Harm van den Dorpel, mutant.garden (screengrab), 2020
Upstream Gallery proudly presents Harm van den Dorpel's second exhibition with the gallery, dedicated to his Mutant Garden software, its various material outputs and research.
Where traditional artistic mediums require the artist to create the work with their own hand, Van den Dorpel rather programs software and trains it by looping continuous feedback through its output in order to produce works with unpredictable aesthetic outcomes. As many people nowadays equate artificial intelligence with neural networks, the artist wants to highlight other moments in this recent history of computation, approaching it as algorithmic archeology. The latest installment in the artist’s inquiry into the history of computation is Mutant Garden, which uses an existing algorithm called ‘Cartesian Genetic Programming’
PolakvanBekkum, Fronting Motion as presented in the online show Appearances on our online platform upstream.gallery in September 2020
From 23 April - 8 May Upstream Gallery presents in it's private viewing space Fronting Motion, an online installation by PolakvanBekkum.
The artist couple Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum have built an extensive oeuvre around their research of movement in time and space. In their work the use and shape of landscape and infrastructure play an important role, as do vehicles for movement (from bodies to cars and planes) and traces of movement.
The work Fronting Motion we show here was initially produced as both an online and live installation for the exhibition Internet of Cars in Southampton, UK (2014) using live data from around Southampton. Two different websites each show a different data feed: one showed boats moving through the harbor from AIS ship monitoring data, while the other showed the highway through registration plate data. The current work shows the archived data from 2014, restored especially for this occasion.
The exhibition runs from April 23rd through May 8th and is open on Wednesdays - Saturdays between 1 and 6 PM. If you would like to visit the gallery (both exhibitions), please reserve a timeslot here: