LANGUAGEWORKS

Contact:

Aldo Castillo Gallery

ATTN. Julia Friedman

Phone: 312-337-2536

EDUARDO KAC OPENS SOLO SHOW AT ALDO CASTILLO GALLERY, CHICAGO

Exhibition: Entitled "Language Works", the exhibitionis comprised of 13 media works exploring visual texts in multiple environments

When: The show opens on July 17 and closes on August 29, 1998

Where: Aldo Castillo Gallery, 233 West Huron, Chicago, Illinois60610

Web: The show can be seen at http://www.ekac.org/languageworks.html

Curatorial Essay: The Language Labyrinthby Julia Friedman

Review by Garrett Holg published inArtnews, November 1998.

Review by Pablo Helguera published in ArtNexus, January/April 1999.

The exhibition:

This month, Aldo Castillo Gallery presents "Language Works",an exhibition by Chicago artist Eduardo Kac curated by Julia Friedman.For 15 years Kac has been exploring the poetics of electronic and photonicmedia, investigating new writerly and readerly strategies. Of the thirteenworks on display, six are digital and therefore can only be experienceddirectly on a computer. These six digital works include runtime animations,a hypertext, and a vrml (Virtual Reality Markup Language) piece. Kac isalso showing four Iris prints, one hologram, one single-channel video,and a video installation.

Some of the pieces in the show are interactive and invite the viewerto navigate a textual space and discover new meanings along the way. TheIris prints and hologram undermine the fixity of the verbal sign on thetwo-dimensional surface, extending their semantic ambiguity to the unstableorganization of the verbal material. Other works, notably the videos andanimations, explore verbal rhythms that can only be created once languageis removed from stable surfaces and is immersed in a malleable electronicspace.

Kac states that "language plays a fundamental role in the constitutionof our experiential world. To question the structure of language is toinvestigate how realities are constructed". For the artist, "language(particularly written language) is nothing but a transitional moment ina much more complex semiological continuum. The show explores this notionin multiple ways."

Biographical note:

Eduardo Kac is an artist and writer who works with electronic and photonicmedia, including telepresence, robotics, and the Internet. His work hasbeen exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, and South America.Kac's works belong to the permanent collections of the Museum of ModernArt in New York, the Museum of Holography in Chicago, and the Museum ofModern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, among others. He is a member of theeditorial board of the journal Leonardo, published by MIT Press. His anthology"New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies" waspublished in 1996 as a special issue of the journal Visible Language, ofwhich he was a guest editor. Writings by Kac on electronic art as wellas articles about his work have appeared in several books, newspapers,magazines, and journals in many countries, including Argentina, Australia,Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Mexico,Paraguay, Portugal, Spain, Russia, Uruguay, United Kingdom, and UnitedStates. He is an Assistant Professor of Art and Technology at the Schoolof the Art Institute of Chicago and a Ph.D. candidate in the Center forAdvanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CAiiA), at University of WalesCollege, Newport, United Kingdom.. Kac has received numerous grants andawards for his work.

Recent awards:

The Shearwater Foundation recently announced the award of $10,000 toChicago-based artist and writer Eduardo Kac to support his work and research.The Florida-based Foundation does not accept applications and recognizesindividual creative excellence within its stated areas of interest withannual awards. CEC International Partners, New York, also announced thatEduardo Kac was the recipient of an ArtsLink Award in the amount of $3,500,and noted that "the review panel was very impressed with the qualityof Kac's creative work". Earlier this year Eduardo Kac received the1998 Leonardo Award for Excellence, which is awarded annually to a Leonardoauthor for an article describing work judged to be excellent in the fieldof art/science and technology. Previous Leonardo award winners have includedRudolf Arnheim and Otto Piene.

Additional information:

For more information see Kac's web site at http://www.ekac.org

Aldo Castillo Gallery

Tel 312-337-2536

Fax 312-337-3627

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