DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center (SAAM) -- Exhibit: Watch This! Revelations in Media Art:
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Description of Pictures: Watch This! Revelations in Media Art
April 24, 2015 – September 7, 2015
Creative and commercial innovations in hi-fidelity stereo, broadcast television, videotape and satellite technologies ignited a frenetic pace of social change through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, simultaneously shattering and shaping modes of communication and expression. From the 80s into the millennium the electronic age burst through to the digital age, advancing in previously inconceivable directions at blinding speeds and opening entirely new terrain for creative exploration that continues today. Artists have fearlessly engaged technological innovation to create an artistic revolution that continuously redefines how we imagine, receive, and understand our time.
Watch This! identifies the pervasive interdependence between technology and contemporary culture. The exhibition includes forty-four works of art from 1941 to 2013, many of which were recently acquired by the museum—including 16 mm films, single-channel video, installations, video games and related ephemera. Thirty artworks in the exhibition will be on display at the museum for the first time.
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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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SIPGWT_150424_08.JPG: Watch This! Revelations in Media Art:
The second half of the twentieth century introduced an array of technologies and electronic phenomena that sent humanity careening down a path of relentless acceleration toward futurity and set art in motion, innovations that brought us hi-fidelity stereo, broadcast television, videotape, orbiting satellites, computer systems, video games, and cellular communications also index the frenetic pace of social change from the 1940s into the present. Artists encounter these technological leaps with impunity, finding in them new modes of expression that continuously redefine how we imagine, receive, and understand our time. This fearless embrace of contemporary materials is a striking disclosure of the artists' ambitions, empowering them to confront the complex histories of the present and inspire new futures.
Watch This! is an introduction to media art and to the material and conceptual exchange with technology that is shaping artistic practice. Drawn from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the selection shown here invites an examination of technology-based artworks in dialogue with one another and identifies the pervasive interdependence between technology and contemporary culture. The range of aesthetic styles, formal arguments, and conceptual engagements represented, which is influenced as much by developments in science and technology as by style or medium, gives testimony to the compelling advancements in electronics and the cultural meanings embedded in them.
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2015 photos: I retired from the US Census Bureau in god-forsaken Suitland, Maryland on my 58th birthday in May. Yee ha!
Trips this year:
a quick trip to Florida.
two Civil War Trust conferences (Raleigh, NC and Richmond, VA), and
my 10th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Los Angeles).
Ego Strokes: Carolyn Cerbin used a Kevin Costner photo in her USA Today article. Miss DC pictures were used a few times in the Washington Post.
Equipment this year: I mostly used my Fuji XS-1 camera but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000.
Number of photos taken this year: just over 550,000.
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