Erwin Redl – Matrix II at MCASD

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re sitting at your computer. Maybe you’re reading texts and charts, watching a video, listening to music, or playing a game. In all cases, what you’re experiencing is the outer skin of so-called ‘cyberspace.’

This late 20th century phenomenon exists entirely thanks to computers and their related technologies and is most seductively present on the surface of monitors. Responding to its temptations, if you reach out to touch it, all you do is bump your finger on the glass.

For Austrian born computer artist Erwin Redl, this was not an acceptable situation. So he began asking himself the kind of question that an artist, with the accelerated imagination typical of the breed, would inevitably ask. It’s a simple question: “What does cyberspace look like on the inside?”

Redl’s answer can be seen in La Jolla starting January 17, when his “Matrix II” makes its debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The work consists of thousands of tiny LEDs deployed in a dense grid that fills the entire volume of the museum’s largest gallery. The faint glow emanating from each of the LEDs combines with all of the other’s to saturate the gallery with a light-presence that seems almost physical and appears to extend beyond identifiable limits. The experience is so unlike the real world that our senses normally encounter that a visit to “Matrix II” can be quite unnerving in a benign, even cleansing way.

If a “virtual reality” could ever be made tangible, this is the kind of space where it would exist. It’s a space that seems to hungrily invite anything and everything as a possibility, a kind of womb of imagination where dreams could all but really come true.

Redl came to this kind of work following years of study and involvement with the interface between art and computers; first as a composer of electronic music and more recently as a creator of digital art. In the course of doing this work, Redl encountered a powerful and ultimately inspiring frustration that would challenge his art making from then on. “Literally,” he says, “I was sick of hitting my nose against the screen because I wanted to be in that abstract space.”

To get into that space, Redl turned to LEDs and fiber optics to produce two- and three-dimensional installations in which the lights, the design of their distribution, and generated light constituted the only “subject” of the work. By dimming the illumination of an interior setting or relying on the darkness of night in outdoor pieces, the further effect was a de-materialization of the physical structures on or in which the works were installed.

An early example of Redl’s two-dimensional art is his 2002 project for the Whitney Museum of American Art, in the heart of New York City. He sheathed the front of the building in red and blue curtains of LEDs linked to a computer program which made them appear to be in constant, very slow motion. The intense radiance of the light draping the building eclipsed the structure behind it to such a degree that the structure appeared to hover, ghost-like, as though unrestrained by gravity.

In Redl’s three-dimensional installations, such as the museum’s “Matrix II,” he constructs room-filling arcs and patterns of lights that similarly redefine and dissolve the physical restraints of their surroundings. For a viewer, the result is a surround of abstract space remarkable for its purity and clarity, and unlike anything that might be experienced in the world outside the installation. Could this be what cyberspace is?

Redl originally created “Matrix II” in 2002, and reprised the work for a 2005 exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art titled “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States.”

That show looked at the legacy of the art produced during the 1960s. It stirred up some notoriety for its embrace of works which claimed or were accused of having their origins in psychedelic experiences. Redl’s art does not belong to this tradition. But it was during the 1960s that light itself became an artist’s medium; in the work of Dan Flavin, James Turrell, and Robert Irwin; each of whom showed light to be something almost tangible and certainly beautiful in its own right. That work then and Redl’s work now invites the characterization of “trippy.” The word trivializes what these artists offer but, at least in Redl’s case, seems quite appropriate, as a journey from normal space to cyberspace is certainly a trip.

The presentation in La Jolla of “Matrix II,” from January 12 through May 4, joins the museum’s ongoing exhibition, “Soundwaves: The Art of Sampling,” a demonstration of contemporary artists’ engagement with the world of sound. Its works range from a trio of inflatable pools in which plates and glassware slowly move through the currents to tinkle and clang against each other, to a video of birds whose flight through a large, acoustically wired cage triggers specific tones that combine to form something between a symphony and a cacophony of sound.

Add to these the museum’s continuing exhibition at its downtown location of “Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries,” a survey of one of the giants of contemporary art, and you see San Diego at this moment as alive on the edges of art today as it has ever been.

For more information about the exhibition of Erwin Redl’s “Matrix II” and the other kindred shows offered by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego at both its La Jolla and downtown locations, visit the museum’s web site, www.mcasd.org, or call the museum at 858-454-3541.