Ernesto Klar is one of eleven Venezuelan artists nominated for the 12th edition of the “Premio Eugenio Mendoza” (Eugenio Mendoza Award) curated by Diana López for the Sala Mendoza in Caracas, Venezuela. The exhibition of the artists’ submissions opened on February 3rd at the Sala Mendoza and runs until April 14, 2013. Participating artists: Suwon Lee, Oscar Abraham, Lucía Pizzani, Ernesto Klar, Juan Pablo Garza, Iván Candeo, Starsky Brines, Irene Bou, Ana Alenso, Emilio Narciso and Mairyseth Vargas.

MORE INFO:
[spanish] http://www.el-nacional.com/escenas/Premio-Eugenio-Mendoza-convoca-nuevo_0_128989842.html
[english] http://www.artnexus.com/Notice_View.aspx?DocumentID=25213

Ernesto Klar will participate in the artist symposium and will give a workshop about his latest work-in-progress “Invisible Disparities”:
http://microwavefest.net/festival2012/#!/workshop
http://microwavefest.net/festival2012/#!/artist_symposium

October 27, 2012 – April 7, 2013  NOW EXTENDED UNTIL April 28th, 2013
LICHT LINIEN | LIGHT LINES
(un)wirklich | (un)real
Centre for International Light Art Unna
Lindenplatz 1, 59423, Unna, Germany

http://www.lichtkunst-unna.de/ausstellungen/2012-licht-linien
http://www.lichtkunst-unna.de/en/exhibitions/2012-light-line

Participating artists: Li Hui, Ernesto Klar, Stephan Reusse and the one time artist group consisting of Wolfgang Bittner, Yoko Seyama, Lyndsey Housden and Jeroen Uyttendaele. In addition to the “LIGHT LINES” temporary exhibition, the museum permanent collection features site-specific artworks by Rebecca Horn, Mario Merz, James Turrell, Christina Kubisch, François Morellet and Olafur Eliasson, among others.

“Luzes relacionais” will be part of the interactive art exhibition of the Art Rock 2011 festival in Saint-Brieuc (Cotes D’Armor, France) from June 7th to June 13th, 2011.
MORE INFO: http://www.artrock.org/programme/accueil-programme/217548/exposition-d-art-numerique/index.php5?jour=jour1

“Doce venezolanos que brillaron en 2010″
José Roberto Coppola, Todo en Domingo, El Nacional, 26 de Diciembre de 2010 (Número 584; pag. 20)

Ernesto Klar: Ilusiones luminosas
Con la luz como materia de exploración, el venezolano Ernesto Klar ha desarrollado un discurso visual y poético contemporáneo. Desde una aproximación a la luz de manera espontánea, intuitiva y experimental, este artista de nuevos medios, como prefiere que lo llamen, ha creado escenas luminosas lúdicas en gestos muchas veces imperceptibles, que, en la claridad y oscuridad, y aliados a sonidos programados digitalmente, muestran su expansiva dimensionalidad. “La luz es un medio que me fascina y que he investigado en los últimos años. Mi trabajo tiene una relación con la fenomenología que explora las relaciones sensoriales con el mundo que rodea a la luz”, cuenta con su cadencioso verbo vía telefónica desde Nueva York, donde reside. Su más reciente obra, Luces Relacionales, como tributo al trabajo de la artista brasilera Lygia Clark, ha logrado la expectativa de la crítica y además alzarse con dos premios de arte interactivo este año: Share Festival en Turín, Italia, y el File Festival en Sao Paulo, Brasil. “En esta obra creo volúmenes físicos de luz en los que de una manera interactiva el público los pueda manipular en una experiencia creada por un software con cámaras infrarrojas que analiza los movimientos de la gente y permite que las luces, básicamente, se muevan. Acá las líneas de luz no son un límite, sino espacios de encuentro”, cuenta. En su búsqueda, Klar hace maleable y conductual, no sólo la luz, sino sus intencionalidades genuinas de manera de representar, de nuevo y a su modo, lo que ocurre naturalmente. “La realidad pasa inadvertida, no nos fijamos en ella, por eso creo contextos para amplificar los momentos imperceptibles de la luz”.

The Porto Alegre edition of the FILE Festival 2011 is currently taking place at Santander Cultural until February 27th, 2011. “Relational Lights” is one of sixteen installations exhibited at FILE POA 2011.
MORE INFO: http://www.file.org.br

ERNESTO KLAR: RELATIONAL LIGHTS
December 15 – 21 December 2010
3LD Art and Technology Center, 80 Greenwich Street, NYC
Gallery Hours: 12:00 PM – 8:00 PM and by appointment
Opening Reception: Wednesday, December 15th, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Directions to 3LD: http://www.3ldnyc.org/map.shtml

Nearest subway stations are 1/R/W to Rector Street; 4/5 to Wall Street; J/M/Z to Broad Street; A/C to Broadway-Nassau; E to World Trade Center

NEW YORK, November 27, 2010 — 3LD Art and Technology Center and Ernesto Klar are pleased to present the United States premiere of “Luzes relacionais” (Relational Lights), a new large-scale interactive installation work by Venezuelan-American new media artist Ernesto Klar. Relational Lights creates a morphing, three-dimensional light-space in which spectators actively participate, manipulating it with their presence and movements.

Ernesto Klar (U.S./Venezuela) is a new media artist based in New York City since 2002. His works have been exhibited at festivals, galleries, and museums in the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Employing the interactive, participatory, and generative capacities of digital technologies, Klar’s works explore the poetic potential of revealing and transforming the threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible. Through a subtle and yet at times radical manipulation of light, sound, and space, Klar’s works frame experiences in which participants engage in perceptual immediacy through their bodily, manipulatory, and behavioral activity. Relational Lights continues that exploration in the way it challenges traditional models of perception, objecthood, and participation.

The exhibition of Relational Lights in New York City follows the world premiere at the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a second exhibition at the SHARE Festival in Turin, Italy. At both festivals, Relational Lights received first prize awards among hundreds of contestants — in Brazil it was awarded the first prize of the FILE PRIX LUX in the Interactive Art category, and in Italy the first prize of the SHARE PRIZE. On behalf of the SHARE PRIZE jury, American science fiction author Bruce Sterling explained the decision saying: “In this work, a huge algorithmic complex is hidden behind a simple, elegant interface. This work of interactive art is a fantastic, world-class work.”

Relational Lights is an interactive installation that explores the ways in which the individual and expressive human subject occupies a shifting and variable space in relation to others. The installation uses light, sound, haze, and a custom-software system to create a morphing, three-dimensional light-space in which spectators actively participate, manipulating it with their presence and movements. The work functions as a living organism with or without the presence and interactions of spectators. When viewers step outside the projected light-space, the system begins its own dialogue with space by means of extruding and morphing sequences of geometric light forms. And when viewers penetrate and interact with the projected light-space, a collective and participatory expression of space unfolds. Relational Lights amplifies the three-dimensional fabric of space by making it visible, audible, and tangible to participants. The resulting aesthetic experience encourages an unending relational process of shaping space among participants.

Ernesto Klar created Relational Lights as a tribute to the work and aesthetic inquiry of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920-1988). Relational Lights emphasizes the spectator’s relationship with what Lygia Clark called the “expressional-organic” character of space, and expands on her conception of the “organic line.” The latter is the root of Lygia Clark’s progressive interest in and inclusion of the viewing subject within the work of art. Relational Lights takes examples of the “organic line” in Lygia’s oeuvre, such as her Modulated Space maquettes from 1958, and literally extrudes them as interactive planes into three-dimensional space. Spectators are able to modulate and penetrate the “organic line” itself while maneuvering within the space. Relational Lights brings about an awareness of the spectator’s bodily occupations of space in relation to others.

Relational Lights is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. This project is made possible, in part, with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Additional support has been provided by the generous grants from the Greenwall Foundation and the Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds program. The latter is supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts.

Biography:

Ernesto Klar (U.S./Venezuela) is an artist and educator based in New York City. His artistic work explores the poetic potential of revealing and transforming the threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible. Klar’s works have been exhibited at festivals, galleries, and fairs such as Eyebeam, Pulse Art Fair, Issue Project Room, and Chelsea Art Museum in New York City, the ICA in Boston, the CCCB in Barcelona (Spain), the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, the Oi Futuro Museum in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), the Centrum Kunstlicht in de Kunst in Eindhoven (Netherlands), and The Share Festival in Turin (Italy), among others. His awards include the first prize of the File Prix Lux in the Interactive Arts category (2010), the Artist Fellowship in Computer Arts from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2007), an Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (2009), as well as grants and fellowships from the Greenwall Foundation (2009), and the Experimental Television Center (2010), among others. Klar holds an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design, and a BMD from Berklee College of Music. Since 2005, he has been a faculty member at Parsons The New School for Design and The New School for Film and Media Studies in New York City.

About 3LD:

3LD Art & Technology Center is a New York City community-oriented and artist-run production development studio for emerging and established artists and organizations that create large-scale experimental artworks of all kinds.

- Could you tell us about how you came to be interested in media art?
It happened while I was working as a musician in the nineties. At the time I was primarily composing and performing experimental music with my own chamber group (the Klaresque Ensemble). Towards the end of the nineties, I started to explore computer music, and it was then that I became very interested in the interactive, participatory, and generative capacities of digital technologies. I gradually stopped writing and performing music, and resituated my practice from performance-oriented works to installation-based works.

- Luzes relacionais takes inspiration from the work and interests of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. At the same time I feel it develops your own artistic style, which we saw in you work Parallel Convergences, where the key element was an attempt to render the invisible visible and interactive. What do you think?
The attempt to reveal and transform that which is imperceptible has been a constant in
my work for some time now. It is an exploration that started in my musical work before I shifted towards new media art. “Luzes relacionais” continues that exploration in the way it challenges traditional models of perception, objecthood, and participation. But it is the latter that this artwork considers in more depth than previous works of mine. It explores the ways in which the individual and expressive human subject occupies a shifting and variable space in relation to others. Multiple viewers penetrate and interact with its three-dimensional light-space. What unfolds, then, is a collective and participatory expression of space. “Luzes relacionais” emphasizes our relationship with what Lygia Clark called the expressional-organic character of space. This is why the piece is a tribute to Lygia’s aesthetic inquiry, and particularly to her conception of the “organic line”. Now, besides the intuitive, sensuous, and playful nature of the interactive element, the artwork also functions as an autonomous entity without the interactions of spectators. Both randomly and at preset intervals, the system abruptly subverts the interactions of spectators in order to establish its own dialogue with space (and its occupants) by morphing sequences of light forms. The aforementioned expressional-organic character of space swiftly adopts a rather mathematical-synthetic quality. Suddenly, participants are reminded that the artwork has autonomy, and that the machine behind the system presides over the collective experience. Any sense of empowerment on the side of participants quickly dissipates, potentially coming back, whenever the system returns to its responsive mode.

- Your works always use minimal elements, such as light, lines, glitch music and dark space. What do you want to communicate with this audio-visual language stripped to the bone?
As mentioned before, I am interested in the threshold between the perceptible and the
imperceptible, and particularly, in the poetic potential of revealing and transforming that threshold. Through a subtle and yet at times radical manipulation of light, sound, and space, my artworks aim to frame experiences in which participants engage in perceptual immediacy through their bodily, manipulatory, and behavioral activity. Light is an ideal medium to explore this threshold, since it is what enables us to make sense of the three-dimensional world that surrounds us. And dark spaces end up being ideal presentation scenarios for my pieces, since they allow for a heightened perception towards the phenomena taking place within them. Sound too, from an aural perspective, is very important for similar reasons. In my audio-visual installations, I work primarily with noise, whether computer-generated or analog, along with other sound synthesis techniques and sound spatialization techniques. Space, visuals, and sound are constantly informing each other throughout my creative process – and they usually have a direct relationship in the resulting works. I should mention that I do not call my use of sound “glitch music”. I am actually a fan of this style of music – don’t get me wrong – but I do not think the way I work with sound relates much to it, or even music in a more general sense. And lastly, my preference for what might be considered an austere visual aesthetic with a grayscale palette emerges spontaneously throughout my creative process.