The No. 1 student show this season, with a bullet—with a linear particle accelerator?—is not by the UW master graduates sharing display space at the Henry with James Turrell and Maya Lin, but by a sidecar of digitalati showing at ConWorks through June 24, an out-of-the-way venue where some days the art has to be turned off to make space for a fundraising dinner.
There are only six graduates in the first class of UW's Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), all men. According to online course listings, they've learned mechatronics and telematics and Super Collider programming, so if this art thing doesn't work out, they can always work at NASA.
Peter Brun, looking like a perfect blend of real nerd and art nerd, stands in the middle of the gallery fiddling with his sculpture because the paper parts are breaking off. The piece is a screen of 100 small rollers with 12 flaps each. The flaps flip over as the rollers turn, and each flap is one of 12 hues between black and white. A hidden computer runs a movie slowly, and as its frames change the flaps or "pixels" turn and crude images appear on this utterly analog screen. I don't see any of the images because Brun says he doesn't feel like resetting the machine. This is almost better; the piece is called Cipher—things are lost, not found. (The artist's flustered appearance works so well, I wonder if it's a performance.)
In Kevin Olsen's For Closed Eyes, you sit on a pedestal with your head against a cradle and close your eyes as a projector flashes light sequences through your eyelids while sound waves whine, wheeze, and occasionally crash in your ears. It gives the feeling that the artist is rooting around in your mind, like a wireless spy.
Johnathan Lyon made a fairly conventional narrative video I'm not partial to where a beam of energy bursts out of a dead woman's nipple. Alan Strathmann built an enthralling environment with a mirror and two narrative projections, all superimposed on each other, implying so many gazes at once (including yours) that the relationships between places and people and story change constantly. Scott Carver's installation of sound and visual objects in exquisite flux reminds me of a microscopic version of Bill Viola's amazing desert-mirage videos.
Most intriguing of all is Matt McDowell's three-part installation: a cheesy sci-fi stop-motion animation of a crew of space explorers, interviews about utopian physics and banal lab experiments in two different sets of headphones, and a roped-off centerpiece—a computer monitor taken apart, facing downward, on a platform next to an aluminum triangle tethered to two poles. Outside the ropes is a caution sign with a pair of black gloves so thick they stand up. McDowell puts on the gloves, turns on the monitor innards, and the wattage shooting from them levitates the triangle, like magic. The first time McDowell tested it in his Fremont studio, Brun stood by with a two-by-four, so he could push McDowell away in case his art electrocuted him.
