Bricks and Boxes

The Mattress Factory invited bloggers and anyone else interested in social media to meet-up in conjunction with the opening of their latest 1414 Gallery exhibit PREDRVIE: After Technology. Anyone pre-registering was admitted free to the art, nice food, and for a while, beer and wine.

PREDRIVE: After Technology features new works by six international artists including Takeshi Murata, Brody Condon, Paper Rad, Gretchen Skogerson, and Antoine Catala that interrogate the “aesthetics of immediacy” produced by these technologies in contemporary art. The exhibition, guest-curated by Melissa Ragona, explores themes of digital effects and dysfunctions, readymade cyber-kitsch, software aesthetics, and the performativity of digital environments in real space.

First, the Mattress Factory is really tops in promotions. In 1999, as an architecture student, I fell in love with the place. During one visit I even signed up as a donor to impress a date. It didn’t last long. I haven’t donated in years, but they politely kept in touch with me. They’re one fine organization and I’m going to see what I can do.

I ended up taking three laps through the exhibit. One solo, one with my sister, and one with the Neills* which declined into hiding in a window away from the herd.

The highlight was sort of meeting a cute volunteer in a friendly hat. I stopped and asked what she was scribbling in her notebook. She told me the Gretchen Skogerson installation inspired some thinking about her own blacklight work. In this piece a curved wall in a windowless room is lit with changing levels of flourescent blacklight. We talked a little shop about low level light and spatial perception.**

Thank you Mattress Factory for your vision and generosity. I hope to step up my participation in Pittsburgh cultural activity.

Here’s Ballboy’s “Avant Garde Music” dovetailing with my experience. WARNING: This guy likes to introduce his song with a long story.

* Neither I nor any Neill really endorse John’s blog. Instead we suggest you visit John’s friend Evan’s blog Swan Fungus.

** Did a little Googling later if you’re intrigued. This “low but not quite dark lighting situation” is called Mesopic vision. “A combination of photopic vision and scotopic vision.” [All courtesy of Wikipedia] In Volume 8, Number 3, Article 14 of the Journal of Vision you’ll find the study “Motion processing at low light levels: Differential effects on the perception of specific motion types.” Finding:

That motion processing is affected by light level in dependence on the spatio-temporal characteristics of a specific motion type. Temporal pooling under rod-dominated vision primarily impairs detection of signals at high velocities and complex velocity discrimination. Deficits occur already at mesopic light levels and do not change when luminance decreases further. Furthermore, we suppose that co-activity of rods and cones as well as rod–cone interaction at mesopic light levels contribute to noisy velocity perception. In particular, the analysis of temporal dynamics, e.g., inherent to biological motion stimuli, seems to be vulnerable to interacting rod–cone vision. Since we manipulated light levels and did not control activity of photoreceptors directly, our conclusions have to remain preliminary. The effects of specific transmission mechanisms on motion perception could be clarified further by stimulating rods or cones selectively. Our results provide valuable clues to specific perceptual constraints at low light levels. They suggest that very early retinal signal processing can have complex effects on the perception of different motion types which is generally considered to rely on cortical areas.

Yeah, it’s a scorcher! From only skimming the article it looked to me that their test was a little similar to Gretchen Skogerson’s installation.