Yorgo Alexopoulos, Jim Campbell, Daniel Canogar: DATAFORM

The Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech presents DATAFORM, an exhibition suite that explores the enormous and sometimes overwhelming amount of data that permeates the world with works of art by three artists who incorporate and transform technology-based media and data into sculptural form.

Daniel Canogar (Madrid and New York City), Yorgo Alexopoulos (Los Angeles), and Jim Campbell (San Francisco) incorporate various technologies such as electronics, LEDs (light emitting diodes), computer-generated algorithms, video, and real-time online data to deliver intriguing sculptural works steeped in color, light, movement, and a range of important ideas.

Each artist is represented with a selection of significant works in a gallery of their own resulting in three independent but inter-related one-person art exhibitions.

DATAFORM opens with a distinguished artist talk by Canogar at 6pm in the Moss Arts Center’s Anne and Ellen Fife Theatre, located in the Street and Davis Performance Hall at 190 Alumni Mall. The talk will be followed by an opening reception on Thursday, August 29, from 6:30–8pm in the center’s Grand Lobby.

Daniel Canogar
Concurrent with the exhibition opening is the unveiling of Surge (2019), the center’s third major public art commission for its Grand Lobby. For this site-specific installation Canogar has created a sequence of dynamic, data-fed sculptural forms that traverse across 50 feet of the Moss Arts Center’s Grand Lobby wall surfaces. The artist and his studio assistants, Diego Mellado and Justin Goh, were in residence for 10 days working with the center’s curatorial and production teams to oversee the installation of the work.

Surge encompasses thousands of flickering LED lights in moving, ever-changing, computer-generated abstract images that glide across four sinuous, ribbon-like sculptural elements. Responding in real time to incoming data—ranging from environmental phenomena such as regional weather patterns, including wind speeds and temperatures, to water and pollution data—the generative visuals of “Surge” flow continuously across five walls.

In addition to the mural in the Grand Lobby, a selection of Canogar’s work will be on display in the center’s Ruth C. Horton Gallery. Radiant and suffused with the energy of ever-evolving data points and imbued with rich, luminescent color and flowing abstractions, Canogar’s art engages with light, color, movement, and the dynamics of the data-sphere. Activated by real-time online data, the fluid and ever-changing imagery transmitted through and across Canogar’s sculptures is generated from different environmental and socio-political phenomena occurring around the globe, such as active volcanoes, atmospheric conditions, pollution, and the fluctuations of global financial markets.

Jim Campbell
Featured in the Miles C. Horton Jr. Gallery, Jim Campbell’s work is luminescent yet nebulous, continuous but fleeting—visual impressions that explore the thresholds of time, memory, and perception. With degrees from MIT in both electrical engineering and mathematics, Campbell is an established and renowned pioneer and innovator in using technology to create works of art, working with custom electronics, video, film, LEDs, and computers to produce his work. He is known for his evocative low-resolution works that merge and transform moving images into data points of light. The exhibition includes five of the artist’s signature works, including two from his renowned “Exploded View” series.

Yorgo Alexopoulos
On view in the Sherwood Payne Quillen ‘71 Reception Gallery, Yorgo Alexopoulos’ work is a hybrid fusion of digital animation, sound, and sculpture, featuring synchronized vistas, color fields, and shifting geometric shapes that evolve, unfold, and intersect in continuous motion across high-definition LCD (liquid crystal display) screens mounted in atypical configurations.

With Conjugated Gradients: Split (2018), a 14-foot-long work included in this exhibition, Alexopoulos takes video data—landscape footage of land, sea, and sky panoramas—then edits and recombines it with digitally composed and animated sequences of geometric form and swaths of rich color in an exploration of metaphysical ideas.

Curated by Margo Ann Crutchfield, the Moss Arts Center’s curator-at-large, DATAFORM will be on view until November 9.

The Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech presents renowned artists from around the globe and from close to home, with a special focus on experiences that expand cultural awareness and deepen understanding.