Robin Assner and Adam Watkins's I Love You (remix) (music video), 2011. Courtesy of Laumeier Sculpture Park
On the morning I went to see Electric is the Love, the new techno-manic exhibition featuring seven local artists at Laumeier Sculpture Park, my printer ran out of ink—ironically, just as I was about to print an Office Depot coupon to buy more ink. I texted my parents, who I was meeting later, and asked my dad to check his email; I then sent him a PDF of the coupon so he could print it out for me. I Google Mapped my route to the sculpture park, and in the car, I plugged in my iPod and cued my Autumn II mix (a playlist of songs that, for a variety of arcanely personal reasons, remind me of fall, ranging from vintage Smiths to—somewhat embarrassingly—Ah-ha’s “Take on Me”). But instead, I got sucked into a discussion on NPR about whether police use of GPS and other high-tech surveillance violates Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
What’s the point? Well, exactly. There’s nothing remarkable about my techno-laden morning, even though it encompassed a range of technologies (GPS! iPod! PDF!) that, for most people, were confined to the realm of science fiction a mere 20 years ago. Which is to say that any art exhibition that seeks to take on modern technology and to “explore the powerful effects of a range of communication mediums” while “heightening our senses” to produce “a hyperactive exhibition that aims to expand our knowledge and amplify our interaction as players and viewers” has set a pretty high bar for itself.
So is Electric is the Love worth dragging yourself away from your iPad for?
It’s hard to tell how much irony we’re supposed to invest in the exhibition’s titular emotion. Love? There’s definitely more uneasiness evoked at the outset by Robin Assner and Adam Watkin’s It’s all happening (Love is all around), a TV triptych showing loops of surveillance footage taken outside in the park, including a man and woman (their faces politely blurred) seemingly on the verge of making out. And it may be hard for anyone but a cyborg to fall head over heels for Christopher Ottinger’s Cybercar—the installation’s warm (yet strangely cold) orange glow and its soothing (yet strangely irritating) mechanical hum seem to speak to a more conflicted relationship with the “machine culture” it’s said to represent.
The design duo Yo_Cy (Christine Yogiaman and Ken Tracy) meld po-mo Conceptual art forms with a kind of Science Center–worthy wonder in their Loom Portal. Wispy fiber-optic tendrils connect to an array of mirrors outside, which translate the goings-on in the park into twinkling pinpricks of light—at once beautiful and disconcertingly reductive, like a Mozart symphony boiled down to some sort of binary code.
When I got home, I was tempted to go straight to my computer or to hunker down over a long game of Angry Birds. But something about Electric is the Love made me want to take the dog to Forest Park instead.
Electric is the Love at the indoor galleries at Laumeier Sculpture Park runs through January 22. The park is located at 12580 Rott Rd., and the galleries are open Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. For more information, go to www.laumeiersculpturepark.org. UPDATE: also check out http://virtuallaumeier.net, where you can further explore the exhibit's multimedia aspects.
