The Live Art Performance by Tom Estes at ‘’Parallax: Other Realms’ will inaugurate The Biennial Project’s expanded program of large screen digital projections at La Biennale di Venezia. The performance will coincide with Estes’ time at the newly founded Biennial Project Residency Project at the V70 building in Venice.
The path to a successful art career can be a twisting one, but one commonly traveled route is the artist residency. Not all residencies are created equal, and while some may help artists get a leg up in the art world, programs can be grouped several ways. There are hundreds of residencies out there, but only a few highly prestigious programs are invitation-only like those of Artpace, the Walker Art Center, UCLA’s Hammer Museum or — The Biennial Project Residency Project.
However, unlike many other residency programs The Biennial Project Residency Project selects only one individual to take part in our program at any one time. This years Biennial Project Artist in Residence for 2015 is London based Artist Tom Estes www.TomEstesArtist.com.
The Venice Residency takes place in the heart of the historic city of Venice — an “open-air” museum with a cultural and artistic heritage of inestimable value. The residency also takes place during The Venice Biennale — which has for over a century been one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world.
For those of you who don’t know, The Biennial Project, the hosts of this event, have the collaborative goal that artists’ explore the nature and understand the perception of biennials within the art world and, and in so doing, develop a collective body of work that will be exhibited in as many biennials as possible. This year the President of la Biennale di Venezia, Paolo Baratta, accompanied by the curator, Okwui Enwezor, met with the representatives of the 53 Countries participating and determined this years theme for 2015. A “Parliament of Forms” rather than one overarching theme was chosen. The title and theme which is ‘All the World’s Futures’ is informed by a layer of intersecting “Filters” or a constellation of parameters that circumscribe multiple ideas, touched upon to both imagine and realize a diversity of practices.
In the search for a language and method for an exhibition in Venice, The Biennial Project and Artist in Residence Tom Estes have settled on the nature of the exhibition as fundamentally a visual, somatic, aural, and narrative event. In so doing, we have ask how an exhibition of the scale and scope of the 56th International Art Biennale can be addressed in its format and refresh it with the potential of its temporal capacity.
For Estes there are new possibilities opening up around the next generation of mediated experiences. Of course, the artistic possibilities of virtual reality are tremendous, but the implications are far greater for many other fields. From advertising and fashion to pornography, virtual reality is on the cusp of becoming a part of our everyday lives. Like a child in a world of new technologies, Estes references these new technologies and tests boundaries and deciphers our sense of reality with play and curiosity.
Thinking through the lens of 20th-century cartoons, Atari video games, The Sims, the writing of Oxford Professor of Philosophy Nick Bostrom, the innovative and self-reflective film Tron, and other children’s entertainment, this Live Art Performance explores the coexistence of disparate elements within shared spaces. Gags betray complex meanings and socio-political satire, and unrelated objects, locales, and avatars interact in both the same dimension and time as well as imagined ones.
Through the work, Estes glimpses the possibilities and problems that emerge when becoming a digital entity. Clumsy and mischievous, in this performance work Estes becomes a “Virtual Drawing Machine’ by incorporating a DARPA-funded Exoskeleton ‘soft’ suit (currently under development at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University). Estes utilizes this technology with a sense of wonder and humor by reverse engineering to a past time in order to position himself to explore the potential of computers in an at-the-time esoteric field. Concepts surrounding animation, digital technologies and Science Fiction are expanded into a Live Art Performance that enacts a sort of hysteria around flatness and depth perception in relation to technologies, robotics, real and illusory spaces—physical, virtual, the internal, and the external.
The title of the work ‘Parallax’ is a term for an effect in optical instruments. Many animals, including humans, have two eyes with overlapping visual fields that use parallax to gain depth perception; this process is known as stereopsis. Questioning the use of human senses in deciphering reality, Estes transcends the categories that separate drawing from performance, the human from the nonhuman, and the animated from the static, while experiences of technological devices and flatness lead to fantastic and absurd implications for drawings and computer programming. As screens, portals, and shadows populate both physical and virtual realms, the artist poses question as to whether images are reflections or traces of the objective world, obstructions, fantasies, or entryways into other realms.
The Live Art Performance of Parallax: Other Realms will take place from 5:00 on May 4th, 2015, followed by a Champagne Reception organsed by The Biennial Project at VIA GARIBALDI 1791 Sestiere Castello Venezia, Italia
The Biennial Project Residency Project will be open to the public from the 3rd to the 8th of May. Arrange a studio visit by calling 44 + 7552091612 or by emailing TomEstesArtst@gmail.com
You can see more of the work of Tom Estes at www.TomEstesArtist.com
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There is a Venice Launch party
LAUNCH PARTY @ LO&BEHOLD
In Association with Bath Spa University
7pm start till MIDNIGHT
Stimulus Ltd DJ SQUAD
Alex Čepalović
Rude Boy Ray Gange
Messrs Danny Pockets & Steve Smith
Live ART Performance by Tom Estes
Paul Sakoilsky Dark Times Editor Poem 4 Venice
Late Night Reading
Special Live Guest Performance 11pm START
Jaye Moni
ART SELECTRONIC 