The AC Institute [Direct Chapel] presents four summer solo exhibitions by artists The KIT Collaboration + Robert Saucier: Virutorium, Owen Mundy: You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore; Hannah Ross: I Have Plagiarized; and Jennifer Wroblewski: Get Free.

The KIT Collaboration + Robert Saucier: Virutorium Virutorium is the second joint project by The Kit Collaboration + Robert Saucier. Their first project, named Infrasense, was a large-scale sound installation that toured 11 galleries in Canada, UK, USA and Belgium between 2004 to 2006 and dealt with the cultural economy of paranoia surrounding the word ‘virus’ in its biological (sexual), computational (coding) and capital (marketing) forms. Virutorium is an interactive robotic sound installation, a kinetic and aural work that advances themes originated in the Infrasense project. This new project explores the extensive and pervasive cultural dynamics of the ‘virus’ and seeks to highlight how far viral systems and models are influencing bodily and computer based communication systems, modes of capitalism and socio-sexual relations, ultimately contemplating how we construct cultural memories about transient entities that we consider detrimental to our livelihoods.

Owen Mundy: You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore Owen Mundy’s artwork considers places where money and culture collide. Often involving collaboration, software and interventions, it manifests in both private and public spaces, initiating dialogue by engaging with history, vernacular forms of communication and the political order. The development of his sculptural and digital practice continues an interest in the cultural construction of meaning through mechanical means of representation.

You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore is an installation that projects moving US Geological Survey (USGS) satellite images using handmade kinetic projection devices. Each device hangs from the ceiling and uses electronic components to rotate strips of satellite images on transparency in front of an LED light source. They are constructed with found materials like camera lenses and consumer by-products and mimic remote sensing devices, bomb sights and cameras in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The installation includes altered images from various forms of lens-based analysis on a micro and macro scale; land masses, ice sheets and images of retinas, printed on reflective silver film.

Hannah Ross: I Have Plagiarized In honor of Hal Davis’ 1985 court case, Hannah Ross has taken famous contemporary works and copied them. Without altering the images in any manner, she converted the digital images to computer code, and displayed the code. There is a grey area when it comes to US copyright law; because a derivative work is allowed to attain copyright on the basis that the original was creatively altered. But the extent of alteration and what constitutes “creativity” is vague. An additional technicality is that in order to begin a derivative work, you must be granted permission by the owner: “only the owner of copyright in a work ?has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work.” The act of creation itself is the infringement. So these works are in violation of copyright law because they are identical to the originals, but are just read in a different visual format.

Jennifer Wroblewski: Get Free For Get Free, Jennifer Wroblewski frames “the real” as the perceived limitations inherent to life in the material world. The temporary installation investigates possibilities of finding freedom through a transcendence of the material body, and an embrace of that which is our energetic presence in the material universe.

The goal of this temporary installation/wall drawing is to challenge and redefine ideas about the drawing as object by creating a site-specific, impermanent installation. The drawing is a byproduct of a performance, the casting of a spell, an offer of a different version of reality for both artist and viewer. The space becomes the body, in constant motion, externalized. Following the exhibition the walls will be repainted, the drawing lost forever. The work cannot be preserved, framed, purchased. The work itself is fleeting, as are all moments of freedom.