Experimenta
Utopia Now
12 May – 19 June 2011
Over fifteen international artists have come together with Australian media artists to wrestle and seduce the elusive partners: perfection and happiness in Experimenta Utopia Now International Biennale of Media Art. Offering solutions, satisfactions and agitations in their pursuit, the installations, interactive video works, animations and audio-scapes invite direct engagement and immersion in the artists’ created utopia’s and dystopias.
Within the safe enclosed environment of the gallery space Experimenta Utopia Now provides an intense virtual race, where our flaws and hopes help to drive the creative engineering of a perfect world.
Kit Wise, Xanadu 2009 HD video installation, silent 6:00 mirrored glass
Showcasing more than 18 works from countries including Australia, Japan, Austria, India, Germany, Canada, France, Taiwan and the UK – Experimenta Utopia Now critiques the scope for happiness on earth as we know it, pokes fun at social and physical boundaries and questions the human race’s ability to preserve itself.
Visitors will be able to lead a chorus of interactive singing plants with Akousmaflore, a hanging garden composed of living musical plants that react to human gesture and gentle contact; Shadow 3, an interactive installation where the by-products of our consumerist society fall from the sky like rain, inundating your shadow with a deluge of debris; and You Were in my Dream, an off-the-wall ‘choose your own adventure’ dreamscape where interacting with familiar fairytale characters draws you into an enchanted fractured forest.
Experimenta Utopia Now features artists including AES+F (Russia), Shilpa Gupta (India), Scenocosme (France), Kit Wise (Australia) and dynamic Melbourne duo, Van Sowerwine & Isobel Knowles.
Together the artists in Experimenta Utopia Now envisage and reveal the ideological flaws in the drive to engineer a perfect world. From ominous to optimistic, they highlight the responsibility of the individual to choose, hope and work for a better tomorrow.
Experimenta is Australia’s leading organisation dedicated to commissioning, exhibiting and promoting the most advanced media and technology based art.
MORNINGTON PENINSULA REGIONAL GALLERY
Location: Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, MORNINGTON
Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am-5pm.
Exhibition admission fees: $4 adults / $2 concession
General information: 03 5975 4395
www.mprg.mornpen.vic.gov.au
