Adobe Museum of Digital Media today announced its 2011 fall exhibition schedule. On November 9, 2011, AMDM will launch Journey to Seven Light Bay, a new exhibition by Mariko Mori, curated by Tom Eccles, executive director of the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale in Hudson, NY.
Journey to Seven Light Bay explores Mariko Mori's longtime interest in harmonizing nature, spiritualism and technology in the digital age. The exhibition illuminates Mori's artistic process and provides a digital recreation of her upcoming physical project, Primal Rhythm, being built on Miyako Island off the coast of Okinawa, Japan.
Mori's work speaks to the notion that the more digital and "connected" we become, the less we are directly connected to the non-digital world around us. By creating the exhibition in the virtual space of AMDM, people from all over the world will be able to have an understanding of Mori's physical installation, Primal Rhythm, located on a remote island.
In the AMDM atrium, Journey to Seven Light Bay will present visitors with a glowing white orb, the Tida Dome, as the entry point to Mori's digital installation. Specifically developed for the AMDM, Tida Dome was inspired by prehistoric caves of Okinawa that illuminate when sunlight hits from a specific angle. When entering the Tida Dome, visitors will experience a virtual/digital replication of this illumination, and will continue through the exhibition to virtually experience other elements of the physical project. The physical project being built in Japan consists of a Sun Pillar and Moon Stone, which together create a solar monument to the natural rhythms of the sun and moon and the alignment of celestial orbits during the winter solstice. The first phase of Primal Rhythm will open on Dec. 22, 2011, upon the completion of Sun Pillar in Japan.
Throughout Journey to Seven Light Bay, visitors will hear Mori's commentary on Primal Rhythm as well as past art works. Mori's work as the artist has long drawn inspiration from the intersection of nature and technology. "I would like to reintroduce ancient culture to contemporary life in order to reconnect with nature," Mori commented.
On September 13, 2011, AMDM will launch InForm: Turning Data into Meaning, curated by Thomas Goetz, executive editor of Wired Magazine. This is the inaugural exhibition of AMDM's Curator-in-Residence (CIR) Program, a new initiative that invites guest curators from the arts, culture, media and technology fields to use the museum's online exhibition spacetoexplore groundbreaking digital work and illustrate how digital media shapes and impacts today's society.
Through InForm: Turning Data Into Meaning, Thomas Goetz presents an analysis of digital data from our online lives, and gives new meaning to this information through a series of newly commissioned and found images.
The commissioned images are based on data sets gathered from across the Internet centering on three themes: Wikipedia as a crowd-sourced network with constantly evolving data; how the Twitter platform of followers, interactions and re-tweeting ranks its various users; and the impact and fluidity of an online financial social network. A series of digital artists has been invited to use these data sets to create unique visualizations of the information. Goetz's program intends to make visible the way our social lives are digitally quantified. The exhibition celebrates a new generation of visual pioneers - part graphic designer, part statistician, part artist - who have a facility for turning data into meaning.