Dave Greber and Sophia Belkin
September 6 – October 11, 2024
Current Space, Baltimore, MD
Supported by a Professional Development Grant for adjunct faculty from the Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) at UMBC.

On Dave Greber and Sophia Belkin’s “Glimmerloom”

by Tommy Doyle

John Bernhardt Smith, an American professor of entomology, is credited with having developed the glass lidded box that many are familiar with today as the preferred way to display insect collections. He developed the standardization of such boxes with his father, a cabinet maker, during his time as assistant curator of insects at the National Museum of Natural History (known then as the National Museum of Washington). They are still known as Schmidt or Schmitt boxes, as Smith had adopted the anglicized version of his family name. 

The work Glimmerloom by Dave Greber and Sophia Belkin first appears similar to a Schmidt/Schmitt box; a collection of three-dimensional, creature-like shapes laid flat on a two-dimensional service. However, the work defiantly escapes comparison by presenting itself moving, fluid, and alive. Unlike an entomologist’s collection or a Renaissance “cabinet of curiosities” or “wonder room” (Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer), Glimmerloom contains no boundaries or barriers that seek to categorize, chronicle, or define objects within a boundary. The sculptural elements are instead more like growths that emerge from a swirling painted backdrop. It’s an anti-cabinet; a collection that was never intended to be owned; John Carpenter’s 1982 film “The Thing”, an alien matter that is foreign, but also in us. 

There is a practice in entomology that requires a “killing jar” to kill a captured insect with minimal damage, but the Glimmerloom contains no reference to death, capture, or stillness. It’s all sustaining, none asking for alive. It doesn’t emulate the type of oddities popularized by retail stores like San Francisco’s Paxton’s Gate (or Baltimore’s own, Bazaar) that harken to the Victorian obsession with dying. The tension that that makes Glimmerloom a robust experience over a visual replica of a cabinet of curiosities or Schmitt/Schmidt box is that the things that are pinned down are not restricted by their placement, they move with the aid of projections and motors and wind, they’re kinetic, as much machine as they are biological. They didn’t die in order to be presented, they in fact seem to not just live, but thrive as their wings are pinned to a surface. 

The German entomologist Maria Sybilla Merian was born in 1646 to a father who was an engraver and publisher and encouraged in childhood to paint and draw by a stepfather who was a flower and still life painter. She gained access to the gardens of wealthy citizens through work as a drawing instructor for their children and documented and collected insects during this time. By somewhat masquerading as as naturalist painter and illustrator, she was able to document the lifecycles of butterflies and the development of frogs, which produced detailed studies that dispelled the idea of spontaneous generation, the belief that insects were “born of mud” and furthermore deemed “beasts of the devil”. The starkness and frankness present in Merian’s work is not anything akin to what is presented by Belkin and Greber, but there is a similarity in the decorative flourishes, exaggerated forms, and fiction that exists in creating both abstraction and cramming all lifecycles of a single animal into a single image. Merian too may have not actually observed with her own eyes some of the things that she was “documenting”, which is its own type of “science fiction”. 

The wedding of the machine to the organic is poignant now for the explosion of artificial intelligence, which actually is a tool utilized by Greber and Belkin (and especially in Greber’s own individual practice). There’s a historical tendency for creatives to imagine what this looks like in a gothic/steampunk fashion, human inventiveness and science bringing the capability to reanimate (think Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, Yorgos Lanthimos “Poor Things”) or in a science fiction style, skewing dystopian of course (“Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep” and it’s descendent “Blade Runner” or “Terminator”). However, dystopia and horror are the antithesis of the Glimmerloom. For all of their uneasiness and uncanny movements, they breathe and glow with a vibrancy and pastel-like calmness. The robots aren’t taking over, the monster isn’t coming to your village - it sits before you, happy to exist, minding its own business. It inspires a specific type of affection, like observing a bird from a window as you work on a laptop, or hearing the rhythmic snoring of a dog that sits before a television. Existing with nature and technology side by side is an essential part of the contemporary human experience and it behooves us, it’s imperative, that we work to find the perfect balance there. 

Another essential part of being alive is making meaning of it all, finding reason and rationale from things that are purely natural. It’s why we have myths and religion. The Victorian obsession with death that inspired the collection of post-mortem photos, death masks, and memento mori was a way to make tangible the realities of the high mortality rate. But collections, knowledge, and understanding, new or old, are noble and necessary but ultimately futile. We burned the Library of Alexandria but the waves of the Mediterranean continued to lap at its ruins, whether or not we knew the reason for the wind and storms that caused them. Glimmerloom, as an anti-collection in an anti-cabinet, doesn’t help us to categorize what we know or put definitions and borders around things. It isn’t an invitation to understanding because it isn’t inviting us to do anything at all; it just wants to be. And while viewing it can inspire a series of thoughts and ponderings, it sighs and wriggles and floats like plankton regardless of whether or not we inhabit its space. Live and let live. 

We take our phones into the wilderness with us. After all, isn’t technology an extension of being human, divine, and perfect as conceived by the/a God(s)? Scientific and technological advances are byproducts of our natural will to live, survive, and thrive. Furthermore, explorations into the possibility of interplanetary travel were partially inspired by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Russian Cosmism. There’s a very human innate desire to extend ourselves infinitely in all directions, and that desire inspires works of creative fiction and “real” scientific inquiry all at once. For all of our efforts, science is a mythology; it’s an interpretation of what is laid before us, what glimmers in the loom, a tapestry in progress. It’s as much transcendental as it is “Twilight Zone”. “I Sing the Body Electric”; so do you.

a web-based interactive solo exhibit 

Interactive Link: Online Exhibit
 

The Call From Inside the Home Office: Dave Greber’s HomeOffices at Public Access Memories
by Emily Farranto

The 2020 pandemic lockdown left its mark on our collective psyche and changed the shape of certain corners of our lives. While many were suddenly out of work, others were forced to merge work and home lives, blurring temporal and spatial boundaries, turning tables into desks and small rooms into offices. When the lockdown ended, many jobs continued on a work-from- home or hybrid structure. Even those whose work lives were not directly upended by the pandemic, the employer assumption that workers are available outside work hours has been normalized. There is no consensus about whether the shift toward a work-from-home economy has done more harm than good for individuals and families. Dave Greber’s exhibition of interactive digital collages, HomeOffices, suggests there is something grotesque about this grafting of work and home, grotesque but laced with culture-deprecating humor.

Arriving at the online gallery, Public Access Memories, we find ourselves looking at the desktop of a home computer whose wallpaper is a picture of a desk on which sits a worn, softcover book titled Home Offices. Visitors select an emoji avatar. Other emojis may be floating about; these are other gallery-goers. As we mouse around the screen, images–a daisy, a pen, a yellow, rubber glove–appear and disappear under the cursor. We enter the exhibition at the bottom right corner and move through each image/installation this way like turning pages of a virtual book.

The works in HomeOffices are based on images from a 1984 look book of office furniture. The originating interiors dense and airless, dated and bizarre. Making the strange stranger, the artist added objects–some human or animal–to the scenes using AI. The image viewers encounter when they click into each space, is the final iteration of the collage. They can explore the images, which flicker and change revealing random-looking objects, which are the AI suggestions the artist dismissed. If you mouse over the globe on the desk, it becomes a basketball, then a cluster of balloons.

This haunted history of rejected versions is one of many ways the work is deeply layered. Avatars proceed though virtual rooms that can be understand as collages or spatially as virtual installations. An avatar, representing a whole person, moves through the space suggesting they are installations, but a binding seam passes vertically though some images, implying the rooms are two dimensional and we are looking in a book. Occasional objects appear to be placed on top of a page further confusing our viewpoint. Meanwhile, viewers access the exhibition from computers, most likely in their home space, possibly at a desk. This is the reality parfait the work creates, layering the viewer into its gaudy claustrophobia. In the unlikely event that a viewer feels underwhelmed, each installation-collage hosts an AI generated soundtrack related to the objects in the room and occasional pop-ups vie for our attention.

The pandemic hastened our adoption of communication technologies and drove our work lives into all hours of the day in some Philadelphia Experiment-type, mutated collapse of time and space. Humans hardly have the time to ask essential questions like, what are we working for? And, Can we mute the discomfort by redecorating our offices? The playfulness and humor in HomeOffices, consistent with the artist’s larger body of work, is funny-dark. The nightmare-like deformities, vagueness, and misinterpretations of AI not only generate appropriate imagery, but provide an apt metaphor of the zeitgeist. Is artificial intelligence cool or scary? Will it help or hurt us? Art is the sometimes-uncomfortable mirror of how we are living and what we value. Is working from home working for us? Greber’s HomeOffices does not answer these questions, but it suggests the call is coming from inside the house.

 

Credits

Programmer: Jenna deBoisblanc @jdeboi

Essay: Emily Farranto @thevillagedisco

Technician: Nathaniel Britton @natejbritto

Printer: Paper Machine @antenna.works

52-Channel Video Installation
2 min duration
Fulton Center & Dey Street Concourse
Manhattan, NYC
July 2018 through March 2019
Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design

Artist Dave Greber’s Skyyys™is the most recent iteration of his vibrant, digital abstractions created from recognizable, colorful kinetic objects, such as balloons, bouncing balls, and stuffed animals. Skyyys™playfully mimics the persistent activity and change that defines our material world and transit experiences. The piece references and remixes the distinct, but convergent, forces between virtual media streams and our infinitely inventive minds, which simultaneously inhabit the same time and space. The tidal pace, whimsical imagery, and prismatic palette of Skyyys™creates harmonious visual-music that complements the pace of commuters at Fulton center, a likewise kaleidoscopic, liminal space, in the heart of visually diverse New York City.

Greber’s immersive 52-channel digital animation can be seen for two minutes at the top of each hour in the Fulton Center complex and the Dey Street pedestrian tunnel that connects to the R line and the World Trade Center PATH station. The work will be on view until fall 2018. The work is presented by MTA Arts & Design with technical support from Westfield Properties and ANC Sports.

Skyyys™ (2018) © Dave Greber, Fulton Center. Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design. 

An epic poem in the form of an enigmatic educational video following the life-cycle of a Casebearer Moth. The language, voices, and (some) visuals were created in collaboration with artificial intelligence models. It has been featured in the US and Internationally, IRL and in VR.

Dave Greber
The Casebearer 2.0
2022
4K, 9:59 min

The Casebearer 1.0 was developed as a collaborative project by Cristina Molina and Dave Greber during A Structure Envisioned for Changing Circumstances online project, Curated by Maija Rudovska (Blind Carbon Copy) in close partnership with Amy Mackie (PARSE NOLA) and Tina Rigby Hanssen (Vestfold Art Center). They took inspiration from the highly adaptive species commonly known as the Bagworm or CaseBearer who creates a cocoon home for itself from whatever debris it finds. As artists who live in New Orleans, a city that faces coastal erosion and is threatened by sea level rise, the Bagworm serves as a model example of a resourceful nomad that acclimates itself to any given situation.

The Casebearer 2.0 is Greber's fork and expansion of the original pair of videos.

2020
A series of decorative Mirrors 
Made during a residency with Scandy.io
and Scale Workspace in New Orleans

Svetspalonos is the product of a remote collaboration between Sophia Belkin, Dave Greber and Kanrec Sakul. The exhibition was organized in the industrial warehouse facility at Južná trieda 82 in Kosice, Slovakia in August 2019. Curated by Kanrec Sakul.

I was personally responsible for the video work and some of the textile work.

Cyoracle Tarot
2023
Dave Greber
Interactive Tarot Deck Web Application

The 78-card CyOracleTarot deck combines ancient and modern symbolism to offer insight and guidance for navigating the digital age. Each card uses symbols from recent technological products to correspond to traditional Tarot symbols, creating a unique blend of ancient and futuristic imagery. Despite the use of modern technology-related symbols, the cards themselves have an ancient and eternal appearance, adding a sense of timelessness to the deck. CyOracle can encourage us to question our assumptions and perceptions, and to consider the impact of technology on our lives and society as a whole.

This is the interactive web app. You can ask a question and it will give you a response. Make sure your question ends in a question mark:

https://cyoracletarot.com/

You can also browse all of the designs here.

2022
performance and augmented reality project

jurtakaShrines are a collection of unique .glbs and videos developed in New Orleans, LA and composed while hiking the Latvian portion of Baltic Coastal trail in 2022. 

I wrote about the experience of the trail in this Medium article and I wrote about the technical process of creating these pieces in this Mirror entry.

This project was created as part of ASEFFC, an international online/IRL residency which reflects on the precarity and uncertainty that art workers face. And asks “How can we find space for expression and creation in a world of changing circumstances?” My intention was to create a studio-less process in which I could produce work while hiking 300 km of the Jūrtaka, in Latvia.

ASEFCC was curated by Maija Rudovska and the greater project was supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Latvian Culture Capital Foundation, Arts Council Norway, Viken County Municipality, U.S. Embassy in Latvia.

www.asefcc.org

2018
Dave Greber and Sophia Belkin
12' x 10' 
Video projection on inkjet-printed polyester, found artifacts, thistles

Collaboration featured as part of the Narva/Detroit symposium held at the Narva Art Residency, Estonia, August, 2018. 

Statement:

Pothole Geodessia is a hybrid of the industry and natural environment of Narva. 
The history books tell the story of Krenholm as one of manufacturing decline. 
Yet if we think of the landscape as an evolving symbiosis between nature, humans, and technology-
we see that the narrative changes.
The land is as alive as ever. It breathes, pulses and slithers.
The snails come out after the rain and the conveyor belt keeps moving along.

Pothole Geodessia on hübriid Narva industriaalsest ja looduslikust keskkonnast.
Ajalooraamat räägib loo Kreenholmist kui manufaktuuri allakäigust. Jah, kui me
vaatleme maastikku, kui pidevalt muunduvat sümbioosi loodusest, inimestest ja
tehnoloogiast, siis võime tõdeda, et narratiiv on muutumas. Tööstusmaastik on
tärganud ellu. See hingab, pulseerib ja libiseb. Teod roomavad vihma järel oma
kodadest välja ning konveierilint liigub omasoodu edasi.

В книгах по истории всегда рассказывают об упадке производства
Кренгольмской мануфактуры. Но если посмотреть на окружающее нас
пространство как на постоянно меняющийся симбиоз природы, людей и
технологий, то можно сказать, что история меняется. Промышленный
ландшафт ожил. Он дышит, пульсирует и развивается. Улитки выползают
после дождя, а конвейер продолжает работать.

2019
12' x 10' x 4' 5:00 min.
video-mapped wood, bottles, trash
by Dave Greber produced and installed at Salon residency in the Canal Place Mall, New Orleans, LA
Arts Council New Orleans

&

2019
12' x 20' x 6' 5:00 min.
video-mapped insulation foam, bottles, trash
SITE GALLERY HOUSTON @ The Silos at Sawyer Yards