The Outlook Magazine | 梦语人
by Pinko Chaooriginal article - October, 2010“你的眼睛疲倦了，累了，闭上你的眼睛……”上世纪末，一位神经科医生在维也纳议会街上的小诊所里，解救了数以百计的被幻觉绑架的人，你一定猜到了，这位医生是弗洛伊德。就在之后的十几年间，那本无人不知无人不晓的惊世骇俗之作《梦的解析》面世。梦，让人又爱又恨的东西。它可能是你不愿面对的潜意识的映射，也可能是人类发展的催化剂。卡梅隆用少时的梦境创造了《阿凡达》，而纽约艺术家Alex Dodge则试图将当今炙手可热的社交媒体移植到梦的深处。这并不是件容易的事情，正如苏联曾联合本国精英开发时间机器一样，想在梦里实现种种属于现实范畴的事情，必要联合高科技的力量。于是Alex Dodge找到了布鲁克林的高科技设计团队Gernerative一同造梦。他们设计了一系列概念性的服饰原型，希望让人以安静的方式参与到非积极的交互之中。例如名为“梦语人”（sleep talker）的头套就可以让两个或多个用户在相似的睡眠状态中互动，或将某个人的无意识体验广播到一个专门的社交网络中，简而言之，就是让你在梦中也能玩社交。这个安置了复杂程序的头套可以监测使用者的脑电波、心跳频率和环境音效等，混合各种实时视听数据，使用户在睡梦中对话。失眠的人也不再孤单，旁听他人谈话或许可以缓解痛苦，说不定能更快入梦。你只需通过类似地理方位、信号过滤、谈话内容与搜索难易度为特征的分析工具找到“梦语人小组”（dream clusters）即可。在科技大举进军的今天，现实和虚拟的界限越来越模糊。在享受科技带来的便利的同时，我们也会不由得产生这样的疑虑：“我不知道哪个世界更真实。”（撰文_pinko）
Art Review | Alex Dodge: Generative
by Tyler Coburn
September, 2010
Visitors to 438 Union Avenue may be surprised to note that scrappy gallery Klaus von Nichtssagend appears to have gone the way of other mid-noughties Brooklyn establishments, replaced by a white-on-white outpost of Apple-esque technology prototypes, courtesy of artist Alex Dodge and his registered LLC, Generative. There, on a grey trade-show carpet within a perimeter of recessed fluorescents, a visitor can lounge prone on a massage table and lose not a New York multitasking minute, thanks to a suspended computer workstation, or admire the sheen and finishing of Wearable Interface (GEN-1J) (all works 2010), a ‘cross-seasonal jacket’ equipped with onboard processor, USB ports and microphones, which provides real-time responses to a user’s environment, be it a wooded terrain or (likelier) rooftop cocktail party.The fibrous Haptic-Synth shirt, which would have been at home in the S/S 10 Rick Owens collection – or antique undershirt emporium – gains in the way of chic from an allover grid of touch sensor ‘cells’, which users can programme to pair with specific devices. Good looks notwithstanding, aesthetics is but a hook to get this shirt onto the consumer body, and get the consumer back in touch with her nonvisual faculties. An accompanying rubber widget, customised to fit a user’s hand and fingers, conjures a porcelain joystick as conceived by a medieval votary. Better that the future be cold-cast in the fetishes of the past, in other words, than stitched into the black leather and vinyl that made Keanu and Carrie-Anne such pedantic dystopians. Sociotechnological immersion, our lifestyle brands now insistently promise, will lead the way to utopian possibility – though that road, it must be said, will be paved with products.In this sense, Dodge’s exhibition does an admirable job of capturing the ambivalence that many of us feel at the fact that ours is a future to be consumed, and that our relationship to the key companies offering this up can no longer be tenably polarised along the little man/big man axis. This complexity is aptly conjured by Dodge’s occupying a position that is not wholly satirical, critical or fannish. To the artworld’s long history of performative corporatisation, he delivers the real deal, through actual incorporation; and through exacting personal and collaborative labour, he produces prototypes for interfaces that are potentially realisable – and that pass for big-budget design-studio fare. These efforts go some distance to qualifying the potential cynicism that could attend to this thinly veiled parody, which only strains tolerance in Ringo Newton, a 3D animation that has an apple drop and roll across a white background, disclosing Generative’s logo. Indeed, Dodge’s meticulous work adds an inspiring quality to these often deeply considered prototypes, jogging us anxious consumers with the slightest bit of fancy.
SOMA | The Design Issue | Generative by Alex Dodge
by Adam PollockAugust 2010While Silicon Valley may be the actual epicenter of self-delusion, as evidenced by the amount of venture capital dollars that have been thrown at staggeringly ridiculous business models over the years, Williamsburg certainly ranks in the top five when it comes to 'hoods that could use an ego check. Sorry Brooklyn, but electroclash was not going to set the world on fire just because you said it would. By the way, thanks for the beards.How apropos is it then that W'burg's Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is hosting a cheeky exhibit that took our belief, nay certainty, in the fact that success, individualism and freedom can be found in sleekly designed, supercharged technological wonders, and turned it on its head.Social networking has done an amazing job at replacing actual socializing with all the joys of typing, but how lame is it that you have to be conscious when doing so? Not so in Alex Dodge's world, where a device called a Sleep Talker exists. The Sleep Talker dream interface, to quote from the artists' description, "is an experimental prototype offering a means for two or more users to interact while in similar sleep states or as a means of broadcasting one's unconscious experience within a specialized social network." Finally ... non-social REMing is so 2009.The Sleep Talker is just one of the many imagined products that inhabit Dodge and Generative's new world. There's also the Haptic-Synth, a touch sensor-enabled shirt and handheld widget- think about it, a solely virtual creation made three-dimensional- and Wearable Interface, basically a smart phone turned cross-seasonal outer garment, neither of which would be out of place if Blade Runner were based on a true story.Dodge has addressed the ubiquitous presence of technology in our world before. In his Study For Intelligent Design, the artist presented casts of his own body as discarded android parts, and in his 2009 painting, An Intractable Contradiction In the Nature of One's Existence (Mishima), he presented a samuri disemboweling himself to reveal guts of metal tubing and wires.Dodge, a Brooklyn based RISD alum, has been showing for a decade, and Generative is his new conceptual project in conjunction with Akira Shibata, a particle physicist who worked on the Hadron Collider, and video game developer Yohei Ishii. Together the three have imagined Generative as a research lab focused on mobile technology and visualization.With Generative, the collective adds potential real world function and high design (read consumer packaged goods) to the human/technology hybrid. Yes, the Sleep Talker might be a few years, and a lengthy privacy policy away from hitting the market, but Vantage Point (Integrated Mobile Broadcaster), a set of '70s style headphones with Wi-Fi-enabled POV camera, wouldn't be out of place on the L train today.Generative's Brooklyn show is a study in imagination, in an environment that prizes form over function. But just wait, it won't be long before art forms like these come with warranties and user manuals.
Designboom | alex dodge: generative
by Andrea DB
original article - July 12, 2010
the interests of new york-based artist alex dodge extends into the relationshipsbetween humanity, technology, art and design, in which he has designed a collectionof garments of concept prototypes developed in collaboration with brooklyn-basedtech start-up generative. each of the works address the notion of passive interfacing;engaging the human body through acquiescent means. some of the pieces seem to be influencedby science fiction while others are more accessibly clear-cut. the prototypes developed bydodge himself, range in their levels of functionality, but are presented here as art objectsand design objects on equal standing. while dodge may focus on creating mass-manufacturableproducts, envisioning that they bring people one step closer to a utopian ideal,dodge's objects fetishize the technological imperative, or the inevitable hybridizationof man and machine, as something worthy of appreciation in itself.
Brooklyn the Borough | ‘Generative’ Blends Art, Design, and Technology
by Suzanne Stroebe
“Generative,” currently on view at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery in Williamsburg is difficult to define. A collaboration between artist Alex Dodge and Brooklyn based tech start-up Generative, the series of concept prototypes shown in the gallery seriously blur the boundaries between art, design, and technology. Dodge’s level of comfort grappling the conceptual, sculptural and the technological simultaneously is not unusual in the art world today: more and more contemporary artists are leaving the confines of art history and collaborating with specialists from other fields such as science, music, and botany. Dodge’s show, however, may be one of most thought provoking in that he seems to be subtly criticizing his collaborators.The pieces in the show are well designed and beautiful in an Apple-like way: sleek, cool, comforting, and well built. They range from highly marketable, practical products to the absurd. An example of the former is the Power Step Shoe, a comfortable yet fashionable looking item that stores the wearer’s energy from walking in a removable power-cell stored in the heel. Wearable Interface is similarly appealing. A crisp white jacket designed to be unisex and trendy with a motorcycle-style collar is embedded with “multiple adaptable standard USB ports, GPS, accelerometers, microphones, temperature and photo sensors, the garment’s on-board processor can be trained and programmed to interact with a range of other devices.” Plug in an iPhone and essentially you have a laptop you can wear with skinny jeans.Like walking through the Apple store, it is easy to get caught up in the desire for these objects and to forget to consider them on a conceptual level. Without making any explicit commentary, Dodge does invoke the viewer to question our inclination to be constantly connected to our technological devices with works such as Human Interface Device and Sleep Talker. A massage table modified to include a laptop under the face pad, Human Interface Device allows the user to recline completely (and face down, to avoid distractions of the outside world) while using a computer. Sleep Talker is a soft helmet that is worn to bed. Loosely based on conventional social networking like Facebook, this device allows communication with others or “broadcasting” while unconscious.The more dependent we have become on constant access to the internet, the more products have been developed that we could never before have imagined but now cannot live without. The Internet and electronic devices are such an integral part of our daily existence today the subject scarcely warrants a discussion on the possible negative impacts of our dependences. Social networking sites, webcams, and email have greatly improved communication for business and personal purposes and provide access to a vast amount of knowledge and resources. However they can also threaten our ability to connect and communicate with people face to face. Online we escape reality, the drudgery of our daily lives and relationships for instant gratification with no consequences. We can go wherever, see whomever, do whatever we desire, because it is not real. “Generative Prototype 2010” highlights the impact of technology on society in a subtle, non-didactic way, imploring the viewer to ask where culture may be heading when we long for products that allow us to be hooked up to multiple electronic devices while walking, socializing, laying down, or even asleep.- Suzanne StroebeAlex Dodge's Generative runs through July 19, 2010 at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, 438 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Artnet | DESIGNER DREAMS
by Ben Davis
original article - June 17, 2010
What’s a contemporary artist to do, faced with the slick world of consumer gadgetry, which seems to slurp up so very much of the public’s attention? Alex Dodge’s show at Williamsburg’s Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery offers a novel answer: He turns the gallery into a space to show off his own conceptual gizmo prototypes, realized with the help of his very own, very real, tech start-up, Generative, Inc.Thus, you get Powerstep, a pair of white shoes, the heels of which house something called an "Achilles Cell." A wall text explains that the Powerstep shoes would generate energy from your footsteps through "an encapsulated piezoelectric ceramic," storing it in the detachable power-cell that can be used to charge your mobile devices. Well, why not? As an idea, it sure beats those sneakers that tone your butt!Dodge’s Haptic-Synth, a relatively unassuming undershirt, has a web-like grid of touch censors woven into its fabric. These, we are told, can be synched with the various devices in your life, so that the act of touching regions of the garment in different combinations activates different commands. In essence, it imagines a world in which we can use our underwear as a garage door opener.Then there’s the Vantage Point (Integrated Mobile Broadcaster), consisting of a pair of bulky headphones, equipped with a tiny embedded camera. The device promises to automatically snap pictures from your vantage point, uploading them to the web, thus potentially creating a real-time log of what you are seeing, so that fans can check out life from your point of view, as it occurs.At least one of the devices here is essentially a joke -- that being the Human Interface Device, a massage table modified to function as a computer work station, thereby picturing the day when you can do data entry and get a backrub at once. Meanwhile, by far the most sci-fi "prototype" in this show is the Sleep Talker, a white cap adorned with wires that proposes to monitor your brain activity during sleep, "synching" your dreams with those of others via an online interface -- social networking for your dream life (as if Facebook didn’t already take up enough of my life already!)Considered overall, as one statement, what you notice is that tone of the show is too whimsical to be completely serious, but also too serious to be completely a joke. This underlying ambivalence makes some sense, given the artist’s background -- Dodge, a 2001 graduate in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, has shown twice before at Klaus Von Nichtssagend, and each time the show has featured a sculptural centerpiece exploring the theme of the mingling of technology and the human, with some uneasiness: 2006’s "The Most Beautiful Dreams" offered a figure in an astronaut suit, laid out on the gallery floor, face a skull inside his helmet, a butterfly perched enigmatically on his chest; 2008’s "Intelligent Design" featured the dismembered remains of some kind of android, strewn on the floor amid several torn-open bags of shredded paper, its rubber limbs and frozen face life-like enough to be slightly disturbing.In the present exhibition’s "prototypes," Dodge’s techno-Surrealist sensibility is sublimated into something more inscrutable (the only piece explicitly in the old vein is hung discretely behind the gallery desk -- it resembles a Japanese erotic print, except the couple is composed of two malfunctioning androids). Indeed, the background of Dodge’s new body of work represents a real uncertainty about the value of visual art itself in the face of technology: Until recently, he was director of Chelsea’s CRG Gallery, leaving when he realized that commercial art dealing wasn't his game. With the NYU physicist Akira Shibata and the video game designer Yohei Ishii, Dodge decided to found a company that would merge creativity and technology, and Generative Inc. was born. The press release for the Klaus Von Nichtssagend show says that Generative is "a conceptual project," but it has sincere aspirations as a company. As Dodge explains in an email: "based on a stratified or staged development model, Generative is an independent R&D lab, which intends to develop concepts internally or to order. . . to various levels of completion."Considered as artworks, Dodge’s "prototypes" aren’t totally unprecedented: Andrea Zittel comes to mind, though Dodge is less committed to Zittel’s back-to-nature communalism, and more to his own preoccupation with the shrinking border between the human and the technological. Nevertheless, this show’s big influence is clear, and it ain’t an artist -- with its smooth white-on-white designs, and gallery tricked out with strips of spacey florescent lights, "Generative"’s esthetic influences hail straight from the Apple Store.If you peruse Dodge’s endearing, though infrequent, blog, you will find that considerations of the Apple Corp.’s products and their effects on the mental environment recur. Fascination with the tech goliath’s ubiquitous devices butts up against a sense of rebellion against the absorptive homogeneity that they have begun to impose on creative life. Writing approvingly of the "ikee" worm, the first to attack the iPhone, Dodge admits that he experienced a slight thrill reading about it: "someone did something truly creative with the mobile platform without getting Apple’s approval first, and by this I mean: that the most creative thing you can legally do to your iphone without getting an SDK [software development kit] and waiting for the App Store’s ‘Approval Process’ is probably to crochet a cute cover for it."Why is it, then, that Dodge’s personal creative rebellion against slick consumer technology takes the form of imagining his own line of slick consumer technology? On a monitor at the gallery, a short animated video clip -- seemingly a promo for both "Generative" the exhibition and Generative the company -- shows us passing through a cloud of rubber bands, push-pins and other office supplies, all floating weightlessly. Strands of paperclips coalesce into the shape of a spiraling DNA molecule. "Technology is Human," reads a slogan, before the "Generative" logo appears. Well, if you take that statement seriously -- if "Technology is Human" -- then the only way to be truly in command of your humanity is to be in command of technology, and that means imagining yourself as the person who conceives it, rather than as just a passive consumer. Therein lays the unusual thing about this show’s perspective: Its "critical" relation to technology gets channeled into a real attachment to it, rather than ironic distance.Ah, but the glittering gadgets that rule the public mind are the product of giant corporations with vastly more resources than any normal human being -- a reality that, of necessity, pushes Dodge’s imaginings back into the realm of art and fantasy once more. The art/prototypes in "Generative" play out a kind of Little Brother complex; they both emulate and reject the object of their admiration, without being able to separate from it or attain to some imagined intellectual superiority. As well-executed as they are, Dodge’s prototypes are still too palpably one-offs, and handmade -- too human -- to rival the inscrutable slickness of present-day consumer toys. The very fact that they are shown in an art gallery itself illustrates the distance that separates Dodge from his subject matter; Apple, of course, is famous for being quite aggressive about keeping its own prototypes from public view.The perfect symbol of the whole enterprise comes on the cover image for this show catalogue, featuring a woman posed in the Sleep Talker cap, eyes closed, seemingly dreaming. It is meant as a picture of someone putting Dodge’s imagined dream-catching device to work. But at the same time, it captures the sense that the whole project has the inescapable tinge of fantasy and longing. It’s the image of art caught under the spell of technology, unable to wake up -- or unsure it wants to.Alex Dodge, "Generative: Prototypes 2010," June 11-July 19, 2010, at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, 438 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11211BEN DAVIS is associate editor of Artnet
Engadget | Alex Dodge's 'Generative' depicts the wearable sci-fi tech of your dreams, literally
by Joshua Topolsky
original article - June 5, 2010
In an upcoming gallery show dubbed Generative, artist Alex Dodge (in collaboration with tech start-up called... Generative) will be sucking you into an awesome near-future where shoes generate electricity, the "Sleep Talker" cap lets you transmit your dreams into other's, and a shirt becomes a touch-sensitive input device. As the show's press release puts it, "Dodge's objects fetishize the technological imperative, or the inevitable hybridization of man and machine, as something worthy of appreciation in itself." The works will be shown off at the Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in Brooklyn next week, but you can get a peek at tech just out of reach right now by perusing the accompanying catalog for the show and browsing the handful of images below.
Core77 | Alex Dodge's 'Generative' wearable tech concepts
by HIPSTOMP
original article - June 3, 2010
Shoes that generate electricity when you walk, a sleeping cap that transmits your dreams, a shirt that serves as a touch-sensitive input device; these aren't actual products, but concept prototypes by artist Alex Dodge, going on display next week at Brooklyn's Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.Alex Dodge's third solo show with the gallery extends the artist's interest in the relationships between humanity, technology, art, and design by presenting a collection of concept prototypes developed in collaboration with Brooklyn-based tech start up Generative.Each of these works address the notion of passive interfacing; engaging the human body through acquiescent means. While some works appear inspired by science fiction, such as his Sleep Talker dream interface, which intends to allow users communication with others while sleeping, other works are perhaps more accessibly clear-cut, like Dodge's shoes that generate electricity with each walking step.The unique prototypes developed by Dodge may range in their levels of functionality, but are presented here as art objects and design objects on equal standing. While a designer might focus on creating mass-manufacturable products, envisioning that they bring people one step closer to a utopian ideal, Dodge's objects fetishize the technological imperative, or the inevitable hybridization of man and machine, as something worthy of appreciation in itself. This exhibition serves as a natural progression from Dodge's more traditional artworks, which have typically been engaged in a dialog concerning technology and its means of altering human experience.
ArtForum | Alex Dodge: Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery
by Michael Wilson
May 2008
Like the freshly severed head of Ash, the treacherous corporate android in Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), the disembodied silicon-rubber face that forms part of Alex Dodge's sculpture Study for Intelligent Design (all works 2008) looks ready to open its eyes and spill its guts. Surrounded by shredded documents and wreathed in Christmas lights, the ghoulishly lifelike visage (a self-portrait) suggests the aftermath of a grisly murder, until we notice the bundled wires protruding from its underside. The robotic simulation is, however, deliberately imperfect; woven into its artificial viscera is an incongruous mixture of parts spanning the past half-century of technological history; typewriter components, for example, vie for space with fiber-optic filaments.Accompanied by grubby casts of a leg, a foot, two hands, and an ear--all stuffed with an unnatural blend of, among other things, mangled bike parts and shattered compact discs--Dodge's death mask becomes a kind of morbid steampunk fantasy. It also implies, as do the other works in the artist's recent exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery (his second solo outing at the Brooklyn venue), that human beings and technology are fundamentally inextricable: Three modest paintings and a set of drawings bolster the argument by blending computer-generated and computer-inspired forms with color applied in an unashamedly "organic" manner.The paintings take Keita Takahashi's cult video game Katamari Damacy as their starting point. In Takahashi's bizarre diversion, players roll a giant sticky ball--a katamari--around a landscape, picking up larger and larger objects as they go. Dodge's Large Katamari (millions of years of pressure and heat) depicts a sphere encrusted with skyscrapers, oil tankers, and other massive industrial structures, which project from the floating globe at awkward angles. Initially rendering these forms with the modeling program Autodesk 3ds Max, then simplifying them via Adobe Illustrator, the artist uses solvent to transfer the black toner from prints of each image to the panel's densely gessoed linen surface. The resultant schematics are then colored with oils, here, primarily, an iodic brown and a denimlike indigo.
Intelligent Design | Design Boom
detail of ‘Study for Intelligent Design’ by Alex Dodge, 2008
Alex Dodge‘s show ‘intelligent design’ opens tomorrow at the Klaus von Nichtssagend in new york. this is the American artist’s second show and will feature several new paintings, a sculptural installation, and works on paper.- Andy Butler
Read the full article here.
New York Times | Art in Review; Greater Brooklyn
Original ArticleBy Roberta SmithCRG Gallery535 West 22nd Street, ChelseaThrough July 22An exhibition devoted to the work of artists who lack gallery representation can indicate one of two things: it can reflect the kinds of work that galleries aren't interested in at the moment, or it can just uncover more of the kinds of work already being shown. Unfortunately, the cheerfully diverse survey that is ''Greater Brooklyn'' falls into the latter category. Perhaps the most interesting fact about this show is that it was organized from 400 open-call submissions. Its organizers, Glen Baldridge and Alex Dodge, young artists who work at CRG, selected work by 30 artists. The entire process was conducted by e-mail.Excepting the unusual zero-level gallery representation, the show shares some attributes with its inspiration, the current ''Greater New York'' exhibition at P.S. 1. There is too much work for the space available and yet not enough from each artist to give much of an idea of individual potential. In addition, it is too diverse to have any curatorial shape.Representation, in two and three dimensions, from na? to fanatically realistic, dominates. On the wall, paper is preferred to canvas. In what seems to be a disturbing trend right now, women are grossly in the minority. Works that are abstract or in three dimensions tend to stand out, including Brian Montuori's cartoonlike sculpture of a life-size safe hanging over the doorway; Gretchen Scherer's folded-paper monoprint of a pair of abandoned jeans and pumps; Ian Pedigo's fragile yet savage-looking bundle of jagged sticks painted gray and white and bound with a yellow cord; and Jim Lee's brightly colored oval relief whose self-descriptive title is ''Ultra Blue Wood.'' Also worth noting are works by Eric Doeringer, George Boorujy, Josh Brand, Andrew Kuo, Keiko Narahashi, Butt Johnson, Allison Gildersleeve, Zak Prekop and William Touchet. Competence runs high throughout, so if this show doesn't accomplish much beyond superficial introductions, it also doesn't rule anyone out. ROBERTA SMITH