Karl Sims: A Video Retrospective
Media Space @ DeCordova, Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Gallery
January 16 – May 31, 1999
Karl Sims: A Video Retrospective features the computer animations of 1998 MacArthur Fellowship Award recipient Karl Sims. The exhibition, which was organized by Adjunct Curator for Media Arts George Fifield, anticipates the opening of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, which will take place throughout Boston on May 1 – 15, 1999.
Sims creates artwork using the paradigm of natural selection, as life has created different species. Sims, a computer/video artist, first began creating animation in this evolutionary manner while an artist in residence at Thinking Machines in Cambridge.
Karl Sims: A Video Retrospective, highlights five short computer-generated videos created in the past ten years. Sims’ computer animated video Panspermia (1990) presents the artist’s need to design many different images of plants and to write a program to mathematically create plants using twenty different parameters. After viewing the computer-generated plants Sims chose the results he liked best and the computer then modified those equations to create new generations. This evolutionary process was used to create entire images for Sims’ 1991 animation Primordial Dance. In 1992, Sims further evolved this type of animation in his work Liquid Selves for the Memory Palace at the World’s Fair in Spain by mixing the process with scanned images and morphing techniques with music composed by Peter Gabriel. Other videos on view will be Particle Dreams (1988), and Evolved Virtual Creatures (1994).
Sims’ most recent interactive installation, Galapagos, will have its American premiere as part of the Make Your Move: Interactive Computer Art exhibition, DeCordova's contribution to the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Make Your Move will be on display in the Media Space @ DeCordova from March 27 – May 31, 1999.
