THE LOST MUSEUM
12 September 2008
8 Comments
Originally from New Delhi, India, Shaurya Kumar is a colleague of mine who graduated from the U. of Tennessee, and he’s making a name for himself as both a printmaker and a digital artist. His most recent exhibition, The Lost Museum, opens tonight at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts.
Kumar’s prints are beautifully abstracted/pixelated/distorted/corrupted digital documents of actual works of art that have been lost or destroyed in wars throughout history. He starts with a Museum-quality jpeg file and then somehow alters one tiny bit of code to create unpredictable corrosion of the data that makes up the image. With his work, he sheds light on the very real concern of data corruption, the phenomena by which aging digital files are inexplicably corrupted over time. The future of the data on which much of our contemporary history is stored is at risk.
He presents his Lost Museum as a legitimate museum exhibit, each work is labeled with the original artist’s name and, in the case of the image in this post, the same dimensions of the original lost artwork.
Here’s more:
THE LOST MUSEUM
The Fate of World’s Greatest Lost Treasures
September 11 to October 4, 2008
It is said that the shape of our culture is very much defined by the art that shapes up in that particular era;
that the art and culture are very much the alter egos of one another. It reflects the thought of masses and elites, their concepts of divine & material, of purity & pollution and about their socio-political- economic values. Hence, the artwork embodies a past, a history in itself. Loss of any art is thus a loss of history, a loss of the spirit of bygones.
The exhibition brings together works of art by Shaurya Kumar, from the collection of the Council of Documentation of Lost Art & Cultural Heritage (CDLACH) that were destroyed during various wars & acts of violence and lost in the course of history
Opening reception: September 11, 2008, 7 – 9 pm (in conjunction to Downtown LA Art Walk)
Closing reception: October 3, 2008, 7 – 9 pm
Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts
107 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
323 646 9427
This is really great James. Congrats to your friend. I can’t believe how large these prints are. Original size of the original. What massive undertaking. Digital prints on vinyl. So he has these ordered at a sign shop I would think as the one in the post is the size of a billboard.
Have you stayed in touch with him much? Do you think you can possibly interview him for the old bloggy?
A question for you to ask him if you do, is isn’t it all fleeting. Do physical art objects have more sustainability on a planet the size of a spec of sand floating through space via digital art objects? Just a thought. Especially when all art objects are floating on a skin of rock beneath an ocean of magma?
I wonder how long a bronze sculpture will last in a volcano? I like the idea though. It’s all fleeting. Especially digital media. All we have is this moment.
What interested me most about this week was the first successful experiment of the Hydron Collider. Now that’s art.
I’m sure he would be open to an interview, and yes I do plan to ask him something along those lines. Sure comparing our experience to geological time or astronomic time makes us feel small, but I’m talking more about the conceivable future on a human species scale. The issue of data corruption is one that is affecting us here and now, too. Neat vid.
Oh and a correction: Not ALL his pieces are the same size as their originals, but the big Miro that was lost in the second World Trade Center collapse on 9-11 is the same size, I believe.
insightful, in sight full
wonder full
Mondrians most philosophically profound, at least
least in my mind
least
less than mind full
where will this journey take him?
the stakes are high.
James.
I was trying to be cute. I love the concept of his work and you definitely have a point about how much of our work and documentation of that work could be totally unaccessible if we were to all go offline.
It’s an interesting point to make for sure.
Even if my hard drive was to crash on my home computer ten years of documentation of my artwork would be lost.
Yeah, but as I’ve said before, if our digital data were somehow lost, we’d probably replace it in a few years. If our original art objects were lost, we’d indeed be at a loss. The same goes for writing. If we lost all the e-books and blog posts, we’d refill the void quickly. If we burned all our books Farenheit 451 style, we’d be through as a culture.
I personally don’t want to see that happen and I can’t be persuaded that our culture needs to crash and something new needs to rise from its ashes. I think people are being ignorant and uncaring if they push that fourth. They don’t know the extent of what is actually good and worth hanging on to. And we can’t see the fragility of it all until we see real havoc. A digital data crash or a big disaster or some dystopian future President Palin banning books and censoring the internet could wake a few people up to the need to hang on to the best of what our culture can produce. Rambling…
Is there a way we could save data in a tough physical form that doesn’t require electricity? Now that would be a step forward. Could nano technology somehow play a role in creating some kind of eternal solid-state data brick? That’s what I’d like to see.
Now that’s a hell of an invention James. If we could get the Hydron Collider folks on that we could solve that one for sure.
I’m all for the solid state data brick. For sniz.
I should just write science fiction and hang this art thing up.
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