CURATED: MARINA ZURKOW

Media and participatory practice artist Marina Zurkow connects people to nature-culture tensions and environmental messes, offering new ways of knowing, connecting, and feeling. Using research and technologies including software, animation, food, and other biomaterials, she fosters intimate multispecies and geophysical connections. Zurkow works as a founding member of several collaborative initiatives, including Investing in Futures, Dear Climate, and Climoji.

Recent solo exhibitions include bitforms gallery, New York; Google (Hudson River campus); ICA San Diego; New York City’s MTA Arts & Design; and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; her work has been featured at Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning; the Cooper Hewitt, New York; Storm King Art Center, New York; 21C Museum, Louisville; the 7th Moscow Biennale; FACT, Liverpool; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; and the Seoul Media City Biennial, Korea, among others. Her public art engagements include work with Creative Time, New York; The New Museum’s Ideas City, New York; Northern Lights.mn, Minneapolis; The Artist’s Institute, New York; 01SJ Biennial, San Jose, California; and Rice University, Houston.

Zurkow was a 2022 fellow at the Environmental Media Lab, Princeton University; a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow; and received grants from Rice University, NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is represented by bitforms gallery and resides in the Hudson Valley, New York.


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Inquiry

ARTIST

EXHIBITION

“DEATH 1 was originally conceived as a contribution to a scholarly arts journal on the topic of one’s own death. At first, I imagined producing a one-liner about “the death of the author” that AI threatens to bring upon us all. This turned rather quickly into a sustaining improvisational effort to collaborate with machines—to make unimaginable associations between visual histories, visualizations of morbidity, open skies, and multiple horizons.
At its best (and the not-irrelevant copyright infringement issues aside), AI is one of many algorithmic tactics to collaborate with machines, and be surprised by them. 
At present, text-to-image generation tools are nicely constrained to text prompts, compositing images as add-on squares to be filled in with text-to-image prompts, and manual erasing of image sections (both part of the outpainting technique that Dall-e offers to composite larger or more complex images). The outputs are prone to error and glitch. Dall-e's rich database of historical East Asian imagery flows with my own authored output: having worked for Japanese television from 1989 - 1994, Ukiyo-e and scroll painting have been a deep influence on me for 3 decades.
This image, the first in a series, address this concept:
Upon death, my energy as a creator will— as all creators will— merge into the slipstream of dreams and hallucinations, mingling and in conversation with my kin, ancestors, and descendants—reposiitories or databases of sorts, I suppose— including humans, birds, trees, plastics, worms, images, the scents of geosmin, creosote, and incinerated ash. As above, so below; inside and alongside.” – Marina Zurkow

DEATH 1

“DEATH 2 was originally conceived as a contribution to a scholarly arts journal on the topic of one’s own death. At first, I imagined producing a one-liner about “the death of the author” that AI threatens to bring upon us all. This turned rather quickly into a sustaining improvisational effort to collaborate with machines—to make unimaginable associations between visual histories, visualizations of morbidity, open skies, and multiple horizons.
At its best (and the not-irrelevant copyright infringement issues aside), AI is one of many algorithmic tactics to collaborate with machines, and be surprised by them. 
At present, text-to-image generation tools are nicely constrained to text prompts, compositing images as add-on squares to be filled in with text-to-image prompts, and manual erasing of image sections (both part of the outpainting technique that Dall-e offers to composite larger or more complex images). The outputs are prone to error and glitch. Dall-e's rich database of historical East Asian imagery flows with my own authored output: having worked for Japanese television from 1989 - 1994, Ukiyo-e and scroll painting have been a deep influence on me for 3 decades.
This image, the first in a series, address this concept:
Upon death, my energy as a creator will— as all creators will— merge into the slipstream of dreams and hallucinations, mingling and in conversation with my kin, ancestors, and descendants—reposiitories or databases of sorts, I suppose— including humans, birds, trees, plastics, worms, images, the scents of geosmin, creosote, and incinerated ash. As above, so below; inside and alongside.” – Marina Zurkow <quillbot-extension-portal></quillbot-extension-portal>

DEATH 2

The exhibition presents pioneers from different generations, early 1950s until today, working in the field of generative art. On view will be, among others, plotter drawings, generative photography, sculptures, and NFTs from 30 international artists. In collaboration with ELEMENTUM.ART.

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MARINA ZURKOW

ART

EXHIBITION