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000000
Collaborative exhibition by Kyle Evans and Jessica Mathews: Pump Project, Austin TX.
Photos and text by Pump Project currator Rebbecca Marino
000000 is the experimental responsive process between Kyle Evans and Jessica Mathews. Using hexadecimal black as a point of departure, information is filtered through both digital and analog methodologies and is thus altered, multiplied and compressed. This conversation and translation of data becomes tangible through paint, code, video and installation.
Both Kyle Evans and Jessica Mathews share a strong background experimenting with the translation of analog and digital processes. 000000 expands on this human-to-device interfacing with the addition of human-to-human collaboration through correspondence.
Beginning with hexadecimal black (#000000) as a point of departure, or in this case, a kind of salutation from Evans to Mathews, the two proceed to alter and relay data back and forth over the course of three months across the 4,000 miles between Mathew’s temporary residence in Iceland and Evans’ home base of Austin. Black, which is both the absence of and the complete absorption of light, nothing and everything all at once, served as the foundation for the artists to build off of, and a way to emphasize the effects of each individual process. These processes range from handwriting hex code to overlapping sync signals, from oil painting the changes in a single pixel over time to sonifying the data of an image file.
One may find that through these methodologies information is often degraded, and as a result, new content simultaneously added extrapolating the data further and further from its original form. Given a different perspective, however, the data is not degraded at all but distilled, breaking black (or data in general) into its component parts and exposing something about its true essence. Ultimately, the exhibition becomes as much about this co-authored (de/re)constructive framework as it is about what the framework produces. In this exhibition, one can observe this reconstructed flow of information and its translation filtered through various modalities. While a certain level of control is given up to technological processes, a human element feels equally tangible in the manipulations that occur throughout. The result serves as a unique representation of #000000, as well as an archive of the conversation between Evans and Mathews.
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