Andrew Demirjian & James Proctor

Artists’ Statements:
Andrew: My artwork explores the interplay between psychological, virtual and physical spaces in contemporary culture. The pieces take the form of single channel videos, interactive installations, generative poems and audiovisual performance. My work challenges the occularcentric focus of our culture and media conventions and seeks to raise the perceptual role of sound in media. I am interested in using technology to expand our perceptual experience of the everyday through classification systems, computational processing and distributed networks.

James: Generative art is a reflection of the rules that create it. In my practice I continuously develop a process of writing those rules in code. The central contradiction that fascinates me is that each piece can be described simply by it’s instructions, but the resulting images are unpredictable. The potential to surprise is a consequence of how the systems I’ve put in place interact with one another. Observing the outcomes of a system, altering it’s rules, and then observing what has changed forms an endless loop. I add and alter instructions to balance consonance and dissonance. No piece should resolve to a single image. Instead they should continue to change in a fluid and natural progression. I create a successful system when no image is the same as the one that came before it, but all are part of the same piece and described in the same terms.

Bios:
Andrew Demirjian is an interdisciplinary artist who creates alternative relationships between image, sound and text that challenge contemporary media conventions. He uses computer programming, surveillance, data gathering and motion tracking to twist perceptual relationships between the senses. The pieces take the form of interactive installations, generative poems, audiovisual performance and single channel videos. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of the Moving Image, Eyebeam, Rush Arts, the White Box gallery, LMAK Projects, The Visual Art Center of New Jersey, Fuse Factory, Cyberfest, the LOOP Festival of Video Art, Huuto Gallery, Flux Factory, the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, Digital Graffiti and many additional galleries. Andrew’s digital poetry pieces have been featured at the Currents New Media Festival, Harvestworks, The Athens International Film Festival, Jacket2, Infinity’s Kitchen online literary magazine, The Center for Book Arts, The Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology 15^th Biennial Symposium, The Sugarhill Children’s Museum, the Laznia Contemporary Art Center in Gdansk, Poland, the Yeosu Cultural Center in Yeosu, South Korea, the Fieldgate Gallery in London, England, and the Newark Museum. The MacDowell Colony, Puffin Foundation, Artslink, Harvestworks, Diapason, Experimental Television Center, The Bemis Center, The Visual Studies Workshop and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts are among some of the organizations that have supported his work. Andrew teaches theory and production courses in emerging media in the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College. www.andrewdemirjian.com, ademirji@hunter.cuny.edu

James Proctor is a software artist and data visualization designer. In his art practice, he writes and iterates on rules in code that guide the growth of each piece. The resulting images reflect the visual legacy of their predecessors, as well as the ordered patterns of the process that creates them.While working as a lab assistant at the University of Delaware, where he earned his B.A. in Fine Art and Psychology, he realized that the data collection and processing methods he learned could be applied to art. With a research grant awarded to him in the summer of 2009, he created an interactive installation utilizing Max/MSP software. Programming has since become an integral of his life and art. Professionally, James works as a data visualization designer creating pieces that help others interact with and interpret information. His work has been featured in Vice’s The Creators Project, Currents New Media Festival, Human NYC, the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival and the New Wilmington Art Association. He has collaborated on pieces that were displayed at Eyebeam and The Standard High Line. Select digital editions of his artwork are available through the online gallery The File Arts.