A National Exhibition with Juror George Fifield
June 12 – July 17, 2015
Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5 to 7 pm
The 21st century will see a proliferation of artificial objects, which will seek to interact with us, talk to us and demand an empathetic response. They will say they are sorry when they are incapable of sorrow. They will act happy to see us but are unable to feel joy. They will offer companionship with no sense of society. And in all technological change, it is the role of the artist, to prepare us for the impact of the new. As Marshall McLuhan said in 1969, “Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.”
For this reason, this is not an exhibition of intelligent objects, nor was it meant to be. It is an exhibition of art that addresses, in some manner, questions of intelligence and empathy. What does it mean for a sculpture to be nervous? What does it mean for a wall to breathe? Each piece in the show asks a similar question, not always having a satisfactory answer, but then art doesn’t have to answer the questions it asks, that is our job as the audience.
George Fifield
Participating Artists
Nancy Bardach (Berkeley, California)
David Barnett (Tarrytown, New York)
Linda Behar (Parkland, Florida)
Adina Bricklin (Arlington, Massachusetts)
Andrzej Brodzik (Arlington, Massachusetts)
David Calloway (Oviedo, Florida)
Alexander Churchill (Norwalk, Connecticut)
Lindsey Clark-Ryan (Northampton, Massachusetts)
Bec Conrad (Providence, Rhode Island)
Alicia Eggert (Portland, Maine)
Jean-Marie Guyaux (Long Island City, New York)
Delbert Jackson (Boston, Massachusetts)
Pat Lay (Jersey City, New Jersey)
Philip Levine (Stratford, Connecticut)
Ayelet Lindenstrauss Larsen (Bloomington, Indiana)
Ken Lovell (Hamden, Connecticut)
Robin Mandel (Northampton, Massachusetts)
Michael McBride (Saint Louis, Missouri)
Joseph Morris (Brooklyn, New York)
Kathleen Rogers (Summit, New Jersey)
Jeff Warmouth (Groton, Massachusetts)
Image Gallery
About the Juror
George Fifield is a media arts curator, writer, teacher and artist. He is the founder and director of Boston Cyberarts Inc., a nonprofit arts organization that produced the Boston Cyberarts Festival, an international biennial Festival that included exhibitions of visual art, music, dance, and theatrical performances as well as film and video presentations and symposia at numerous organizations throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. For thirteen years until 2006, Fifield was also Curator of New Media at the DeCordova.
He is an independent curator of New Media with numerous projects in the United States and abroad. Among his numerous curatorial efforts, he co-curated the computer installation art show, The Computer Is Not Sorry at the Space in January 1993 and in May 1999, he co-curated Mind Into Matter, the first international survey show of new digital sculpture at the Computer Museum in Boston.
Fifield has written on a variety of media, technology and art topics for Artbyte, Bomb, Communication Arts, Digital Fine Arts, The Independent Film and Video Monthly, Sculpture Magazine, Art New England and numerous exhibition catalogs.
Fifield has taught at a number of institutions on New Media subjects. He is adjunct professor at the Digital + Media program at Rhode Island School of Design where he teaches a graduate level course on Interactivity in the Fine Arts. He has lectured at Harvard University, Brandeis University, Massachusetts College of Art, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Tampa and many others.
In 2006, the Boston Arts Community members of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Boston Chapter honored Fifield with the First Annual Special Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Arts Community. In 2007 the Boston Cyberarts Festival was the recipient of the Commonwealth Award, the state of Massachusetts’ highest honor in the arts and humanities in the category of Creative Economy.
Exhibition Sponsor
Intelligent Objects is generously sponsored by
