Review of "Digital Mudra" in Tussle Magazine

 

Sonya Rapoport, Digital Mudra. Installation View at Bibeau Krueger, New York, 2024. Courtesy Estate of Sonya Rapoport. Photo credit: Michael Popp.

 

An insightful review of “Sonya Rapoport: Digital Mudra” at Bibeau Krueger gallery, NY, was published by Tussle Magazine. Critic Logan Royce Beitmen observes that the work “exhibits a compelling mix of scholarly sincerity and deadpan wit.” The article explores Rapoport’s process and provides essential biographical information. Beitmen also brings a deep knowledge about Indian cultural traditions to bear on the project, expanding its contemporary relevance in a way that Rapoport, who was always updating her projects, would have found exciting:

“Mudras are symbolic gestures with an ancient pedigree in South Asia. Those familiar with Buddhist art may know the abhaya (“no fear”) mudra, an outward-facing palm communicating benevolence. And if you saw the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show, you may remember the rapper M.I.A. raising two middle fingers to the camera, for which the NFL later sued her for $16.6 million. M.I.A. told reporters that what she had performed was a “godly” mudra associated with her namesake, the goddess Matangi. “Of course, the NFL is not believing that,” she said, “because the NFL does not believe in any other culture outside of the NFL.” To be fair, the rapper probably intended the gesture to carry multiple meanings, but the incident reveals the thorny nature of interpreting mudras cross-culturally.”
— Logan Royce Beitmen, Tussle Magazine, April 22, 2024

Sonya Rapoport: Digital Mudra is on view at Bibeau Krueger through May 4th.

373 Broadway C09
New York NY 10013
Thurs-Friday 12-6pm
info@bibeaukrueger.com

Source: https://www.tusslemagazine.com/sonya-rapop...

Digital Mudra at Bibeau Krueger, NY

Sonya Rapoport
Digital Mudra (1986-89)

Bibeau Krueger

March 28 - May 4, 2024
Opening reception Thursday, March 28, 2024, 6-8pm

Exhibition walkthrough with Farley Gwazda, Director, Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust:
Saturday, March 30, 2024, 2 p.m. (please rsvp: info@bibeaukrueger.com)

Bibeau Krueger: 373 Broadway C09, New York NY 10013
Open Thurs-Friday 12-6pm

Bibeau Krueger is pleased to announce Sonya Rapoport: Digital Mudra (1986–1989), an exhibition presenting original photographs, 35mm slides, and an artist-published edition by Sonya Rapoport (1923–2015). This is the artist's first solo exhibition in New York City since 1981.

Sonya Rapoport (American, b. 1923, Brookline, MA; d. 2015, Berkeley, CA) is considered a pioneer in new media. Rapoport used the personal computer in interactive gallery exhibitions as early as 1982 to explore what she called “soft material:” data about domestic spaces, sentimental objects, her shoe collection, and emotional states, subjects that she characterized as explicitly feminist. Rapoport's tenacity in developing material methodologies for creating artwork in relation to the accelerated information age in which she lived included multivariate participant-based installations with an emphasis on pattern-finding and organizational similarities shared between humans and their data sets.

By cataloging human behavior, Rapoport analyzed the personal and the political through data, performance, and photographic media. Digital Mudra grew from Rapoport’s fascination with the way meaning can be expressed through gesture. She began with a set of photographs of participant’s hands derived from her computer-mediated performance Biorhythm (Works Gallery, San José, California, 1983), in which she gathered data about viewers’ personalities and emotional states. Searching for preexisting systems to categorize and decode these ambiguous gestures, she identified the mudra gesture language used in South Indian kathakali dance tradition, in which the positions of the hands and fingers translate to specific words or concepts that can be used to tell a story.

Digital Mudra performance documentation at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, 1987, and printed acetate collage by Sonya Rapoport. Photographer unknown.

Anchoring the exhibition are thirty-five wall-mounted plexiglass frames arranged in an irregular grid pattern that relate to a poem, providing a visual sequence for photographs from Biorhythm. Each photograph is mounted in an acrylic shadow box and superimposed with a mudra that visually matches the gesture in the photograph. These are labeled with phrases that participants used to express how they were feeling, as well as translations of the mudras. This work was first exhibited in the computer-mediated “audience participation performance” Digital Mudra, at KALA Art Institute, Berkeley, in 1987, in which Rapoport worked with esteemed kathakali dancer K.P. Kunhiraman (1931-2014).

The current exhibition also includes a projected 35mm slide show featuring hand gestures clipped from newspapers in the mid-1980s. These images include world leaders and public figures, as well as comic strip characters, each matched with a mudra gesture. The juxtaposition of reportage of political violence and international conflict with bizarre or childish humor is both jarring and typical of Rapoport’s practice, which is both a serious attempt to create new systems of understanding of the human condition, and a lighthearted parody which pokes fun at itself. Rapoport offers the paranoid suggestion that there exists a secret gesture language which, analyzed by computer, can be used to decode subconscious patterns in human relationships.

The final element of the exhibition is an artist book and software publishing project Digital Mudra (diskette), (1988), which contains documentation of the interactive exhibition, an instructional booklet, thirty-five digital mudra cards, and a floppy disk with an interactive program that prompts viewers to select mudras and compose a poem. This reflects Rapoport’s active participation in early computer-networked creative communities, including Fine Art Forum and Art Com, which distributed Rapoport’s software. A related version of Digital Mudra was also published online in 1989, predating the World Wide Web.

Sonya Rapoport’s (b. 1923, Brookline, MA; d. 2015, Berkeley, CA) work has been included in numerous exhibitions including the STARS Gallery (Los Angeles), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, (Napa, CA), San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose CA), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Zero1 Biennial (Silicon Valley), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), Bienal de Arte (Buenos Aires) and Documenta 8 (Kassel, Germany), and Casemore Gallery (San Francisco). She was the subject of late-career retrospective exhibitions at KALA Art Institute, Berkeley (2011), Mills College Art Museum, Oakland (2012), The Fresno Art Museum (2013) and the book Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport, edited by Terri Cohn (Heyday, 2012). Her archives are preserved in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust was established by artist Sonya Rapoport during her lifetime to steward her art estate, to preserve and contextualize the history of her studio art practice through a living archive, and to expand the cultural legacy of her work. The Trust maintains a collection of Rapoport’s art objects dating from the 1940s through 2015, including definitive collections of her computer-mediated interactive installations. The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust is directed by Farley Gwazda, who worked with Sonya Rapoport as an artists’ assistant during her lifetime, prepared her papers to be archived at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and completed the process of inventorying and preserving her work after her death.

Source: https://bibeaukrueger.com/Sonya-Rapoport-D...

"Portals" at STARS Gallery, Los Angeles

 
 

PORTALS
STARS Gallery, Los Angeles

Bradley Bell, Jacci Den Hartog, Hanna Hur, Ravi Jackson, Alexandra Noel, Megan Plunkett, Sonya Rapoport, Tristan Unrau, Daniel Wenger

Opening Reception Thursday, November 16, 6–8pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5 pm
3116 N El Centro Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90028
646) 256-3711 | www.stars-gallery.com

Sonya Rapoport is featured in the exhibition “Portals” at STARS Gallery in Los Angeles.

 

Sonya Rapoport, Ancient Gateways (detail), 1989. Artist Book: photocopy, graphite, and ink stamp on paper, framed, 8½W x 77H inches (unframed).

 

Sonya Rapoport’s 1989 artist book Ancient Gateways represents the earliest artwork associated with her iconic, computer-mediated “audience participation performance” Animated Soul - Gateway to Your Ka (1989-92).

This extended project reflects Rapoport’s interest in the mystical belief system described in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, especially as an antecedent to the Ten Commandments. Although the project features lighthearted wordplay and images, it is ultimately an exploration of mortality and divine judgment (ka is the Egyptian word for double or soul).

Animated Soul eventually took the form of an interactive hypermedia installation at Ghia Gallery, a funerary casket showroom in San Francisco in 1990. A series of collages derived from imagery that first appeared in Ancient Gateways was displayed alongside a computer running a Hypercard program. Participants began by selecting an owl (wisdom), windmill (power), or dancers (pleasure), and, after a series of choices, were printed a ticket with their assigned “ancient double,” or Egyptian god. They then found their “words of power” in one of 27 open coffins, and received their “boarding pass” to everlasting life.

Ancient Gateways represents Rapoport’s first engagement with concepts and imagery that would occupy her for several years. The Rapoport Estate believes that the only other existing copy is committed in perpetuity to the Sonya Rapoport Archives at the Bancroft Library of Western Americana at UC Berkeley.

Happy 100th Birthday to Sonya Rapoport!

We are celebrating the 100th birthday of Sonya Rapoport, who was born on October 6th, 1923 in Brookline, Massachusetts.

 
 

To mark this occasion, we have revamped our website to provide a thorough overview of the development of her work over the course of 67 years as a working artist. We are especially excited to reveal images from slides that haven’t been seen in decades, revealing the origins of the radical ideas in her more widely recognized work.

Please join us for a special online event: 5-6pm Pacific on Friday, October 6th, via Zoom. Contact us for a link!

Terri Cohn and Alla Efimova, co-authors of three volumes on Rapoport’s art, will share tidbits of the artist’s inner life gathered from the archives, and will give a brief performative reading in Rapoport’s own words.

SRLT Director Farley Gwazda will present selected images of Rapoport’s earliest paintings which tell the story of an artist who was always pushing boundaries and experimenting with materials.

We would be delighted to see you as part of the extended community of people who continue to enjoy and support Rapoport’s work.

Sonya Rapoport “Force Fields” at Casemore Gallery

Sonya Rapoport: Force Fields
Early Computer Art & Works on Paper

April 1st – May 13th, 2023
Opening Reception: 5 – 7pm, Saturday, April 1st, 2023

Casemore Gallery
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco
Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 5pm

Sonya Rapoport, A 20th Century Portrait (Unknown), 1979. Plotter print, Prismacolor, and pencil on vellum, 31 x 40 inches.

Casemore Gallery presents an exhibition of works on paper by Sonya Rapoport (1923-2015), recognized as a pioneer of computer art. The exhibition explores the evolution of her engagement with the computer, from her earliest drawings on printout paper in the late 1970s, through her computer-mediated “audience participation performances” in the 1980s.

Rapoport–whose work is currently on view in the exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art–began using the computer in 1976, when she found discarded continuous-feed computer printout paper in a bin in the basement of the UC Berkeley mathematics building. Drawn to the futuristic aesthetic of sprocket holes, grid lines, and carbon-black, dot-matrix printed code, she drew into the existing patterns with graphite, colored pencil, and ink stamps, and stitched the construction together with colorful yarn to create drawings such as Right-On (1976).

In 1977 Rapoport wrote, “my work is an aesthetic response triggered by scientific data. The format is computer print-out, a ritualistic symbol of our technological society.”

By the early 1980s, Rapoport had learned to code and was using the computer to analyze and visualize data. At a time when computers were primarily used for business, science, and military applications, Rapoport was gathering and processing data about what she called “soft material,” including her biorhythms, her shoe collection, her home, and the objects on her dresser, an approach she characterized as a feminist use of new technology.

In A 20th Century Portrait (Unknown) (1979), part of Rapoport’s Objects On my Dresser series, she represents her subject as a multidimensional “netweb” plot, perhaps referring to the analytical, quantitative perceptions of the computer. But behind this enigmatic image is a social interaction where Rapoport discussed the objects on her dresser with an unknown subject – an idiosyncratic personality test of sorts. The related large-scale drawing Surface (1981) features photocopied images and appropriated text on computer paper that reveals the complex, interconnected psychological relationships that Rapoport had with the objects on her dresser.

Surface (detail), 1981. Prismacolor, pencil, ink stamp, acetate collage, and photocopy on paper, 24 x 202 inches.

Shoe-Field (1982-1989) began with a performance at a home computer store in Berkeley, where participants were asked how they felt about their shoes. Their answers were analyzed by a computer and they were given a printed Shoe-Psyche Plot that represented their feelings as an electromagnetic force field printed in ASCII characters. Rapoport’s artistic process–which she described as “quantifying qualitative information–can be seen in a video that documents the interactive performance of Shoe-Field at Media Gallery, San Francisco in 1986.

Rapoport’s use of technology should not blind us to the fact that she is working out a structure of human interactions, even if they are based on their relationships with inanimate objects, their shoes.

- Richard Cándida-Smith, A Throw of the Dice: Between Structure and Indeterminacy, 2012

Shoe-Field Map (detail), 1982-85. Dot-matrix print on continuous feed computer printout paper.

Please join us for an opening reception, 5 – 7pm, Saturday, April 1st, 2023!

“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age” at LACMA Opens Feb. 12th

The Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust is excited to announce that Sonya Rapoport’s artwork will be featured in a major survey exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952 – 1982 will run February 12th – July 2nd, 2023.

Sonya Rapoport, page 2 from Anasazi Series II (detail), 1977. Prismacolor, graphite, and colored typewriter on pre-printed continuous feed computer printout paper. Collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 explores how the rise of computer technology, together with its emergence in popular consciousness, impacted the making of art in the age of the mainframe.

International and interdisciplinary in scope, Coded examines the origins of what we now call digital art, featuring artists, writers, musicians, choreographers, and filmmakers working directly with computers as well as those using algorithms and other systems to produce their work. Whether computer-generated or not, the many artworks considered here reflect the simultaneous wonder and alienation that was characteristic of the 1960s and ’70s, along with the utopian and dystopian possibilities of these new machines.

“Today, with digital technology having been fully integrated into our lives, Coded’s examination of the years leading up to the advent of the personal computer is relevant, even imperative, to fully appreciating art and culture in the age of the computer—both then and now.”

–Exhibition Statement on LACMA website

The exhibition is curated by Leslie Jones, who has a deep engagement with Rapoport’s artwork, including having published an in-depth biographical article, The Personal is Computable in Art in Print journal (2019).

The computer printout drawing that will appear in the exhibition was recently added to LACMA’s permanent collection: Anasazi Series II (1977) is a beautiful abstract work in colored pencil from a period of Rapoport’s career that marked her first engagement with computers.

Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982, a hardcover exhibition catalog, is available via the LACMA Museum Store.

Featuring several images of Sonya Rapoport’s work, this book explores the history of early computer art and is filled with fascinating histories and revelatory images.