DiVA is the new –scope. Taking its cue from –scope New York of years gone by, this year’s Digital & Video Art Fair New York (DiVA) was housed in floors of Embassy Suites hotel rooms. Like –scope and PULSE, DiVA ran in conjunction with the Armory Show, but unlike these other venues it was inconveniently located in Battery Park City, a factor that may have contributed to its evident under-attendance. | ![]() |
Environment with a bigger –scope – Colleen Becker

DiVA is the new –scope. Taking its cue from –scope New York of years gone by, this year’s Digital & Video Art Fair New York (DiVA) was housed in floors of Embassy Suites hotel rooms. Like –scope and PULSE, DiVA ran in conjunction with the Armory Show, but unlike these other venues it was inconveniently located in Battery Park City, a factor that may have contributed to its evident under-attendance.
Generally not the best environment in which to view works of art, hotel rooms seemed to suit the media on display, which made demands on the viewer’s time and attention. While dimly lit bedrooms may not have provided ample exhibition space, they nonetheless offered the audience a place to sit as they watched the short films, animation and non-narrative time-based pieces on view. Sit or, perhaps in the case of most of the art shown at DiVA, sleep, since after the jam-packed intensity and visual overload of the other fairs DiVA’s art and venue were decidedly underwhelming.
Two DiVA galleries and two represented artists stood out from the crowd; Montréal’s Pierre-Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain, representing new media art veteran Luc Courchesne and the Walsh Gallery of Chicago, which exhibited claymation shorts by video artist Zhou Xiaohu. New media is proliferate within the Asian contemporary scene. Walsh Gallery’s director, Julie Walsh, lived in Shanghai where she studied traditional painting before founding her Chicago space for Asian art of the non-dragon kind.
Though far splashier, Rodney Swanstrom’s room-sized sci-fi wonderland S.L.>>TransPod<<3000, a Gesamtkunstwerk of light, image, climate control and aromatherapy, was somehow eclipsed by Zhou Xiaohu’s emphatically lo-tech series of claymation shorts. Intimate in both presentation and content, a small screen facing the hallway broadcasted the enactment of violent narratives such as No. 9 Electrocution, in which a tiny clay character was put to death as a priest read the last rites or No. 8 Procedure, which treated the viewer to a demonstration of C-section surgery.
With far less prurient, and far more cerebral appeal, Luc Courchesne’s series Journal panoscopique (2003-2006) provided photographic documentation of the artist’s forays into virtual reality. Rotating disks featuring panoramic views of different sites were the by-product of a process: a professor of design at the University of Montreal, Courchesne develops large-scale machines that physically encompass the viewer-participant, who at once creates and is photographically embedded within an artificial three-dimensional world manipulated and controlled through the use of a navigational joystick. Video demonstrations and examples of his groundbreaking work are available (see http://panoscope360.com/rv-video1.html.)
Given the prevalence of digital art at –scope, one wonders why galleries would choose to exhibit at DiVA’s cramped and isolated locale. -Scope’s gigantic Cinema-scope installation housed works by new media heavy-hitters like Rhizome.org and the New Museum. This was chief-curated by Lee Wells who showed projects by a broad cross-section of artists using the internet, film, video and telecommunications to produce their work.
The visual vocabulary of digital art is frequently appropriated by artists working in traditional formats, as displayed at –scope by Tokyo-based Gallery Beaux’s Kentaro Hiramatsu. A former Philip Morris K.K. Art Award nominee, Hiramatsu sees his subjects with digitized vision, even as he renders them with paint on canvas. Like many artists who work with new media he complicates the distinction between reality and fantasy. In his Person I (2004), for example, a blonde-haired girl, replete with naturalistic details such as a pony-tail, flip-flops, sundress and shadows, stares into pictorial space, passively observing her cursorily outlined environment, Yankee Stadium and the Manhattan skyline, as it disintegrates, collapses and swirls into a vortex at the center of the canvas. Pixelated sections of her body and surrounding stadium seating separate and fall away from their forms. The image at once alludes to reality emulated by a masterful artistry as well as the bits of information that comprise the reality projected by television or digital media.
Around the corner at Dam, Stuhltrager, Ryan Wolfe’s strangely compelling display of robotic grass actualized another type of exchange between the real and the illusory. Wolfe, like Hiramatsu, made no attempt to hide the artificiality of his construction. Instead, the mini computer boards that direct the movements of individual blades of grass were exhibited, along with an aesthetically arranged tangle of wires. Simulating wind in a field, together they formed a wall-sized installation.
In general, installations at –scope came in two flavors: big and messy and small and neat. An example of the second variety was on view at Ricco Maresca where Christopher Adams generated palpable visual impact through a clustering of his diminutive objects. Reminiscent of flora or anemones, the stylization of his small-scale glazed ceramic sculptures verged on the monstrous, as if cast after the Gothic hothouse experiments of some mad horticulturist. Of the big, messy installations, the work of Brooklyn-based collaborative The 62 was the best example of the kind of DIY project in ample abundance at –scope. Invited to submit material by –scope’s Curatorclusterfuckcompetition, the 62’s process-oriented piece was a work-in-progress throughout its exhibition at the fair. It consisted of a large, screen-printed banner, an on-going cooperative wall painting, a number of hand-made go-cart hybrids, concept sketches of the carts and a live-action collage.
Yet another example of DIY subculture could be found within LA-based Catherine Brooks’ portraits of Suicide Girls self-fetishizing women who volunteer their constructed sexual personae for consumption on an internet site of the same name. The Proposition exhibited her paintings as well as mixed-media pictures of guns and skulls “made with paint that doesn’t like each other,” by notorious prankster and Jean-Michel Basquiat forger Alfredo Martinez. Their canvases were, however, outrivaled by Martinez’s skilled telling of the time that he and Brooks purportedly pied Mark Kostabi as he was leaving a Soho20 speaking engagement on “How to Make It in the Art World,” a moment in which the “iron fist in velvet glove” attraction of Suicide Girls was publicly enacted by Brooks as she flirted with Kostabi, drawing him into their trap.
Los Angeles galleries exhibited some of the best painting as well as the most politically motivated work at the fair. Represented by Acuna-Hansen, New Yorker Ian Davis showed a number of canvases describing good ideas gone bad. Infested with redcoats, a forest of bloody tree trunks festooned with axes, for example, alludes to our nation’s long history with colonization and points at our government’s current imperialistic