software process that translates this stream of data into a pixelated rainbow of constantly shifting words and images. About 30 trends are shown on the screen at a given time, all of which are updated every few minutes as the work undergoes transitions. It depicts a collective state of mind – the instant nature of Internet culture that has become familiar to so many.
An associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts and the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago, Salavon recently completed a seven-month Artist-in-Residency program in Seattle at Microsoft’s campus gallery, Studio 99. The gallery exhibits art that integrates data and creative coding with cutting-edge technology. Salavon’s work can be found in major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Both the lecture and the roundtable conversation are free and open to the public. Rainbow Aggregator can be viewed in the Student Union near the first floor information desk. To learn more about the artist, watch “Three things about art: Jason Salavon at TEDxMidwest” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41OdoHJBVxA.