Re-Cog-Nition

Artist Statement

RE-COG-NITION explores the question: “What is the work of art in the digital age, in relation to the contemporary state of interactive art and electronics?” A cracked LCD TV hangs on the gallery wall. As the audience approach, their presence causes changes in the image. Abstraction unfolds. The image from a video input connected to the broken TV is distorted through the dysfunctional character of the screen. As audiences simultaneously recognise both themselves and the surface of the technological other, the work acts as both a mirror and a window, revealing both the human and the technological. Instead of a disconnected, mediated experience, RE-COG-NITION connects the audience to the immediacy of technology.

• Tara Cook is a Melbourne based contemporary media artist, academic and gallery director. She creates interactive, temporal, expanded and embodied works centred around relationships with technology. She has exhibited extensively in Australia, and also in Bulgaria, China, Greece and Japan, and has been the recipient of a Sydney City Council grant and a GBK Award. She is the founder and sole gallery director of New Low, an artist run initiative located in Melbourne, facilitating monthly shows of contemporary art, performance and writing. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from the University of New South Wales, where she created an expanded understanding of the topic of ‘glitch’, and is currently a PhD candidate at the Victorian College of Arts, University of Melbourne. Her practice-led research attempts to reframe the aesthetic history of the pixel beyond the digital.  taracook.com.au