The Kit Collaboration + Robert Saucier: Virulava
Virulava is the second joint project by The Kit Collaboration + Robert Saucier. Their first project, named Infrasense, was a large-scale sound installation that toured 11 galleries in Canada, UK, USA and Belgium between 2004 to 2006 and dealt with the cultural economy of paranoia surrounding the word ‘virus’ in its biological (sexual), computational (coding) and capital (marketing) forms. Virulava is an interactive robotic sound installation, a kinetic and aural work that advances themes originated in the Infrasense project. This new project explores the extensive and pervasive cultural dynamics of the ‘virus’ and seeks to highlight how far viral systems and models are influencing bodily and computer based communication systems, modes of capitalism and socio-sexual relations, ultimately contemplating how we construct cultural memories about transient entities that we consider detrimental to our livelihoods.

The KIT Collaboration has produced numerous interactive robotic installations for galleries and museums, sound and video projects for new-media festivals, and site-specific works for offsite locations across Europe, the Middle East, North America, Australasia, and Japan. It has also been producing internationally touring exhibitions and has been curated into group shows for galleries and biennials since its conception as a collaborative unit in 1995. Invited to undertake residencies in universities, sculpture parks, production units, to research its work, The KIT Collaboration develops its projects from a wide range of situated practices.

Robert Saucier is originally from the province of New Brunswick, and currently lives and works in Montréal, Canada, where he is a professor of sculpture and media art at the University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM). Since he began his professional practice in 1979, Saucier has produced artworks for many solo exhibitions and has been curated into group exhibitions for galleries, museums, and festivals in Canada, USA and Europe. He is an active member of Hexagram (Art and Technology Research and Development Centre) in Montréal, which funded portions of his recent research in the robotic arts.

Owen Mundy: You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore
Owen Mundy’s artwork considers places where money and culture collide. Often involving collaboration, software and interventions, it manifests in both private and public spaces, initiating dialogue by engaging with history, vernacular forms of communication and the political order. The development of his sculptural and digital practice continues an interest in the cultural construction of meaning through mechanical means of representation. You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore is an installation that projects moving US Geological Survey (USGS) satellite images using handmade kinetic projection devices. Each device hangs from the ceiling and uses electronic components to rotate strips of satellite images on transparency in front of an LED light source. They are constructed with found materials like camera lenses and consumer by-products and mimic remote sensing devices, bomb sights and cameras in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The installation includes altered images from various forms of lens-based analysis on a micro and macro scale; land masses, ice sheets and images of retinas, printed on reflective silver film.

Owen Mundy is an artist, designer and researcher. He was a photographer in the US Navy and has a BFA in Photography from Indiana University and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. He is based in Tallahassee, FL, and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design at Florida State University. His work has been shown at Transitio_mx 03 in Mexico City, the California Center for the Arts, compactspace in Los Angeles, Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, APEXART in New York, the Sarai Media Lab in New Dehli.

Hannah Ross: I Have Plagiarized
In honor of Hal Davis' 1985 court case, Hannah Ross has taken famous contemporary works and copied them. Without altering the images in any manner, she converted the digital images to computer code, and displayed the code. There is a grey area when it comes to US copyright law; because a derivative work is allowed to attain copyright on the basis that the original was creatively altered. But the extent of alteration and what constitutes "creativity" is vague. An additional technicality is that in order to begin a derivative work, you must be granted permission by the owner: "only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work." The act of creation itself is the infringement. So these works are in violation of copyright law because they are identical to the originals, but are just read in a different visual format.

Hannah Ross was born in Washington D.C. and spent six years living abroad in Panama, Japan and the UK. She received her BFA from New York University and has completed photographic training through the Pratt Institute and the Corcoran. Ross is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on photography who makes satirical works about the notion of ideal Americana, the influence of media and society's conventions. A majority of her inspiration derives from international cognitive studies, personal experiences, sociology and commercial trends. In looking at how society functions and grows, Ross finds links between humanity's method of thinking and its actions.

Jennifer Wroblewski: Get Free
For Get Free, Jennifer Wroblewski frames "the real" as the perceived limitations inherent to life in the material world. The temporary installation investigates possibilities of finding freedom through a transcendence of the material body, and an embrace of that which is our energetic presence in the material universe. The goal of this temporary installation/wall drawing is to challenge and redefine ideas about the drawing as object by creating a site-specific, impermanent installation. The drawing is a byproduct of a performance, the casting of a spell, an offer of a different version of reality for both artist and viewer. The space becomes the body, in constant motion, externalized. Following the exhibition the walls will be repainted, the drawing lost forever. The work cannot be preserved, framed, purchased. The work itself is fleeting, as are all moments of freedom.

Jennifer Wroblewski is a visual artist whose work consists mainly of monumentally scaled drawing and drawing installation projects. She is the recipient of a 2009 NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts. In 2008 she was selected to participate in Radius 11, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s program for emerging artists. She was a 2008-2009 recipient of and Artist Fellowship at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, during which time she had her first solo New York exhibition, "New Monuments to the AntiConcept." Her work was recently reviewed in the New York Times (December 20, 2009) and a drawing was included in Timeless: The Art of Drawing at the Morris Museum (NJ). Since 2006 Ms. Wroblewski has been an adjunct lecturer in the School of Art+Design at (SUNY) Purchase College.