Museum Response

This weekend I attended the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. I was sad to see that much of the museum was actually temporarily closed to set up new exhibits. While there wasn't much to see on that day, there was a still a fine example of Digital Art on display.

On entering the building, I was drawn immediately to Kevin O'Conell's exhibit, "Everything Comes Broken". He was set up on the first floor next to the windows, directly over the 14th St. underpass. I found this clever because of the use of audio in his installation. I walked to the windows thinking that the audio from the installation was actually some strange resonance caused by the traffic directly below. The sound instead drew me not to the window, but around the corner into O'Conell's Digital Media display.

The darkened room had three projections on three walls. Each wall showing a different view of a rural windfarm. The sound was a rich laying of mechanical noises; disorienting, but organic. The projections gave the feel that you were truly standing in the vast expanse of a Wyoming prairie, engulfed by all the corresponding sights and sounds.

The piece could have been saying that wind energy is the wave of the future, with the viewer taking note of the "2001"-esque, elegant starkness of the turbines. But when you take note of the cacophonic audio piped into the dark room, the message seems to be a bit dark, surely not as superficial as green energy.

The piece seemed to me to speak of the wind itself, the audio swelling in time with the long shadow of the turbine. Drawing attention to the futuristic windmill, touted as the wave of the future; but in all actuality is one of civilization's oldest inventions. A clever irony suggesting that maybe the future isn't all it's cracked up to be; or a new twist on an old cliche, maybe old is the new new.