Blue Swimmer is the latest piece from Louisa Armbrust that uses games
and sports to examine ideas about play and creativity. Armbrust uses games and
sports as a helpful matrix for thinking about the creativity involved in trying to
follow a rule. The installation is located in THE NEW YORK ELECTRONIC ART FESTIVAL
Building 10b, part of Wave(form)s – an Exhibition of Electronic Art on Governors
Island. Blue Swimmer by Louisa Armbrust is an interactive video installation that
uses video and sound to bring to life stop-motion photographs from a 1950’s
competitive swimming manual. Using Max/MSP and Jitter, the installation reanimates
these beautiful but outdated images, creating an immersive environment where the
viewer influences but does not control events. The original images upon which Blue
Swimmer is based were created with the photographic technologies of their time to
attempt to convey, as comprehensively as possible, the rules for performing a
butterfly stroke or a competition dive. These images exquisitely demonstrate the
distance between lived experience and the carefully orchestrated representation of
experience, aligning them poetically with the task of exploring the gap between the
rule and its resulting action. Supported by the Jerome Foundation through the
Harvestworks Artist In Residence Program. Programmed by Gene Kogan, with help from
Kyle Kaplan.