FEED is a mixed media collaborative art installation / performance composed of individual art works and performances networked together to create a metaphorical closed system-- a living body.

FEED explores the concepts of Network as influenced by Information Transmission, and symbiosis. FEED questions the borders that separate human and machine, organic and inorganic.

FEED seeks to examine societal hunger for constant information flow. Every day we are becoming more dependent on information: When we cannot access our e-mail, or forget our mobile, we go into withdrawal. We have become part of the network. Increasingly this connection is literal: an implanted pacemaker is reset and tested using tones over a phone line held near the chest. Science and Medicine announce such cybernetic innovation daily. We have been assimilated.

Artists, technologists, and scientists will be invited to create individual pieces around the above theme(s). The works will function as metaphorical “organs” to form a “body” through the process of networking with each other to create, receive and respond to a live feed of information.

ASSIMILATING CREATIVITY
Those artists whose work is conceptually strong and relevant to the project, but do not know how their work might be integrated physically will be invited to collaborate with others to ‘jack’ their work into the system. FEED challenges artists who work in traditional media to invent methods of physically networking their pieces. The artist’s creativity thus becomes part of a larger collective work—a spirit not often fostered in contemporary art making. How far is the artist willing to push, revise, edition, or reengineer their work in order to comply with the rigidity of the system?

FEED will appear as a factory of sorts: Cords cables and tubing will be everywhere; an inextricable viscera of precarious “efficiency.” FEED challenges the border between object (the tubes, cables and machinery) and artwork; mixing them in a working environment where the two depend on one another to make the system function.

INTERACTIVITY
FEED seeks to include creative endeavors, which are not easily displayed in a visual arts setting. Thus FEED will invite scientists, authors, designers, musicians and performers to contribute thematically related works at special events during the exhibition.

FEED eliminates the barriers between artist and audience: 1) for example through viewer-triggered interactivity: through motion, or sound. 2) At open workshops, the public will be invited to brainstorm, construct and connect nodes to the network. Thus the viewers themselves are integral, becoming part of the network; creating it, sustaining it, and hopefully being fed by the experience.

Until FEED is able to achieve complete energy independence, it will jack into the wall for power and information. It immediately assimilates / is assimilated by the same network and infrastructure that brings you these words. Taking this further, it becomes possible to expand the system to absorb other project nodes in remote locations.

A CHALLENGE TO ASSUMPTIONS
In creating a symbiotic network, FEED subverts the notion of art as consumable object, and artist as virtuoso. It seeks to remind the viewer of the power and the fragility of the information superstructure that has become the lifeblood of the modern world; we feed it, as it feeds us.

-Lisa Lunskaya Gordon, Curator