"LIQUID_EDEN -
THE DISCREET PARADISE OF NETWORKS"
An Exhibition By Stephanie Owens

November 13, 2003 - January 10, 2004

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 13, 7PM - 9PM

MediaNoche, the new Uptown gallery devoted to new media, presents Stephanie Owens's "Liquid_Eden -- The Discreet Paradise of Networks".

By placing the artwork in the hands of remote Web users who click into the exhibition site, Owens's project reflects the shift of art away from individual authorship to the domain of public accessibility and mutability.

The installation comprises two large-scale, networked projections of a single lily onto a pair of Baroque panels. Over the course of the exhibition, the lilies are systematically destroyed by the cumulative actions of visitors to the project Web site (www.medianoche.us/liquid_eden) forming a luminous animation in perpetual erosion. As witnesses to this spectacle of life and disintegration, we are challenged to re-think our relationship to image and the role of information networks in dictating that relationship.

For Owens, who is also a painter, the Web can be read in different ways. "There is a common conception of the Web as a form of proliferation and generation", she explains, "but it is rarely seen as a destructive force. I am interested in the material aspects of networked communication -- transforming the hypothesis of interconnectivity into an physical artifact --- a stain that makes manifest the presence of people united in a common behavior in time". In Liquid_Eden, immediacy is transformed into a tangible record of looking and thereby making legible the impact of our collective mark.

Stephanie Owens is an artist living and working in New York City.

Owens is also an instructor at Parsons School of Art and Design, where she teaches "Signs of Life - The Aesthetics of Reality in Digital Culture" in the Graduate Department of Design & Technology.