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Sarnia, ON – How do you send an artist's mother an email from retro space? Jeremy Bailey will engage the audience to help with this unusual task at the Trinity Lounge on the next First Friday on January 8, 2010. While First Friday events run from 6pm to 9pm, WarMail will begin at 9:30pm.
Led by Bailey, the audience will interact with the artist's retro space video game interface, turning the space craft with the motion of their flailing arms and propelling it with the hum of their voices. Together the group navigates the screen to locate letters which are used to compose an email to Bailey's mother.
Originally commissioned for HTTP gallery, WarMail takes its interface from Computer Space, one of the first video and arcade games available to the public. Created by the founders of Atari, and predating Pong, the use of this cumbersome, dated interface is given a new life when used to control the everyday simple activity of writing an email. By bringing the traditionally private activities of video game playing and email writing into a social and public forum, Bailey forces the participant to consider the sociological impact of technology on human interaction.
A native of Toronto, Bailey is a visual artist and curator working primarily in electronic media. He has been described by filmmaker magazine as, “a one man revolution on the way we use video, computers and our bodies to create art.”
Bailey's work has been featured in many exhibitions and festivals nationally and internationally. He is co-founder and participating artist in the 640 480 collective, an award winning international collective of sculpture and video artists who create conceptual interdisciplinary new media projects. Bailey received his MFA in Art Video from Syracuse University in 2006.
WarMail coincides with the exhibition Interplay: Art, Technology, Man which is featured at Gallery Lambton until January 23, 2010. Interplay is a group exhibition of three artists whose artistic practice includes the use of robotics, computers, video, sound and human interaction. The exhibition conveys the range of work being done by contemporary artists in this field. Included in the exhibition are two installations by Jeremy Bailey: Video Terraform Dance Party and Transhuman Dance Recital #1, Reva Stone's Carnevele 3.0., and Michael Waterman's, RoboChorus.
For more information about Lambton County, visit www.lambtononline.ca.
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Contact:
Holly Rutherford
Gallery Assistant Community Relations
Gallery Lambton
Telephone: 519 336-8127
email: holly.rutherford@county-lambton.on.ca
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