One year after the opening of the Center for Art and Media, the Institute for Visual Media presents surrogate as its first report of its position within the productive domain where art, technology and society meet.

surrogate describes new forms of expression and unfamiliar spaces of experience: models of virtual worlds that require cooperation and coordinated interaction from several visitors. The viewers can either interact together on location or be joined via a network. Some exhibits link real and virtual object worlds, other works thematize societal reality and social processes. Especially these works show that today numerous artists are committed to moving beyond the aesthetic context and questioning technology's ambivalent influence and imprecise responsibility.

surrogate explores possibilities of technology far more than its achievements, and in this sense the exhibition is indeed optimistic. Rather than audacious claims, here one finds creative systems. By its critical probing of the relationship between art, engineering and media technology, surrogate with relaxed irony rather than accusation or propaganda here develops an enigmatic game of vision and embodied movement.

The inherently dynamic domain of this exhibition is defined by the encounter and interdisciplinary development of concepts from the fields of art, architecture, engineering and computer technology. The visitor is confronted with the entire spectrum of artistic ambitions, innovative conceptions, aesthetic strategies and technological configurations that have been discussed and developed since the previous year at the Institute. Many of the works being exhibited were created in the context the European Union's ESPRIT Research Program i3 (Inhabited Information Interfaces). Here the task is to explore to what extent radical technological creativity, as manifested in these works, can be of use for the future social and industrial implementation of information technologies. Perhaps the exhibits will help in finding explanations for social processes and other tendencies that actually lie beyond our conventional imagination.

Exhibited artworks:

Jeffrey Shaw, Distributed Legible City, 1998
Tamás Waliczky, Focusing, 1997
Forced Entertainment & Hugo Glendinning, Frozen Palaces (Chapter one), 1998
Masaki Fujihata, Impalpability, 1998
Ken Feingold, Interior, 1997
Masaki Fujihata, Nuzzle Afar, 1998
Kirsten Johannsen, The Panoptical Village, 1995
Jeffrey Shaw, PLACE - a user's manual, 1995
Erkki Huhtamo, The Ride of Your Life, 1998
Pavel Smetana, The Room of Desires, 1996
Bernd Litermann & Torsten Belschner, SonoMorphis, 1998
Agnes Hegedüs, Things Spoken, 1998

Works exhibited on EVE:

Institut for Visual Media & Kodiac, iC_inema
Jeffrey Shaw, rePLACEd
SICS, The Web Planetarium, 1998