(New York, NY) presented by the Ohio Arts Council and OnSSI
Marketou’s stunning, attention-grabbing “Red Eyed Skywalkers” is a public participatory outdoor installation involving the combination of a flock of 100 red weather balloons and selectively disbursed wireless cameras capturing real-time video of festival passersby from multiple aerial perspectives. The result is a unique, eye-catching exhibit that allows widespread access to surveillance information through the playful, ironic, and iconic emblem of the red balloons.
About Red-Eyed Skywalkers
“Red Eyed Skywalkers” is the Cleveland-specific re-incarnation of an installation originally commissioned in 2007 by the Shift Festival of Electronic Arts and New Media and Plug In Gallery in Basel, Switzerland. The elaborately expanded Ingenuity project entails 100 hundred red 5-foot diameter meteorological balloons inflated with helium, which will form a floating, cloudlike canopy that will appear to loom over Star Plaza. A striking image on its own, a selection of the balloons will be further enhanced with specially-designed wireless video surveillance cameras that help create a playful subversion of ideas about privacy in public space.
Aerial images gathered by the cameras, tucked inside the massive red flock, will be broadcast in and around the site, including the Jumbotron screens at Star Plaza and on flat screen monitors inside the Idea Center. An espionage mission? A game of capturing obscure ecosystem data? The installation is an open-ended kinetic sculpture, which instigates its own outdoor stage and provides the opportunity for endless, fanciful interpretations. Accessible on numerous levels, “Red Eyed Skywalkers” invites festival participants to casually explore its multiple perspectives of “urban data dispersion,” either by scanning its video monitors, discovering its eye-catching distant image, or simply lying on the concrete below, closing one’s eyes, and soaking it all in.
Artist’s Statement: “Red Eyed Skywalkers” relates directly with my previous works, “Fly Spy Potatoes” (2005), “Flying Cinema” (2006), and “99 Red Balloons” (2006). I see it as a platform which displays part of my concerns which investigate the intersection of computation and representation to explore themes like real time/fiction, public/private, public access/control, surveillance /information and above all the project is creatively and critically engaged with surveillance, in the ways it manifests and it is deployed, especially in the urban context. I see myself in the position of a facilitator in the matrix of agency that gives this project to the public as a gift or, better, as a tool for free access to information to do their own thing and see how it works.
About Jenny Marketou
Jenny Marketou is a new media artist born in Athens, Greece, who currently lives in New York City. Her work in video, video installations, digital media, performance, photography and public dialog investigates the intersection of computation and representation and explores themes such as real time/fiction, public/private, access/control, and communication/information, and implicates the viewer in installations, public interventions, and events that deconstruct modes of viewing, cognition, and participation in her work. Marketou’s work has been shown internationally including Brazil, Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, England, Germany, The Netherlands, and across the U.S. She has been awarded grants and artists residencies worldwide, and holds a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She has lectured extensively and has taught as an adjunct professor Photography and Interdisciplinary studio art at The Cooper Union School of Art and Science in New York City. She is the author of the book with photographs and interviews, “The Great Longing: The Greeks of Astoria, Queens.”
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