Jason Salavon: A Seamlessness Between Things
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Taubman Museum of Art 110 Salem Avenue Southeast, Roanoke, Virginia
Jason Salavon is on the forefront of new media art, and has been for over two decades. With a background in computer programming and software design, he employs the language of digital prints, video, painting, and sculpture to explore scientific systems and technology, as well as aesthetics and art history - all using software of hi own design as an image-generating tool.
Salavon's Taubman project, A Seamlessness Between Things (traveling straight from its debut in New York), consists of 10 real-time video projections of synthesized data. This interactive room-sized work takes input from masses of public, communally generated information from the Internet and TV signals to reveal unexpected images and juxtapositions. Viewers are invited to manipulate control devices - pushbuttons, knobs, and joysticks - embedded in tables in the gallery. The audience can change the projected images, although often the "cause/effect" relationships are purposefully opaque. This "feed aggregator," as Salavon calls it, at times appears as a collage of visual and textural information that walks the line between abstract and representational art. With this installation, Salavon highlights the increasing "game-ification" of contemporary life as evidenced by such ubiquitous phenomena as online social networks and smart phones.