3LD Art and Technology Center and Ernesto Klar are pleased to present the United States premiere of “Luzes relacionais” (Relational Lights), a new large-scale interactive installation work by Venezuelan-American new media artist Ernesto Klar. Relational Lights creates a morphing, three-dimensional light-space in which spectators actively participate, manipulating it with their presence and movements.

Ernesto Klar (U.S./Venezuela) is a new media artist based in New York City since 2002. His works have been exhibited at festivals, galleries, and museums in the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Employing the interactive, participatory, and generative capacities of digital technologies, Klar’s works explore the poetic potential of revealing and transforming the threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible. Through a subtle and yet at times radical manipulation of light, sound, and space, Klar’s works frame experiences in which participants engage in perceptual immediacy through their bodily, manipulatory, and behavioral activity. Relational Lights continues that exploration in the way it challenges traditional models of perception, objecthood, and participation.

The exhibition of Relational Lights in New York City follows the world premiere at the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a second exhibition at the SHARE Festival in Turin, Italy. At both festivals, Relational Lights received first prize awards among hundreds of contestants — in Brazil it was awarded the first prize of the FILE PRIX LUX in the Interactive Art category, and in Italy the first prize of the SHARE PRIZE. On behalf of the SHARE PRIZE jury, American science fiction author Bruce Sterling explained the decision saying: “In this work, a huge algorithmic complex is hidden behind a simple, elegant interface. This work of interactive art is a fantastic, world-class work.”

Relational Lights is an interactive installation that explores the ways in which the individual and expressive human subject occupies a shifting and variable space in relation to others. The installation uses light, sound, haze, and a custom-software system to create a morphing, three-dimensional light-space in which spectators actively participate, manipulating it with their presence and movements. The work functions as a living organism with or without the presence and interactions of spectators. When viewers step outside the projected light-space, the system begins its own dialogue with space by means of extruding and morphing sequences of geometric light forms. And when viewers penetrate and interact with the projected light-space, a collective and participatory expression of space unfolds. Relational Lights amplifies the three-dimensional fabric of space by making it visible, audible, and tangible to participants. The resulting aesthetic experience encourages an unending relational process of shaping space among participants.

Ernesto Klar created Relational Lights as a tribute to the work and aesthetic inquiry of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920-1988.) Relational Lights emphasizes the spectator’s relationship with what Lygia Clark called the “expressional-organic” character of space, and expands on her conception of the “organic line.” The latter is the root of Lygia Clark’s progressive interest in and inclusion of the viewing subject within the work of art. Relational Lights takes examples of the “organic line” in Lygia’s oeuvre, such as her Modulated Space maquettes from 1958, and literally extrudes them as interactive planes into three-dimensional space. Spectators are able to modulate and penetrate the “organic line” itself while maneuvering within the space. Relational Lights brings about an awareness of the spectator’s bodily occupations of space in relation to others.

Relational Lights is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. This project is made possible, in part, with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Additional support has been provided by the generous grants from the Greenwall Foundation and the Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds program. The latter is supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts.

Biography: Ernesto Klar (U.S./Venezuela) is a new media artist based in New York City. His artistic work explores the poetic potential of revealing and transforming the threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible. Klar’s works have been exhibited at festivals, galleries, and fairs such as Eyebeam, Pulse Art Fair, Issue Project Room, and Chelsea Art Museum in New York City, the ICA in Boston, the CCCB in Barcelona (Spain), the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, the Oi Futuro Museum in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), the Centrum Kunstlicht in de Kunst in Eindhoven (Netherlands), and The Share Festival in Turin (Italy), among others.. His awards include the first prize of the File Prix Lux in the Interactive Arts category (2010), the Artist Fellowship in Computer Arts from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2007), an Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (2009), as well as grants and fellowships from the Greenwall Foundation (2009), and the Experimental Television Center (2010), among others. Klar holds an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design, and a BMD from Berklee College of Music. Since 2005, he has been a faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design and The New School for Film and Media Studies in New York City.