Maps for Navigating to a New Perspective
For some of the show’s 38 artists, existing maps serve as raw material to be turned into sculptures, collages and such. For others, a map is the end result, created from experience or imagination to fix a place, a time or an idea. But all these objects, gathered by the guest curator, Sarah Tanguy, force [...]
Personal Identities/Contemporary Portraits
Michael Schwager was working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1985 when Eric Fischl’s famous life-size “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” painted the year before, entered the collection. He was struck by the power and beauty of the image – a startled-looking old man wearing nothing but a shirt [...]
One on One With Video Artist Lincoln Schatz
At the National Portrait Gallery’s recently-opened exhibit “Americans Now,” a work by video artist Lincoln Schatz entitled Esquire’s Portrait of the 21st Century, re-envisions how to create a likeness of another human being. Placing a subject inside a 10-foot-by-10-foot cube, Schatz employs 24 cameras to shoot hours of video footage which is then randomly reassembled, [...]
This man at his best: For Esquire’s 75th, Lincoln Schatz mounts his Cube project of mutable video portraits
George Clooney danced with 10 slightly giddy women. LeBron James played basketball—using his own avatar—on an Xbox. David Chang and four friends got monumentally, rip-roaringly, take-your-shirt-off drunk. Above them, 24 digital cameras captured every dip, dunk and sip, funneling the images into whirring computers, which in turn dissected every frame, pulling them apart like silk [...]
Being There and Letting Go: A Conversation with Lincoln Schatz
Portraiture of all varieties is hot in the current art market. Just as traditional portraiture risks superannuation by alternative approaches like Facebook and Second Life, Chicago-based Lincoln Schatz is charting new ground. His interactive video portraits fuse likeness and identity with character probing and perpetual change. At the root, the need to record, to display, [...]
Weekend Update
…In the new Hearst Building at Eighth Avenue, I got a special pass from the guards to go up the escalator, past the glorious Richard Long mud mural, to a mezzanine where the digital artist Lincoln Schatz is working on a special multimedia commission from Esquire Magazine billed as a “Portrait of the 21st Century” [...]
Review: Chapter 2, Think.21, Brussels, Belgium
Think of the categories ‘digital art’ or ‘new media art’ and lazy critics tends to think of art stuck somewhere in the surly, noncommercial, left-field ‘alternative’ margins of art-making, or of the geeky art-and-technology stuff that fascinates nobody except the nerdy oddballs who are into it. Either way, new media art gets a bad deal [...]
Digital Video Portraits Capture Internal and External Spaces
How do you . . . create a new art form using digital technology that architects would find appealing? Summary: Chicago-based artist Lincoln Schatz is wowing architects with his generative digital video portraits. His video work, called media art, gathers images of external or internal spaces using digital video cameras to create a changing collage [...]
Room with 24 views: ‘Cube’ exhibit is portrait studio, 21st-century style
‘Cube,’ as Lincoln Schatz has dubbed the space, possesses 24 video cameras, which all film the person or people in the room for 60 minutes. Then, the existing videos will be combined into one continuously running stream, in which a software program randomly determines what appears on a 42-inch screen. He calls it a Generative [...]
Unconventional Center
After touring the permanent art collection at McCormick Place West, I decided it was time to rethink the use of the word massive. The latest expansion of the city’s famed convention center, which houses a 470,000-square-foot exhibition hall, includes work by 50 Chicago-area artists. In any other context, Nick Cave’s eight-foot-diameter Universe would be described [...]
Random Access Portraits
For many artists, the act of creation is also an act of control: a deliberate reshaping of reality with a specific message in mind. But for Chicago-based video artist and sculptor Lincoln Schatz, the creative act is all about letting go. Schatz creates “generative portraits” of people and places: video images captured by digital cameras, [...]
Design Events Not to Miss Opening Today – Lincoln Schatz: Cube
Artist Lincoln Schatz will videotape art mavens including philanthropist Ann Hatch, curator Larry Rinder, art collector Rene di Rosa, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, performance artist Annie Sprinkle and San Jose’s Zero 1 founding director Beau Takahara sitting inside a steel and Plexiglas cube for several hours. Sections of the moving images will overlap on monitors [...]
Pose for One Hour, and His Digital Wizardry Creates Art
Don’t look now, but just as technology has changed the way we bank or buy tickets to baseball games, it’s blazing a new trail in how artists create portraits. Lincoln Schatz, a digital artist who uses new technologies for his innovative multimedia portraits, is emblematic of the innovative ways subjects are becoming immortalized. The latest [...]
That’s Not a Flashback, It’s Video Portraiture
It’s nothing unusual to feel a rush of guilty pleasure during a midnight refrigerator raid. But when Jeff Dauber, a senior executive in the laptop computer division of Apple, tries it in his San Francisco home, he feels even more risqué. The shaven-headed, tattooed Mr. Dauber is usually naked, and to get to the refrigerator [...]
Parallax Views
Anchoring the hub of Dallas’ nascent arts district, the interactive video installation “From Here” is rapidly transforming surveillance into artwork. From the moment the piece was erected in the lobby of the One Arts Plaza building last April, its two high-definition cameras began to record and archive the events and people that give the location [...]
Public Domain
Forget imitations: In spaces that incorporate interactive public art commissions, life is art Whether video dependent, light oriented or user supported, interactive art inherently changes the user or visitor experience. “It creates an entirely different piece of dialogue, where it’s about you, the viewer, being the subject of the work,” says Lincoln Schatz, a Chicago-based [...]
Visualizing Memory in Architecture
Chicago-based artist Lincoln Schatz has been drawing attention with his large-scale generative art installations that visualize memory. The artist has recently been commissioned by Dallas developer Billingsley Company to create one of the largest new media works ever installed in a public space. Due to open on March 29, Schatz’s Collision of Memory will be [...]
This Frontier Cannot be Tamed
Want to make a Sundance film? Great! Bring your cell phone to Park City and talk to Shu Lea Cheang. Want to be in a Sundance film? Perfect! Wander by Lincoln Schatz’s Cluster, and chances are you will appear onscreen sometime later. Want to see every single Academy Award winner for Best Picture? Get ready! [...]
At Sundance, Even Artwork Needs a Power Cord
PARK CITY, Utah–Some venues at the Sundance Film Festival are all about the illumination of big-screen independent movies, and some are showcases for creative filmmaking technologies. Only one Sundance spot, however, highlighted the best of both. Film’s art and tech realms converged Friday afternoon at the 10-day Sundance festival’s panel discussion on the intersection of [...]
Sundance’s New Frontier preserves artistic integrity
As Sundance becomes progressively more established as a global film market, fest programmers have to work diligently to preserve its artistic integrity. Hence the unveiling of an expanded New Frontier section this year, featuring moving image installations from 11 visual artists. The fest’s Frontier section has screened experimental films since 2000, and this year will [...]
‘Heavy Light’ Challenges Viewers
There is a small trace of the sun on the ocean, visible on the horizon. A lone figure, a small self-portrait of the artist, is the only figure in the landscape. But the sun isn’t about to rise any farther while you’re looking at it. The reason: In John Gerrard’s digital screen installation, “Thousand Year [...]
Getting Connected
…Budding collectors can also consider the real-life case studies of contemporary art collectors who have ventured into the nascent new-media field. Gary Simons, a Los Angeles real estate developer and his wife Gilena, are two of Sacks’ newest clients. They primarily collect photography by such artists as Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer and Richard Misrach. Last [...]
Portraits Retain Power to Dazzle the Eye
Maybe they appeal to the narcissist in all of us, but the human fascination with portraits seems inexhaustible. Even when we know little about the person in the picture, if the likeness is strong enough the fascination doesn’t fade. Hans Memling was a major Flemish painter back in the 1400s. But stand in front of [...]
Three to See
If you’re going to the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies at 618 S. Michigan, they’ve got a gift shop there, but, in the lobby, you want to see this: Physically, it doesn’t sound like much, it’s basically two flat plasma screens in an industrial frame, okay, not much. But there’s a work on these screens [...]