ISEA 2006 — Edge Conditions

Written on the wall:

Cutting edge, bleeding edge, leading edge. These are all familiar catch-phrases that suggest we are glimpsing the future of contemporary art, today. Edge Conditions, however, is most emphatically not about the “next new thing.” It presents works of art in a different context, at the intersection of creativity, choice, and what might be called “technology” but what is arguably the world we live in, whether it is devices such as pencils and chisels, or ubiquitous aspects of modern life such as electronics, phones, or computers and the Internet, technology is simply a set of tools that is more less familiar at any given time.

This ultimately boils down to a disclaimer that the work in this gallery is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to see in a museum. Creativity, choice, and technology, there is nothing surprising about this choice of intersection. Why even mention the idea “cutting edge”, if you are going to take it away? And what is all that stuff about pencils and chisels? It reads like a college admissions essay.
(There are terminals in the South Hall which can be coaxed into accessing the internet.)
The C5 Corporation, with their piece The Analogous Landscape (Mt. Shasta, Mt. Fuji), tells me that two volcanos are analogous to one another. Analogy: the comparison of simliarities between things that are otherwise dissimilar. An analogy between Mt. Fuji and a melted ice cream cone would have been more meaningful.