“PREDRIVE: After Technology”

This group exhibition of new-media art covers a wide terrain, ranging from rec-room psychedelia to neo-Op-art electronics. The eye-popping vitality of the former is evident in Jacob and Jessica Ciocci’s mixed-media installation The Dark Side of Light, 2008. Core members of Paper Rad, their approach is visually intense and eclectic, using rough juxtapositions of high and low technology in flashing tie-dye colors, furry stuffed animals, VHS-era video hacks, stoner jokes, and crudely pixelated pattern making. Compared with this dizzying heterogeneity, Gretchen Skogerson’s Switch, 2008, works with a far simpler set of tools: A gently curved wall is hung with vertical threads and serves as a screen for a shifting set of powerfully physical fluorescent light fields, some of them magma hot, some icy cool. Antoine Catala’s single-channel video Pumpkins, 2008, takes heavily processed footage of children playing Twenty Questions and echoes the game’s riddling ambiguity with digital visual distortion, their faces breaking and smearing into playfully grotesque abstraction. A more disturbing example of new-media grotesquerie is Brody Condon’s Judgement Modification (After Memling), 2008, a custom computer and self-playing game that seems drawn from a Boschian nightmare: Mindless naked human automata do herky-jerky spasms in the statuary niches of a cathedral’s entrance; a fat man in jester boots performs a corkscrew self-trepanation; fractured prisms of light cut through a nebulous nowhere of smoke and fog.