Portables: Dispositivos Electronicos Moviles de Arte Portables / Portables: Mobile Electronic Devices Portable Art
August 14 – September 19, 2010
Opening: Saturday, August 14 @ 20.00
Museo Nacional del Bellas Artes,
Santiago de Chile
Curator: Ignacio Nieto, LaMe Laboratorio Medial / Media Lab
LaMe Website
The exhibition Portables, installed at the Gallery of the National Musuem of Final Arts, is a selection of different electronic devices, developed by artists of various nationalities. The distinctive characteristic that all of these objects possess, prepared for this program curated by Ignacio Nieto, is that they are portable, hence the exhibition title. The qualities of each piece, developed for Portables, were tested in different public spaces within the city of Santiago and documented on video. The exhibition consists of the documentary videos that accompany each portable device, giving the general public an opportunity to learn more about technological constructions made by artists and how they operate within the city.
Each device reflects upon the urban environment through two types of relations; the theoretical where each piece focuses on a particular theme – such as systems of control, consumption, new systems of food production and gender; the practical in which each piece requires various communication systems in order to operate, ranging from basic electronics to the use of software developed especially for this purpose, or systems like Twitter or SMS.
The selected artists are Michelle Teran (Canada), Chimbalab (Chile), Alejandra Perez (Chile), Carolina Pino (Chile), the Collective GraphTech (Mexico), Otto Von Busch artists (Sweden), and Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga ( USA) in collaboration with Kurst Olmstead (USA) and through the support of various partners including Central Cultural Matucana 100, The Canada Council for the Arts and PSC-CUNY Research Award and Hunter College Presidential Travel Award.