Candy + Code - Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Barbara Rauch, Nicola Naismith :: March 17, 2008; 6:30 pm :: Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer considers her Commodore 64 computer and Fisher Price loom to be defining objects of her childhood. Using knitting and sweets she creates physical representations of digital information and computation and is currently researching the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body. Egenhoefer is supported by the Textile Futures Research Group at the University of the Arts as part of the Distributed South initiative. Her residency will showcase the development of software that provides motion tracking for knitting needles. Egenhoefer explains: “Visually the piece will reflect our bodily interaction with machines, tracing the circular motion of the needles to our body’s give and take of working at a machine.”

Dr Barbara Rauch, research fellow at the Chelsea College of Art, combines consciousness studies with digital art theories and practices. She explores evolutionary aspects of human and animal facial expression to reveal conscious and subconscious experience. Rauch is currently the co-investigator of a two-year AHRC project The Personalised Surface Within Fine Art Digital Printmaking. Much of her work uses data capture technologies, digital print technology, visualisation of digital 3D work, animation, sound, drawings and performance.

Nicola Naismith, lecturer at Norwich School of Art and Design, explores the ordinary qualities in everyday items, for example the white shirt and the sewing needle, using a combination of digital and analogue processes. Simple objects are subject to complex questions concerning production, labour, value and the human-machine. Naismith represents these ideas through works that unravel operations between hand, eye, brain, body and machine.

Following presentations, Dr Jane Harris, Director of TFRG, Helen Sloan, Director of SCAN and Jess Laccetti, Institute of Creative Technologies, will conduct a panel discussion with the artists.

Media Art: challenge or cheat?: Take part in our discussion & have your say on art that comes out of a computer. Is art art, whatever tools you use to make it? Or does the use of digital technology constitute a kind cheating? For three days in March, The ICA, responsible for one of the earliest exhibitions of computer-generated art, Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968, plays host to a series of discussions on the state of Media Art today.