Rivalry Projects is delighted to present QSL is a mixed media installation by Lucy Helton and Jason E Geistweidt, which addresses climate change and local weather. This exhibition is on view March 3-April 21, 2023.
Join us for an Opening Reception for this exhibit on First Friday, March 3, 2023 from 5:00-9:00 PM.
The artists will be speaking about this exhibit and their art practices on Saturday, March 4, 2023 from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM at Rivalry Projects, light refreshments will be served.
QSL is a mixed media installation which addresses issues of climate change and local weather, while questioning the limits of temporal experience. Building on current radio-art and telematic-media practices, QSL utilizes automated photography, analog-data transmission protocols and radio-marine faxes to look at localized climate conditions. Seasonal and site-specific, the installation will conduct a time-based performance that oscillates between live and archival images of ice formations to discuss our planet’s past, present and future.
This installation consists of eight remote cameras with small single-board computers staged within Buffalo’s Lighthouse. The cameras were positioned a week before the Buffalo Blizzard in December 2022 which made international news, and since have captured, encoded, and transmitted environmental data driven by the lake effect process – which produces more than half the region’s annual snowfall and lake ice. The shifts in landscape will be imaged and converted to a slow-scan analog signal (WEFAX) and routed to portable VHF transceivers broadcasting on upper side-band. Their transmissions will materialize as panoramic images printed by a mechanical installation of three radio-faxes placed within Rivalry Projects.
Additionally, the University at Buffalo has a film crew that has been documenting the process from camera installation on the Lighthouse to installation of the transmission point in Rivalry’s gallery.
Mounted on the wall and slowly printing line by line, they will continuously unfurl the accumulated landscapes in an evolving legacy of image-based climate data. Erratic image transmissions, as they seesaw between historic storm images and immediate landscape captures, will produce a live performance that creatively explores the significance of our current climate as well as our unpredictable future. Reminders of automation, intention and distance are constant as the photograph (as signal) is converted into a real-time RF transmission and subject to radio-frequency interference.
As a radio shorthand “QSL” is a call and response confirmation of signal reception. As an inquiry QSL asks “Have you received the transmission?” while as a statement QSL verifies “Transmission received.”
The Buffalo Lighthouse, a sloping conical tower constructed from limestone and cast iron, was erected in a mere 221 days with a project completion date of 1833. The lighthouse was active from 1833-1914, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. By utilizing this site as a point of transmission and reception, QSL reifies the function of lighthouses as a point alert, emitting dots of flashing light into the ether, while simultaneously transforming the beacon on Lake Erie into a camera. Over the course of a few months the Lighthouse will transmit lake-driven data to Rivalry Projects in an effort to map and understand systems of accumulation and disintegration tied to our region’s environment.
Lucy Helton uses visual arts as a means of engagement by employing concept-specific technologies to image the relationship between human beings and the landscapes we inhabit. Her books have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Paris Photo – Aperture First Book Award 2015, and are held in many collections, such as, the Cleveland Institute of Art Gund Library, MoMA Archives and Library, MET Watson Library, Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, Houston Center of Photography, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, David M. Rubinstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, and the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts Leipzig, Germany.
Jason E Geistweidt is a trans-disciplinary artist working at the nexus of music technology, physical computing, creative coding, networked systems, digital fabrication, interactive installation, and performance. Grounding his research is the use of purpose-built computational tools and systems for generating media via procedural, yet aleatoric or otherwise chance methodologies. Conceptually the work is playing with ideas of control, intention, and expectation within the creative process. His approach is experimental and works to interconnect disparate systems in a desire to make the intangible — data, networks, computation, and the like — tangible through their transduction into objects, events, and experiences. Dr. Geistweidt holds a PhD in Music Composition from the Sonic Arts Research Center (SARC), Queen’s University Belfast, as well as Master of Arts in Music Technology from the University of Limerick. He currently teaches in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, coordinating the activities of the Extensible Media Lab.
Rivalry Projects is a commercial art gallery and arts production space located at 106 College Street in Buffalo’s historic Allentown neighborhood. Rivalry is founded on the competing motivations of artist and curator, Ryan Arthurs, to create an arts space that can function as both a site of exhibition and production of contemporary art. Rivalry exhibits emerging, mid-career and underrepresented artists working in all media.
