Adobe Museum of Digital Media brings cutting edge technology to the masses --- 24/7
Joanna Malloy
It’s day -- and night -- at the museum.
If it’s art you crave at 3 a.m., no need to break into the M.O.M.A. -- the free online Adobe Museum of Digital Media has just been launched and it’s available 24/7, 365 days a year.
Artists and early adapters packed into the Highline Room at the Standard Hotel for the software giant’s sneak peak Tuesday were giggling as if their fingertips were ticklish as they each guided a mouse to a mouth that hollered all over the screen.
A seeing-eye jellyfish wafted across, leading us into the “Dark Side” exhibit. Then a zombie blinked, menacing visitors like financier Robert Soros, Vogue’s features editor Eve MacSweeney and playwright Bob Morris, into 16 other “rooms” with names like “Fetish,” “Experimental,” “People,” and “Utopian Zone.”
Bronx-born Lawrence Weiner, looking like the progenitor of conceptual art that he was with his long grey ponytail and red leather jacket, told The Daily News, “This takes television outside the box.”
“We wanted to look at who we are as humans in the face of technology,” said Adobe’s jolly curator Tom Eccles, the Bard professor known for birthing big New York art mirages like Jeff Koons’ giant puppy made of 110,000 flowers in Rockefeller Center in 2000. “To look at our desire to reach out to each other, and to look at art in relation to the Internet.”
That’s why the images are so cool. It’s not just 2-D paintings posted online -- the artist, Tony Oursler, made the most of the medium by making it interactive, with moveable parts.
As faces in cyberbubbles popped and amoebas rocked a little dance, Oursler told us, “I feel like I was born at the right time, because the moving image has passed into the hands of the people.”
You can check out their exhibits at the adobemuseum.com