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Analog Video Union's 'Alive & Electric' exhibition opens today, 11/11 @ 11:11, via @objktcom Galleries. Visit Alive & Electric here: objkt.com/collections/exhibi… Featured artists: @aitsolabs @OnChainBook @BosqueGracias @cuatroceronueve @thedanyrus @DCOT15 @desultor @djkero @eglesaka @____elbi @aaasonipse @ex_mortal_ @GinoBattiston @happyxsnacks @HouseOfDanu @ina_vare @jamesalechardy @joncates @jotta_rs @lucasoxx_ @maxcapacity @Micah_Alhadeff @Nebular___ @Pho_Operator @pit_of_despair_ Sky Goodman @s0mfay @SquintDev @ParticulaStella @miking_t @Tengushee @trillobyteart @Zoen_calega

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” reads the first sentence of William Gibson's 'Neuromancer'. Analog video artists are electromancers who hack these grey heavens, lifting into them the stars. We scry the crystal ball of the Cathode-Ray Tube, threading the eye of the electromagnetic needle toward an alternate reality, dreamt through transistors. There is a seemingly mystical core to this practice, where we interact and dance with Nature's electromagnetism, weaving feedback loops between mind, heart and technology. We peer into a looking glass that at times feels like a form of forbidden magic and, at other times, an entrancing siren song whose melody we cannot help but heed. While the aesthetic of this art form is highly variable, one often finds echoes and pangs of nostalgia, warmly transporting the beholder to a world that has long since frozen within the amber of time, holding on screen the glowing embers of this once living world, scribed to magnetic tape. One may detect elements of long-forgotten VHS video cassettes, reverberating their contents into an unknown future through soft focus, or the digital dreams of beloved video gaming systems, their sprites setting corrugated lines of phosphor alight with ecstatic speed. We transmit our memory of a future passed to be lived and felt anew. Here too, upon this magic eye, will be found the abstract, the geometric and the figurative; the appropriated and the emulated. Not hugging the curve of nostalgia, but rather broadcasting stories and feelings—both familiar and extraterrestrial—expressed from deep within the folds of emotive imagination, oozing forth from between the flickering scanlines. Imperfection is given its highest honour, where within error is found great beauty and meaning, and gold is sewn into the cracks of the firmament in infinite hue. Our practices resist perfection and rebel against the rigidity of the contemporary digital world, where we seek to open doors to the unexpected and surprising. Divining the static, we invite a radiant photon tide to crash the gates standing before the cold coronation of the algorithm. In a world on the verge of embodied artificial intelligence, we resurrect and rejoice in the human impermanence and ephemerality brought forth through the use of analog technology and technique. There is a profound joy that is to be found through the exploration of, and experimentation with, the unpredictable and the unstable—an embracing of the chaos within order, enchanting the system with noise, and allowing the rainbow fire to bloom from the fissures. Our tools exist primarily within the physical domain—a confection shoppe of special boxes with glowing lights, knobs, switches, and faders; our paints, brushes, and canvas. The technologies we use—CRT monitors, VCRs, video mixers, enhancers, and colour processors—may be thought of as obsolete by most of the world, but it is through them that we breathe new life and caress our songs of high-voltage light into being. We are alchemists, witches, magicians, scientists, and engineers, conjuring and concocting. Our wand is the fire of wild electricity, purring and perched upon a glass escarpment ablaze. We are the chroma and the luma; for the love of analog, alive and electric.

Analog Video Union (@analogvidunion) presents: Alive & Electric 🧵🪡