The Samek Art Gallery’s blog is ablaze with excitement as staff receives visitors for tours of the new technology driven, augmented reality exhibition: Seeking Silicon Valley. Commissioned for the ZERO1 Biennial set in San Jose, California and presented in collaboration with ZERO1 and the artists’ collective ManifestAR, Seeking Silicon Valley is unlike anything previously shown at the Samek Art Gallery!
Our readership has heard from several staff members in an attempt to explain the more challenging aspects of Seeking Silicon Valley. Director Richard Rinehart situated ManifestAR’s mission within the context of art history, Operations Manger Pam Campanaro outlined the concepts behind the collaboration, and my colleague Laura Hildebrandt explained augmented reality. So what, pray tell, am I going to discuss?
You guessed it, the artists! ManifestAR is an international artists’ collective comprised of eight founding members/artists: Mark Skwarek (US), Sander Veenhof (NL), Tamiko Thiel (US,JP,DE), Will Pappenheimer (US), John Craig Freeman (US), Christopher Manzione, (US), Geoffrey Alan Rhodes (US), and John Cleater (US). I’ve hyperlinked each artists’ name, so if you want to know more about them or check out their current projects, click away!
I would like to briefly share a project by Skwarek and Pappenheimer, which from an art historian’s perspective I found extremely humorous. Titled ARIntervention, the layer provides users with the opportunity to become a virtual art thief at the British Museum. More specifically, the layer virtually removes all the Elgin Marbles from their displays, thereby allowing users to apply their theft to the controversial history of the “stolen” Parthenon Marbles!
Hopefully you found this post interesting! If you would like to learn more about ManifestAR and its collaborations with the Samek Art Gallery and ZERO1, Director Richard Rinehart is hosting a curator’s talk on talk on September 18 at 6pm in the Gallery Theatre.