Shirley Shor > CryptoMania
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 30, 2017, 20:00
Curator: Yaron Haramati
CryptoMania brings the cyberworld and human/machine relations in the post-digital age into the world of art. Shor explores abstract themes like identity, language, and borders, contemplating their place and relevance in contemporary life.
In her video work Eve, which presents a portrait of a woman composed of tens of thousands of flickering pixels, she wrote a code which displays at any given moment pixels taken from several portraits of Israeli women. The fabricated portrait presents the ethnic diversity that exists in Israeli society. The elusive image confronts the question of identity in the digital world, which shifts between the private and the public and between the familiar and the hybrid.
In the piece The Book of Life, an interactive animation of black and white coordinates is projected on a sculptural object in the shape of a large open book. In this piece, Shor pushes the boundaries of familiar language to more abstract possibilities of communication. This dynamic handwriting seems to be writing, erasing, and writing itself over and over with impenetrable structural complexity. In the new video work, Strange Days, she makes further use in the architectural linear language. This time she projects it on the body of a woman, creating a fragment of the limitless living code. In the encounter between the human female body and the technological language of the line, Shor examines the line between man and machine/web. Is the body “trapped” in the web? Or has it been connected into it for so long that they are now one? And perhaps now it attempts to encrypt itself in order to maintain its privacy?
The exhibition’s title, Cryptomania, is a composite of the word Crypto, a technological trend that expresses the encryption of private information as a reaction to the digital world that offers no privacy, and the word Mania, which expresses the negative an irrational aspect that comes with any modern technological trend.
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