Harvestworks New Works Resident Jakob Dwight invites the NY Art Community to view new works as well as explore his progress with his anthropologically-based art & gaming platform N’CHI from May 24-26, 2013. The opening reception on Friday May 24th will feature a special music performance by sound collagist and composer Lori Scacco (Storms, Savath y Savalas).
[May 24-26] Jakob LeBaron Dwight: New Works Residency Open Studios
Jakob Dwight
Opening Reception: Friday, May 24 2013, 7-10pm
Open Studios: Saturday/Sunday, May 25/26 2013, noon to 5pm
Location:
Harvestworks – www.harvestworks.org
596 Broadway, #602 | New York, NY 10012 | Phone: 212-431-1130
Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R Prince, 6 Bleeker
Harvestworks’ New Work Resident Jakob Dwight’s newest body of work is a mythopoetic and semi-autobiographical visual exploration of the artist’s own history as the adult survivor of a childhood brain tumor – a benign astrocytoma – the removal of which caused a switch in hand dominance from right to left. The imagery is inspired by magnetic resonance imaging and the concepts of bilateralism, transhumanism, Adinkral supersymmetry, and Hakim Bey’s writings on ontological anarchy.
N’CHI
Jakob Dwight’s N’Chi will allow users to become fictitious nations on an imaginary planet where they will exchange with one another on both the aesthetic and material ends of a new cultural spectrum. N’Chi will be interdisciplinary experience that will consist of an online strategy game component and a real-world art-making component blurring the lines between imagined and lived experience where artworks can be seen as real-world artifacts in a collectively imagined narrative.
In the online component of N’Chi, participants will choose avatars in the forms of nations and territories on an imaginary planet called SAATD-S79QM. These nations will interact with one another using an energy-based virtual currency as they navigate a myriad of challenges to both the well-being of their respective nations as well as to the planet as a whole. In the real-world these nations and their identities will continue to interact through a series of conversational and/or competitive art exhibits that will serve as an aesthetic currency in a kind of game of the ‘survival of the most creative.’
Through this kind of innovative gameplay, the N’Chi Projekt as a whole seeks to affect real-world change through the raising of awareness, funds and material support for populations in need of international relief from the ravages of war, famine and natural disasters. In this way, N’Chi as a gesture of ’social sculpture’ is an attempt to establish an active flow and conversation between aesthetics and art-making, anthropological reflection, and social outreach. An attempt to become a true Gesamkunswerk or ‘total art work’ N’Chi will spawn an online e-journal (blog), radio station, and a lecture series.
Please go to the links below to the N’Chi microsite for a more complete synopsis of the project. Additionally, you can read more about N’Chi in the Huffington Post below and watch the introductory video.
N’Chi Synopsis
http://jakobdwight.com/artwork/nchi-2012-797/5850
N’Chi in Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/04/jakob-dwight-creates-art-game_n_1400357.html?ref=arts
BIOS
Jakob LeBaron Dwight (born 1977, Mobile, Alabama) is a multimedia and light installation artist. He has exhibited internationally in Berlin, Salzburg and Vienna, Austria, New York City at White Box, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Saas-Fee, Switzerland at the European Graduate School and in Kassel represented by Kreuzberg Pavilllon on the occasion of dOCUMENTA(13).
Lori Scacco is a musician and composer based in New York City. Co-founder and former guitarist of Seely, the first American band on UK imprint Too Pure, she released her first solo recording, Circles, on Prefuse 73’s Eastern Developments label. She has been a touring member of Savath + Savalas and has performed alongside Roberto Carlos Lange in Helado Negro. She is currently a member of Storms with Eva Puyuelo (Savath + Savalas). Through her multi-media collaborations, Scacco investigates the tactile and experiential while repositioning traditional musical structures within a physical and/or cinematic space.
