Save The Date - Camera Toss at "Command-Z"

When: March 31st through May 26th
Where: Torrance Art Museum - Torrance, California (Los Angeles Area)

The some of the big news I had been hinting about. I'll be presenting Camera Toss, the concept, the community, and the artwork at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles area) as part of the group show entitled "Command-Z". In the tradition of the Camera Toss concept, open and participatory, one element of the exhibition will be a community driven projected slideshow (which will also be viewable online), created and curated by myself. I'll be posting about how to participate very soon. There is a lot of very interesting digital photography and new media work in this show, I encourage everyone to check it out if they can.

Here's the invitation e-card...



The official museum press release describes the show as follows...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact: Kristina Newhouse or Natalie Schoer
310-618-6340
torranceartmuseum@torrnet.com

COMMAND Z

Curated by:
Ted Fisher (New York)
Douglas McCulloh (Los Angeles)

On view: March 31 - May 26, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 31, 7 – 10 pm

Command Z—the Apple keyboard command for undo—presents work by artists exploring the leading edge of digital photography.

Works by: Kate Bingaman-Burt (Starkville, Mississippi); Rebeca Bollinger (San Francisco); Stéphane Degoutin, Marika Dermineur & Gwenola Wagon (Paris, France); Charles Fairbanks (Ann Arbor, MI); Ryan Gallagher (Austin, TX); Ken Gordon (New York); Martha Gorzycki (San Francisco); John Greyson (Toronto, Canada); Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar (San Francisco and New York); Noah Kalina (Brooklyn); Luke Lamborn (Provincetown, MA); leadingzeros (Tokyo, Japan); League of Imaginary Scientists (Los Angeles); Ahree Lee (San Francisco); Iris Lee (Brooklyn); Les LeVeque (New York); Michael David Murphy (San Francisco); Olde English (Brooklyn); Dane Picard (Los Angeles); Stuart Pound (London, Britain); Jacob Reed (Los Angeles); Hong-An Truong (Irvine); Jody Zellen (Los Angeles)

Photographic artists currently find themselves poised at a rare and remarkable moment—a revolutionary shift in basic technology and artistic possibility. There are two primary drivers of the digital revolution: extremely prolific photographic production and an intensifying circulation of these images on the web. In this situation, the systems of encountering the photographs become central, rather than the photographs themselves.

The artistic responses to the vast new digital image stream are memorable, captivating, and have the power to change your view of the world. For Command Z, examples are drawn from around the world: London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, Toronto, and other points on the grid. By drawing from such a diverse group, Command Z sets out to make mid-stream sense of the paradigm shift in photography.

Some 40 billion digital images were made in 2003, the year that digital camera sales surpassed those of conventional film-based devices. In 2004, the amount of photos produced rose to 94 billion, according to former Hewlett-Packard CEO, Carly Fiorina. Phone maker Nokia estimates that camera-phones alone will create 100 billion increasingly high resolution photographs in 2007. And Hewlett-Packard predicts that digital devices will capture 312 billion images in 2008. Whatever the exact figures, the unprecedented scale of imagemaking is clear. Meanwhile, the internet makes these images omnipresent and available. One example among many is the website, www.flickr.com. In February 2004, Flickr emerged as an online photo storage and sharing system. By November of 2005 the New York Times reported that photographs available on Flickr passed the billion-image mark. The site now adds more than a million photographs per day. The result for the new photographic artists is the rarest of situations—completely unexplored artistic territory. Rather than merely make images, digital artists now devise methods of gathering, sorting and encountering images. The results range from the mundane to the sublime, from the hilarious to the strangely profound. In all cases, this is a largely new art, made possible by the scale of the current image universe and enabled by the new tools for encountering it, reshaping it, and making sense of it.