Niio @ BDNY: Boutique Design New York

This November we were invited by our partner Marriott, one of the world’s leading hotel companies, to demonstrate a selection of interactive artworks at BDNY: Boutique Design New York, the leading trade fair and conference for the hospitality design industry.

BDNY brings interior designers, architects, hotel owners and developers together, introducing them to the most innovative and high-caliber design elements for hospitality interiors around the world. Over the course of two days,  we were able to demonstrate how the Niio platform enables art advisors, curators, architects and designers to implement digital art installations within their projects. 

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L. to R.: Rob Anders, Margo Spiritus & Yossi Amon; Featured Art: ‘Selfish Gene Mirror’ 2015 by Daniel Rozin; courtesy bitforms gallery; ‘Bodypaint III’ by Banz & Bowinkel.

We are on a mission to expose people to original, high-quality, immersive digital art experiences. With a collection of thousands of works from top artists and galleries, state-of-the-art technology, a global hardware infrastructure and white glove installation and support, Niio makes it easy to incorporate captivating digital art into any environment.

Want to discuss a project for one of your spaces? Please contact us or sign up for our Designer affiliate program.

Niio Live in London @ TLV in LDN Festival

 

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For four days in September, the magic of Tel Aviv will be transported to London. Dubbed the ‘Miami of the Middle East’, this vibrant Israeli city is a rising cosmopolitan metropolis of food, art, fashion and nightlife.

Bringing the best of the city to the UK, TLV in LDN offers a unique opportunity to experience the rich cultural landscape of Tel Aviv in London.

Niio Manage™

This This year, TLVinLND selected the Niio Manage™ platform to power the festival’s media arts program from open call submissions all the way through to exhibiting a final selection of video works at the event.

Over 250 Israeli artists submitted art works to the Niio platform which were reviewed by curator Marie Shek and artist Ori Gersht.  Six works were selected to be shown on dedicated screens at the 5 day event using the Niio ArtPlayer alongside additional curated selections from some of Israel’s leading artists.

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TLVinLDN VIP EVENT: A New ToolBox, Where Technology & Art Connect

As part of the festival, Outset, Start-Up National Central and the Paul Singer Foundation will be hosting an exclusive evening of “Art & Technology” in London for leading art world figures, where Niio will be presented as ‘the’ company to enable the global video and media art market.

 

Featured image: Eyal Gever, Piece of Ocean, 2014. @eyalgever

14th Factory LA

It’s always refreshing to walk into an exhibit and to be greeted by video art.  It’s even better when you get to the end and realize that that half of the show is comprised of multi-screen moving image works. Such was the case at the 14th Factory LA, a show we were lucky enough to catch right before it closed its doors after after 4 months and over 75,000 visitors.

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‘The Inevitable’ by Simon Birch and Eric Hu with music by Gary Gunn. Read more about this incredible work inspired by a devastating medical diagnosis on Niio’s Instagram page.

The 14th Factory LA was a monumental, multiple-media, socially engaged art and documentary experience conceived by the Hong Kong-based British artist Simon Birch. Taking over three acres of an empty industrial warehouse and lot on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, the location was transformed into a factory where Birch and his 20 creative collaborators worked and manufactured their art, creating an ever-changing immersive environment of 14 interlinked spaces comprised of video, installation, sculpture, paintings and performance.

Keep an eye on Simon Birch, he has some great projects on the horizon. You won’t want to miss them.

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Simon Birch, ‘Tannhauser’, 2016. Realized by Scott Sporleder, Jennifer Russell, with sound design by Gary Gunn. 4-channel video featuring a Hong Kong cityscape. Still by Matthew Sebastian Wood.
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‘The Inhumans’ is a short film directed by Wing Shya in collaboration with Simon Birch.
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The ‘Barmecide Feast’ by Simon Birch and KPlusK Assoc. was a replica of The Otherworldly Bedroom from Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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Simon Birch pictured with Michael Govan, the Director of LACMA. According to Birch, ‘The Crusher’ was in part a tribute to the legendary American wrestler Reginald Lisowski, The Crusher who inspired a 1960s pop song of the same name. Photo by VM Fernandez.
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Niio’s Margo Spiritus with the 14th Factory LA’s founder, Simon Birch in front of one of his paintings.
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Panel: The Art Experience in the Age of Social Media with 14th Factory’s Simon Birch, Niio’s Margo Spiritus, Venus Over Manhattan’s Aaron Moulton,  Marissa Gluck and moderator Gloria Yu of 14th Factory LA.

The Whitney Biennial ’17

This year’s Biennial marks the seventy-eight installment of the country’s longest-running survey of American art.

The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973. The Whitney show is generally regarded as one of the leading shows in the art world, often setting or leading trends in contemporary art. It is known to have brought artists Georgia O’Keeffee, Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons to prominence.

With 63 individuals and collectives featured, we were thrilled to see that 1/3 of the selected works (23) were media art works (e.g. videos, films, websites, games etc.)  Some of our favorites:

Jon Kessler (performative sculpture w/ LCD screen & iPhone)
Tommy Hartung (video)
Jordan Wolfson (VR)
Post Commodity (4 channel video)
Maya Stovall (video)
Anicka Yi (video)
Oto Gillen (video)

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See what some had to say about the show:

NYT: A User’s Guide to the Whitney Biennial
The New Yorker: The Whitney Biennial’s Political Mood
Forbes: 10 Artworks You Must See At the Whitney Biennial
Vulture: The New Whitney Biennial is the Most Political in Decades

 

Studio Visit: Refik Anadol

[vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_column_text]We were thrilled to be invited to the Los Angeles studio of cutting edge media & data artist Refik Anadol. Located in the Silver Lake area on the east side of LA,  the studio is accessed from a small side door.  Step inside and you’re immediately enveloped by a sleek white space with 20ft ceilings, desks dotted with enormous computer screens, a brand new projector and great Mid-century modern furniture.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” css_animation=””][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Of course it’s hard to miss the perfect, small scale model of Frank Gehry’s Disney Music Hall, one LA’s (if not the world’s) most iconic buildings.  Refik used the model to create one of his very first projects in LA.

If you’ve been to San Francisco recently, you would not have been able to miss the skyline altering Salesforce Tower whose lobby is defined by a 3-story tall, 2,500-square-foot digital canvas featuring a custom data art creation by Anadol.

Together with his collaborator Peggy Weil, Anadol created a large scale data piece for LA’s first public art biennial, Current: LA Water.

To learn more about Refik’s unique artwork check out this feature story, KCET: Big (Beautiful) Data: The Media Architecture of Refik Anadol.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”580″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” qode_css_animation=””][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_empty_space height=”40px”][vc_gallery type=”image_grid” images=”579,578,577″ img_size=”full” onclick=”” column_number=”2″ grayscale=”no” space_between_images=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” text_align=”left” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_empty_space height=”40px”][vc_column_text]About Refik Anadol

Refik is a media artist and director born in Istanbul, Turkey.  He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts.  He works in the fields of site-specific public art with parametric data sculpture approach and live audio/visual performance with immersive installation approach. Particularly his works explore the space among digital and physical entities by creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts.  Learn more about Refik.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

A Conversation With Ben Fino-Radin, Preservation Expert (Part 2)

Ben is a NYC based media archaeologist, archivist and conservator of born-digital and computer based works of contemporary art. He is the Associate Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In this role, he develops strategies and policy that contribute to the preservation of the museum’s digital collections.  He has also worked with the Whitney Museum, Cory Arcangel, JODI, Rhizome just to name a few.

We are thrilled that Ben has joined us as an Advisor and is working with us on a key part of the Niio platform – – digital preservation.

Ben in his natural habitat.

What do you believe are the biggest misconceptions about digital / moving image art and what would you like people to understand?

The idea that digital means immaterial. So often I hear collectors and institutions describe digital artworks as being fundamentally ephemeral and immaterial. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Take for instance Andrew Blum’s book Tubes: a Journey to the Center of the Internet – Blum travels around the world tracing and documenting the immense and complex physical infrastructure of the internet. An earlier example of this kind of hacker tourism / documentation is Neal Stephenson’s 1996 piece for Wired Mother Earth Mother Board, where Stephenson documents the gritty blood, sweat, and tears involved in laying a transcontinental fiber optic cable.

This same brutally physical reality exists when considering the storage of digital files. Let’s say you had 100 reels of 35mm film prints, and you digitized and digitally restored them. Are these now immaterial?  You’ve now created roughly 206 TB of data. If you were going to stored these on LTO 6 tapes, they would take up 4,684 cubic feet, and would weigh a total of 37 Lbs (16.7) kg. If you stacked the tapes, they would be almost 6 feet tall. Is that immaterial? Absolutely not. Granted, the amount of physical space in the real world that a digital bit requires is very small – but it is still very much physical.

Do you see a time when digital art / time-based media is considered mainstream?

It is. I think we can all agree that MoMA is mainstream, no? The atrium at MoMA is most often the first gallery that visitors see when coming to the museum. Now, consider the kind of artworks that have been shown in this atrium – the most prominent space in the museum – in the last five years. I would estimate that 75% of the work has been at least partially time-based media.

How do you define mainstream? Will media art be mainstream when museums are selling Ryan Trecartin coffee mugs in museum gift shops? Is that something we even want?

What do you think about all the hype surrounding VR?  Do you think it’s a tool that artists and museums will eventually embrace?  

Artists of course started playing around with the various new VR platforms as soon as they could get their hands on them, and I think that the response on the part of museums has been rather rapid.  MoMA in fact has been including VR in its curatorial programming, and it is only logical to suppose that it is just a matter of time before a VR work is collected.

Personally I approach anything that is hyped as hard as VR with a great deal of skepticism, but having tried various examples, it is absolutely an incredibly rich area for artistic exploration. The sensation is rather astounding. 

As an artist yourself, what drew you to “digital” vs. a more traditional medium?  

I’ve always been the kind of person who likes to take things apart, figure out how they work, put them back together (or not), and make something from the parts. I think that anyone with this predisposition is naturally attracted to working with computers, and time-based media in general.

Many of the professors I met in art school had been heavily involved in the upstate New York video art scene of the 60s and 70s – and they had built our studios accordingly. I became very immersed in real-time video synthesis and processing – hacking, circuit bending, custom electronics, etc. I was lucky enough to have spent time at the Experimental Television Center in the early 2000s, before it’s closure in 2011. Throughout this time I was still drawing, making sculpture, prints, painting, everything really. I was fortunate to have a very interdisciplinary art school experience.

Niio Co-Founder in front of a work by Cory Arcangel in the Lisson Booth @ Frieze NYC.
Niio Co-Founder, Rob Anders, in front of a work by Cory Arcangel in the Lisson Gallery Booth @ Frieze NYC.

What was the first piece of digital art you remember experiencing?

Either Paper Rad or Cory Arcangel

Who is doing really cutting edge work?

Tabor Robak continues to amaze

If you could own one piece of art, what would it be?

Any Ed Ruscha

Favorite museum (aside from MOMA)?

The New Museum is always a favorite for a weekend afternoon.

Favorite city for exploring art?

New York, naturally

 

Read Part 1 of our interview with Ben.

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About Ben Fino-Radin

Ben is a NYC based media archaeologist, archivist and conservator of born-digital and computer based works of contemporary art. He is the Associate Media Conservator at the world-renowned Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In this role, he develops strategies and policy that contribute to the preservation of the museum’s digital collections.

Prior to MoMA, Ben worked as a Digital Conservator at Rhizome at the New Museum where he structured preservation and collecting practices for collections management, documentation, and preservation of born-digital works of art. As an Adjunct professor at NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program, Ben taught a course on Digital Literacy designed to equip first year graduate students with fundamental technical skills for careers in digital archives as well as Handling Complex Media, a course designed to give second year graduate students practical skills for the identification, risk assessment, preservation and treatment of creative works that employ complex and inherently unstable digital materials.

Research interests include: digital preservation, digital cultural heritage, web based creative communities, computer history, information architecture, metadata and animated gifs.