Cool Hunting

A project of the Bushwick Art Project, BAP Lab is a curated, one-day event (just over 14 hours to be exact) that brings together over 80 different new media artists, musicians, performers, DJs, and visual artists in Brooklyn. On 22 July 2006 the second annual BAP Lab took place in a 20,000 square-square foot warehouse that's been converted into community space for artists called 3rd Ward. For CH's 44th video, we highlighted six of the artists there, who all make work best filed under the catch-all "New Media" genre. Playing with notions of time, vision, and technology, the episode includes Jamie Burkart's project called "Time is Long," which records viewers on a VHS tape that he's extended out of the VCR and through the heart of the gallery, so that the image plays back on another monitor 20 minutes later. Also making use of a video monitor and passé technology, Gregory Shakar's interactive "Analog Color Field Computer" allows the user to produce pure fields of color on monitors and manipulate corresponding pure tones. With a near microscopic perspective, Ernesto Klar's "Convergenze Parallele" uses custom-designed software to trace patterns of dust particles and amplify their movements sonically and visually. These and the other three artists in this episode are only the first segment of our two-part coverage of this new independent and inspiring festival.