Artist Statement

Divided We Speak is an interactive media laboratory for Miroslaw Rogala’s Divided We Stand (An Audience Interactive Media Symphony in Six Movements) featuring (Art)n Laboratory PHSColograms/Virtual Photography with interactive sounds. This work is being presented at the MCA Video Gallery Presentation from August 30 through November 9, 1997, and at the MCA Electronic Gallery from September 16 through November 9, 1997. An artist’s gallery talk featuring Miroslaw Rogala with (Art)n, Alan Cruz, Steve Boyer and Mac Rutan will be presented Saturday, September 27..

Featuring Artists: Ken Nordine; Jennifer Guo; Urszula Dudziak; Werner Herterich; Michael Iber; Jeffrey Krieger; Kristan Nordine.

Guest Artists: Ascott; John Boesche; Jan Erkert & Dancers; The Lira Ensemble; Cathleen Schandelmeier; John Sturgeon; Andrea Arsenault; Abu Ansari; and others.

Technical support for Divided We Speak is provided in cooperation with: Apple Computers Inc, (Art)n Laboratory, DigiDesigns, IBM Personal Computers, Opcode Systems, Passport, Macromedia, Rent Com, Skyboy Inc, Swell, and ZZounds Music Distribution Center.

• Miroslaw Rogala (Poland/U.S.A.) is a media artist whose work is known internationally for incorporating new interactive media and expressing a transformed and diverse sense of exis­tence. Electronic Garden/ NatuRealization (1996), is a site-specific interactive sound installation and free speech pro­ject with an extensive web site on-line, extending into world-wide cyber­space. Rogalo’s Lovers Leap (1995) is an interactive envi­ronment produced in two forms simultaneously, as an interactive multimedia installation using the viewer’s body as a triggering device, and as a CD-ROM using the viewer’s hand as a triggering device.The work is included in two international traveling exhibitions and has had viewer participation in 20 countries: An audience interac­tive new multimedia project, Divided We Stand, by Miroslaw Rogala, (1997); and an Interactive Media Symphony, featured in a two-month, one-person gallery exhibition/ workshop, Divided We Speak, this fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois. The Chicago artist is a doctoral candidate in the on-line Ph.D. research program at the Center for the Advancement of Inquiry in Interactive Arts (CAiiA) at the University of Wales College in Newport. Rogala is a recipient of MFA degrees from The School of Fine Art in Krakow, Poland (1979) and The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (1983). He is on the faculty of the Department of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miroslaw_Rogala

Divided We Stand has been initiated with the generous support of the Sara Lee Corporation and the Museum of Contemporary Art.