Stanza recently authored several artworks and these are available as touchscreen editions. Each edition of ten contains a suite of artworks from the project of the same name. The touchscreen units are custom built and configured to load works automatically (viz. plug-n-play). For installation, they can be hung on the wall like a painting or they can mount with screens flush to the wall, or other surfaces. 

They have been made as editions so collectors may purchase the work and galleries may exhibit more easily. The illustration of the computer below shows the first grey prototype, they are now silver steel framed (see image below) and are also available in a steel framed box ie set square to the wall.

Exhibitions

Stanza touch screen interactive exhibitions have taken place at the following selected venues.

Venice Biennale 2007. Inner City and Biocity touch screens will be shown at New Forest Pavilion, 52nd international Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia thanks to ArtSway and Scan.

Tate Britain. (Part of Late at Tate Britain series, by Cybsersonica) 2007.

Artsway Plymouth, New Forest Pavillion. 2007

Blip Festival Brighton. 2005.

The Dana Centre London. Organised by Cybersonica. 2005

Folly Lancaster. 2005

The Watershed Media Centre. 2005

Cut and Splice at Jerwood Space, London. 2005

Arts Depot, London April 2005

Active Interiors: 10 Years of Stanza's Interactive Art E.S.P. Media Lounge, Pacific Design Center, West Hollywoo. The first showing and sales of the editions where supported, curated and exhibited by David Mather. 2004

If you want to exhibit these artwork, or buy them get in touch. To inquire about demos and exhibitions...........Stanza

 

 

Stanza uses computers to develop expressive possibilities between himself and his audience. And, underlying these simple interfaces and engaging forms are sophisticated formal and technical structures, including software agents, custom hardware and complex networking.

His self-generating artworks contain the essential pleasure of digital playfulness, while also approaching deeper issues about people and information networks. This singular process of participation and inquiry can be scaled to large networks or to individual users, and it can also support live performances and large-scale installations.

Stanza's interactive digital artworks from the past decade relate to wide ranging technical and cultural concerns. Since 1994, he has produced numerous bodies of work, each of which is described briefly below: these are also now made exclusively for this machine and available in very limited editions.

 

Amorphoscapes: These colorful abstractions mutate endlessly from precise contours and kaleidoscopic mosaics to amorphous, transient shapes. The vast range of colors and shapes is visually exciting triggered by touch and movement on the screen . 2000

Entropy II: Active patterns propogate over mutating fields of color in this abstract series of finely detailed icons shifting quickly and over time. 2003

Biocity: Data grows and evolves in this complex project of visual elements and sounds that pulse with intriguing behaviors like networks of living information based on city structures. 2003..

Genomixer: Users breed graphic mutants based on human genome data. Where ethical issues are approached with wit, this rapidly changing netherworld is based on the artists DNA data. 2003.

The Central City: Forms and symbols continually transform in this densely-layered experience of mapping, randomness and control. This project has won many awards internationally. 1997.

Inner City: Maps, buildings and geographic symbols meld into patterns of dense urban space. This journey invites exploration and discovery amid varying degrees of order and chaos. 2001.

Soundscraper: These abstract modules serve as instruments of visual and auditory composition with substantial user control guides a rich palette and numerous options. 1999

Subvergence: This self-referential explosion of data uses computer icons, scripts and codes that grow exponentially to create intense desktop feedback. 2001

Virusa: Countless software agents move on screen according to generative logic in this project showcasing semi-intelligent systems as aesthetic tools. 2003

 

The following text is by Charlotte Frost commissioned by Helen Sloan of Scan for the Artsway catalogue to accompany work to the Venice Biennial.

 

Coded Behaviour

Biocities (2003) and Inner City (2002) are audio-visual, interactive, digital paintings. They form part of Stanza’s Amorphoscapes series (which he has been working on since 1997). Unlike existing web-based incarnations, these are limited-edition touch-screens which better demonstrate Stanza’s uncompromising ability to craft technology. These works are exquisitely executed. Aesthetically and technologically they are flawless, standing out vividly against a backdrop of new media art which can be clunky and ill-defined. Even to the untrained eye, or those uninitiated in new media arts, Stanza’s skills and outputs as an artist working with electronic technologies are apparent.

These works present two predominant devices to actively trace urban topographies. One is a seeping aesthetic, where blank screens are gradually flooded with colour and texture which appears to perpetually map and re-map its terrain (as seen in Biocities); it is American-Action-Painting-meets-London-Underground-cartography as the city is given life through visual veins and audio arteries. The other is a stamping aesthetic where heavily-stylised city corners, crevices and conversational off-cuts are sporadically overlaid causing a constant collaging (as in Inner City). Harder to characterise, this effect is something like a strobe inflicting O’Keefe’s eye for detail on a minimalist canvas. Such effects are heavily indebted to Modernism but no less impressive in their new media incarnation.

For me, what is most striking about these pieces – and indeed Stanza’s present work The Emergent City – is its reference to ritual, or socially-loaded, repetitive behaviour. The rituals I find implicit in these works are both urban and artistic. Each of the works amasses aural and aesthetic details which loosely depict a range of city-specific behaviour. However, and this is key, Stanza does not tell us what these behaviours are. He provides a montage of animate archaeological evidence which evoke the comings-and-goings of a city and its inhabitants. The effect is somewhat like sitting at a central hub of city activity and watching the constant ebb and flow of people, trains or traffic, feeling both integral and irrelevant as the movement occurs both because, but also in spite of your presence.

They also refer to the type of behaviours encoded in the ritual of art gallery attendance. They demand that the audience co-author not just their meaning, but also their audio-visual output, which requires a different level of interactivity on the part of the audience. This is art about active not just intellectual engagement. This is art which does not exist without a willing participant. Yet having asked the audience to behave differently, Stanza immediately puts them at ease by offering these works as editioned objects which might well sit alongside paintings and perhaps discuss the aesthetic common-ground of paint and pixel. It seems Stanza intends to build a new relationship between artwork and audience, but not by reconstructing the physical architecture of art history which he leaves very much intact.

The art historian Dana Arnold claims that the architecture and associated activity of the art gallery generate “the cultural life of a society” . With these works Stanza provokes the participants in the ‘cultural life of society’ to reconstruct a range of naturalised urban behaviours whilst rebuilding not just a few of their ideas about art production and presentation.

 

 

Stanza is a London based British artist who is seen as a pioneer in digital interactive work. He creates self-generating screenbased compositions that cross borders between artistic, technological and scientific sectors, and invite the viewer to participate. The city as code is recurrent in his practice as he explores hidden online imagery and data to enable new aesthetic perspectives based on urban and social mapping. His current work, The Emergent City, extrapolates these themes through an AHRC Creative Fellowship.  Stanza has exhibited extensively internationally over the last 20 years and has won awards from festivals such as Videoformes, France and New Forms Net Art, Canada.  www.stanza.co.uk

www.stanza.co.uk