A gallery exhibition sponsored in part by Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College School of Literature, Media, and Communication ran from March 31 – April 2 at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery. MORE LIGHT: Media Art from Atlanta featured work by 15 Atlanta artists, including Georgia Tech faculty and students, and focused on the moving image.

The exhibition was in conjunction with the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) annual conference, which was held in Atlanta this year. Nearly 2,000 scholars, artists, and curators from North America and Europe attended the conference.

“We’re serving two audiences with this exhibition,” said Gregory Zinman, co-curator of MORE LIGHT and assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. “One is the art community of Atlanta; we wanted to do an exhibition that we hadn’t quite seen in Atlanta, which was to focus solely on media arts and ideas of different forms of the moving image. We also want to show off the Atlanta community to this other audience, which is all of these visiting folks coming in for the conference who may be less familiar with what’s going on in Atlanta.”

Visitors of the exhibition saw works using 16 mm film, augmented reality, video games, and even larger than life projections from the rooftop of the gallery.

“We’re used to looking at images and movies on our phones, tablets, laptops, or when we go to the cinema. But there are so many other manifestations of the moving image that we can think about, and the way technology shapes those images,” said Zinman. “So if you decide to use a VCR, how is it different than a digital projector? We wanted to get people to think about that by putting all of these different methods and materials in conversation with one another.”

Georgia Tech-related works included:

MOSAIC: Mobile Cinematics by Jay Bolter, professor and director of Computational Media, and Maria Engberg, associate professor of media technology at Malmö University in Sweden, which uses audio interviews, Twitter streams, and Flickr images to create a mosaic that probes people’s use of these mediums.

Nightmare by Digital Media master’s student Kristan Woolford, an experimental observational documentary that merges archival video and footage of the protest of Troy Davis’ execution at The Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in 2011. Woolford uses a first-person perspective to immerse the audience into the protest experience.

Pioneering video artist Dara Birnbaum contributed newly-digitized documentation of her now-lost Rio VideoWall (1989), commissioned for the Rio Shopping and Entertainment Complex, once located at the corner of Piedmont and North Avenue. The VideoWall was the first public artwork of its kind in the United States, combining an unedited live-stream from CNN glimpsed through the moving silhouettes of mall patrons with a video record of the site’s natural landscape from the time before the mall’s construction.

Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery hosted the exhibition, which spanned all of the gallery’s spaces, including the music room, gallery, and rooftop. Eyedrum has been the center of the Atlanta arts community for over 20 years and is part of an emerging arts scene in downtown Atlanta.

“The Southeast has been long underrepresented in the national conversation around the arts. It’s underrepresented at major museums; it’s certainly underrepresented as soon as you get outside of the United States,” Zinman said. “I don’t mind beating the drum a little bit as a point of pride to say, there’s a lot of great work being done here, take a look.”