Exhibition Statement

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Humans have been seeking and finding meaning in our natural surroundings for millennia. We are drawn to the scalloped crests of waves, to the patterns of the rhizome, and increasingly to our technology. We seem to sense ourselves there, or are we simply projecting? Do you perceive mathematics in the sense of smell? Have you wondered if our perception of the world around us is all happening within an enormously clever simulation? Perhaps these cleverly disguised performances were seeded right into the cosmic DNA, initially dormant, and then resonating, poised to shepherd our emergent consciousness. Xcelerator is an exhibition designed to harness the field of new media art to simulate the explosive creation of worlds following the Big Bang. High energy particle physics, and the massively powerful machines made for this science, serve as metaphors. Artists and scientists have long been world builders, accelerating cultural evolution, even controlling it.The Times Art Museum has been turned into a dynamic arena where 10 works, by ten different artists and artist collectives, collide with each other. The audience plays the role of protons in motion. They, or you, charge the museum space, accelerating the relational perception of the art. Semiotic 'results' are determined by the viewers. New meaning may now live in that mental space formerly occupied by impressions from our beach walk. We have become aware of our own intellectual “machinery”. Xcelerator is a newly conceived exhibition-experiment, an on-going research project that combines and energizes the museum,curators, artists and their audience in new ways. Every component has its own vital contribution, aggregating in these new born art forms. Xcelerator is iterative and dynamic. Each question answered leads to new questions, each experience begets the next.

There are four main chambers in the Xcelerator. Please approach them as experimental zones. Room #3 is encountered first.This serves as the "Catalyst Room" based on the design of particle accelerators. It is charged with works by three artists, delivering three different interpretations of energy. Following this the viewer chooses to enter either Room #2. the Positive Terminal, or Room #4, the Negative Terminal. This introduces polarity the idea of agency and choice. Finally, the terminal rooms connect to Room #1 the inner "Reaction Chamber" which contains and renders observable the mysterious dance of the highest energy collisions and their commensurate exotic particles.