The exhibition features Romy Achituv’s works from recent years. Achituv began his studies at Bezalel Art Academy’s Sculpture Department, and began engaging in new media after working in other media and having a rich art background, a background conspicuous when one examines the installations in the exhibit and the use that Achituv makes of technology.
The Technology Age in which we live places social and cultural challenges before us. Information and its use as it exists on the Internet, the conventional media, and economic and institutional mechanisms is now in a process of consolidation wherein the optimistic option that sees technology-enabled openness and freedom is juxtaposed with the opposite scenario, wherein innovations will be mobilized for tightening monitoring and control mechanisms.
In the world of art and new media too, two opposite extremes are joined. On one side stand economic and commercial bodies that pull technology in a direction of artificial imaging and virtual reality. These bodies control over these the communications market aids a policy of dependence of a maximum number of users on a minimum number of tools, and transforms the language and culture of the Technology Age to minimalist and uniform. On the other side stand those who propose an alternative use of technology, exploiting it as a tool for aiding cultural and social processes taking place in the real world.
In his work, Achituv makes concrete the cultural-social potential that lies in technology. The use of technology in Achituv’s work is mostly a means to create an effect on the viewer in the space where the work is exhibited. Achituv’s installations, particularly the interactive ones, take into account the viewer and the space in which s/he is found as an inseparable part of the work, as an arena for events happening and change that stems from the work and that constitutes an inseparable part of it.
Interaction is created not only between the viewer and the installation, but also between the viewers themselves. If so, technology is a means by which the viewers can undergo a personal and group experience during which they must be aware of themselves, the space, and those around them. This approach, which sees technology as a means only, is also manifested in the design of the installations. The technological devices, the screen, the keyboard, and the computer are hidden and are not a part of the objects in the gallery space.
Achituv, of whose shows this is his first in Israel since 1995, lives and works in New York. In recent years he has shown in the New-Medi Biennal in Kwangju, South Korea; at the Ars Electronic Festival in Linz, Austria; in Montevideo; in the Netherlands; and galleries and museums throughout the world.
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