NeoGeo
Part of FLICKERLOUNGE: Season-Long Cinematic Experience
By Marina Zurkow and Daniel Shiffman
March 16 – April 21
Opening Reception: Friday, March 16, 6-8PM
Location: DiverseWorks Artspace, 1117 East Freeway
Free Admission
DiverseWorks is a non-profit art center dedicated to presenting new visual, performing, and literary art. For each DiverseWorks exhibition, Aurora supports a screening installation that takes place in the private screening room known as Flickerlounge.
As part of Fotofest 2012, Diverseworks commissioned Necrocracy for the main gallery, an immersive art exhibition exploring nature and petrochemical production that combines video animation, drawings and sculpture by Brooklyn-based artist Marina Zurkow. Necrocracy questions the inherited, Romantic-era division between the natural and the human, as it navigates the critical-creative edge between human manufacturing of petroleum-based products and the ecological history and geological chronology of oil.
In coordination with this exhibit, Flickerlounge will host an installation called NeoGeo that will explore what happens underground as an oil drill penetrates through an infinite series of geological layers. What does the drill bit see? This was the driving question that led to the development of a visualization that explores both new and time-worn representations of geological strata, petroleum, and time.
The environment is composed of tiny bits of hand-drawn rock, created in code, and activated by rules of physics and the formation of strata; rules affect the density and behaviors of the strata, as well as the possible location of hydrocarbon particles, all of which come into contact with a drill bit. Cap rock (salt and shale) form barriers under which hydrocarbon particles accumulate. An oil “gush” occurs if conditions are right. NeoGeo visualizes the density and graphical, mutating formations of rock, as well as the liquidity of the earth over unfathomably long periods of time.
Can't attend the installation? From the comfort of home, you can participate in the exhibition with an online version of one of the installations featured in the installation called Mesocosm (Wink, Texas) which explores what happens above ground on the land of a private oil company in Wink, Texas:
This is part of an ongoing series of animated landscapes that develop and change over time in response to software-driven data inputs. The title is drawn from the field of environmental science and refers to experimental, simulated ecosystems, which allow for manipulation of the physical environment and are used for biological, community, and ecological research. They are drawn by hand, frame-by-frame, yet their choreographies are dynamic—not predetermined or canned—dictated by constraints in real-time. Each of the works in Mesocosm is long in duration and recombines perpetually as inputs determine order, density, and interrelationships. They are looped, and have no beginning or end. Because change happens slowly, but can be radical over time, the works are intended to be seen in public places where people gather or pass through frequently, or lived with like a painting—in living rooms and meeting spaces.
Wink, Texas is the most recent landscape to be animated as part of this Mesocosm series. In the animation, a large sinkhole— the “Wink Sink 2” located on located on private oil company property in the small Texas town of Wink—boils, gushes, flows and expels objects: plastic bags, oil and dark clouds that whirl out of the sinkhole’s vortex in ghostly choreography. Oil refineries burn off gases in plumes in the background as an occasional train or coyote lumbers past. This sinkhole has been widening steadily since it emerged in 2002; here, it appears as a natural geological event, complete with picnic rest stop furnishings. By day, the landscape is inhabited by a diversity of bird life, prairie dogs, insects, pronghorn antelope, HazMat workers and—depending on the season—by migrating monarch butterflies, snakes and sandhill cranes.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Marina Zurkow makes psychological, animated works about humans and their relationship to animals, plants and the weather. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and has been a NYFA Fellow, a Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and a Creative Capital grantee. Zurkow is on faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP), and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Daniel Shiffman works as an Assistant Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the
Arts. He is the author of Learning Processing (Morgan Kaufmann, 2008) and The Nature of Code (self-published via Kickstarter), an upcoming text and series of code examples about simulating natural phenomenon in Processing.