VertexList space has the pleasure to present “SELF 2.0”, a group exhibition of emerging US based media artists. On display recent projects by Mike Beradino, Charles Beronio, Zachary Biberstine, Kara Hearn, Jia Lim and Laura Nova. Commenting on the contemporary strategies of electronically mediated self, SELF 2.0 introduces new and exciting voices of artists from across the country.

Live circuit music performance by Jamie Allen/Season of the Bit @ the opening reception.

Curated by Marcin Ramocki and Sakurako Shimizu

Mike Beradino

My works are physical recursions, between the digital and physical. These recursions are similar a feed back loop such as a microphone next to a speaker. The speaker output signal becomes the input of the microphone and so on and so on. An object is created then digitized then produced then digitized then produced. Environments such as SecondLife are populated with objects from real life, but our real life objects probably originated in some digital environment. These two pieces are re-presentations of the hollow vessel of the digital avatar. Mikey Newchurch is re-presented from a CNC mill in a series; which is an attempt of giving some physicality to my virtual body. While Mica Sicling is produce in at life sized scale in paper. An indexical relationship of re-presentation of the avatar is created, the original data that is used to create the virtual is used to create the tangible. That is why I included the process of production.

Charles Beronio

Charles Beronio (b. New York City) lives and works in Oakland/San Francisco and Brooklyn. He completed his MFA in Sculpture at the California College of the Arts (2005), where he is currently developing his thesis on the aesthetics of supermarkets for his MA in Visual Criticism. As an artist and writer, his practice includes a diverse range of work steeped in romantic conceptualism and allegorical formalism. His work utilizes a diverse range of familiar and common materials found in the marketplace and constructed landscape to revealsubmerged meanings and narratives? challenging the trajectories of ideology and commerce. He has shown at Galeria de la Raza, Intersectionfor the Arts, Southern Exposure, Triple Base, Queens Nails Annex, and the S.F. Art Commission in San Francisco, as well as Gallery LuiVelazquez (Tijuana, Mexico), High Energy Constructs (Los Angeles), and Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery (Portland). He was included inConsume/d: Creative Critical Acts from the Bay Area (2005) in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. In 2006 he curated Material World at theAlliance Francais San Francisco and staged the collaborative exhibition Blackout with artist Sasha Dela at Diverseworks, Houston. He will alsobe included in New American Talent 22 at Arthouse in Austin, Texas. He has published several design related articles in CMYK magazine(New York) and his forthcoming magazine/book project Dark Prospects will be published by Printed Matter Inc. later this year.

Zachary Biberstine

This 2006 video performance begins with the unfurling of the American flag and ends with the gasping for breath. This attempted embodiment, although painful and enduring, was an effort to understand and progress. The performance attempts to not only share this experience, but also evoke the experiences of others; create a connection on a visual, audible, and memory level.

Currently working in personal, time based performance; the work of Zachary Biberstine takes many shapes. Interested in experience and embodiment, his recent work lives in and through performative acts, sometimes shown as artifacts or documentation. His work deals with ideasof experience, embodiment, displacement, expansion, and collapse. Selections of work can be seen at www.biberstine.com

Kara Hearn

These scenes are my effort to degrade and venerate the heroics of Hollywood movies. By utilizing the techniques of cinema in the simplest possible ways I hope to recreate narratives that are stripped of everything but the pathos inherent in the medium.

Kara Hearn is an interdisciplinary video artist. She works with the stuff of popular entertainment to map the complexities of various emotionalstates, such as fear, melancholy, courage, and obsession. She studies these conditions and builds intimate and absurd narratives to understandthem by. Her work has shown at White Columns, Pacific Film Archive, New Langton Arts, the Walker Art Center, Dallas Video Festival, andthe Festival Tous Courts International Festival of Cinema. She recently received an MFA in Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.You can see examples of her work at http://karahearn.com/

Jia Lim

It all started with my curiosity about the human mind, conscious and unconscious. After reading Elegant Universe, my curiosities were somewhat solved. It was then that I realized that science and philosophy have the same value system as the artistic process, which is creation originates from the imagination or unconsciousness.

Jia Lim is a Korean American new media artist involved in analysis of identity in pop-culture. Her work was exhibited in Gwang-ju Bienale,Gallery 24 (NYC) and Gallery Andante (Seoul). She holds and MFA in Electronic Arts from the University of Cincinnati and M.P.S in Interactive Telecommunication Program (NYU). http://jiart.com/

Laura Nova

In “First Love” I provide the opportunity for participants to reconstruct memories of their first love using facial composite software. My interaction with the participant is not merely as portrait artist, but also uses the art of the conversation to restore the details of their memories, physical and psychological. The portrait that results is remnant of this conversation.

Laura Nova was born in 1973 and grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. Lives and works on the Lower East Side, New York. Laura Nova isa visual artist working in video, sculpture and installation. Her work is rooted in social relationships and literalized emotions. Using thegallery and site-specific spaces, she creates installations using a wide range of media to explore concepts of public and private behavior andthe relationship between the human body and architecture. She received her B.F.A. and B.A. in art and history from Cornell University in 1996and an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001 as a Jacob Javits Fellow. She lived and worked in London as aRotary International Scholar and completed Associate Research at Goldsmiths College in 2002. She has exhibited internationally, most recently atthe Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City and VTO Gallery in London. For the past year she participated in the Henry StreetSettlement Artist in Residence Program. She has taught at City College, School of Visual Arts, Pratt Institute, The College of New Jersey andThe School of the Art Institute of Chicago. http://lauranova.com/

Jamie Allen makes interactive art and sound makers with his head and hands. He thinks technology can allow us to circumvent and reinvent traditional, commercial and hierarchical relationships to art and performance. His work in design, music, performance and public art creates physical relationships between people and media. Jamie has teaching engagements in interactive art and robotics at the Pratt Institute and musical interface design at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Department. Jamie’s art and performance work is regularly exhibited in New York City and abroad. http:// heavyside.net.

Michael J. Horan is a musician and artist based in New York City. yobitches.com