Tom Burtonwood Curates In Real Life at Platform

In this conversation we talk with curator and exhibiting artist Tom Burtonwood, about taking things from real life to digital formats and then back into real life in his upcoming show "In Real Life" at Platform in Evanston. The exhibiting artists include Aimée Beaubien, Nick Bontrager, Tom Burtonwood, Assaf Evron, Burton Isenstein, Christopher Meerdo, Rosalie Yu

This conversation goes in many places, walking through the art in the show, and talking about current challenges of how to know what is "real" and playing with what our minds and eyes think is real.

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“In Real Life” is an exhibition of work made by artists concerned with the translation of the physical into the virtual and back again. They are invested in the production of art works and experiences to produce outcomes that probe and examine our relationship to the real and how we perceive it to be. While the pursuit and accordant unraveling of artifice is nothing new the current anxiety surrounding “fake news” and the malaise around what is presented to us as real opens up fertile ground to mine new modes of representation.

Volumetric image capture and reproduction represents an evolutionary moment for photography and other types of technical image making mediums. One that is tied inextricably to the history of the mechanical image but also points to many possible new futures in terms of interaction, and simulation. Central to this shift in types of representation is a set of technologies commonly referred to as 3D scanning.

Quietly and without great fanfare we are seeing image, object and time based media production collapse into singular streams of productive behavior. Scenes and surfaces are being generated from technical apparatus and fabricated without intervention from the hand of the artist. It is within this context that a new form of representation is evolving, a form of volumetric photography, that exists in many different versions congruently – as image, as form, as experience, as data, as transmission, all at once.

Saturday, June 2, 12-5 p
904 Sherman Ave.
platform904.com

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 The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, low tech on purpose. Reach out to host Lisa Degliantoni at thelisadshow[at]gmail.com