davidkremers’ work is an ongoing investigation of the fragile boundaries that separate the virtual from the real, and art from science. In the early nineties, he produced a series of audio tours that took the listener through Los Angeles locations in which the world of films, entertainment and shopping had left the real in a shattered state.
For Los Angeles works, davidkremers plans to revive his audio tour project in the form of an infiltration in the mysterious world of the japanese garden at UCLA, exploring the garden’s hidden relations with the greater area of LA county.
Virtual Los Angeles
davidkremers is an artist ‘visiting us from the future’1. as someone once said. Being part of the Apollo-generation (It’s a small step for man, but a giant leap for mankind) he changed his name and stopped using capitals since email isn’t case sensitive. He saw the rise of the virtual age before it was considered as reality and cloned living bacterial paintings before the Human Genome Project was completed.
As ‘caltech conceptual artist’ at Caltech, Pasadena, USA, he collaborates with scientists, helping them to find ways of visualising large, complex datasets, which are often generated by modern measuring techniques. As part of his creative work he often writes an accompanying text, an ‘abstract’, indicating the issue and the challenge he poses for himself in producing the work of art 2. These texts always follow a fixed pseudo-scientific pattern:
given [......................
......................
.
. ]
method [....................
.....................
.
. ]
qed [.................. ]
Quod erat demonstrandum (qed) means: which was to be proved. The above can also be seen as an ‘instruction set’ or algorithm. This is the abstract basis for the work of art itself and its implementation. Running the algorithm under different circumstances can lead to a slightly different result, or ‘output’, without changing the essence of the work of art. This ‘natural variation’ or uncertainty completely suits davidkremers’ work since he is particularly interested in involving living nature in his art.
For the Los Angeles Works program he proposes to revisit and extend a series of audio walks he did in July 1993, titled three stops on the tour of virtual los angeles. Each audio walk documented an exploration, on foot, of Los Angeles through its myths, images and built reality. The audio walks were presented and discussed at Los Angeles Works’ first symposium in the Beursschouwburg in Brussels in 2007.
In his new instalment of the ongoing series, davidkremers will explore the UCLA Japanese garden in Bel Air, as an investigation of the notion of immersive environments, the gardens’ long history in horticulture and their more sophisticated ability to ‘fool the eye’ in relation to their electronic ‘competition’. It will be the first audio walk that takes the form of a dialogue (rather than a monologue like the first three), discussing the microcosm of information invisibly spread over the garden much like contemporary life in the macrocosm LA county. In this dialogue he will probe the garden for significant details and discuss their symbolism in Japanese gardens.