recent

2007:

"RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA", curated by Richard Rinehart, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, Oct 24 - December 23.

The Petrification of Sputnik, Oct 4, 1957-2007, La Brea Tar Pits @ Page Museum and LACMA, Los Angeles.

"Leaded: The Materiality and Metamorphosis of Graphite", curated by Elizabeth Schlatter, University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, VA, August - September 2007, traveling to eight university art museums.

"Beneath the Underdog", Gagosian Gallery, curated by Nate Lowman and Adam McEwen, 980 Madison Ave., NYC., Apr 27 - June 16, 2007.

Solo show at Fringe Exhibitions, "Sediment, Sentiment, Sentient", Los Angeles, CA., Mar 3 - Apr 6, 2007

2006:

Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, Cybernetic Sensibility, 2006 - 2007, Seoul, Korea

Pulse Art Fair at Miami Basel, Dec. 2006

CUT/FILM: Film as found object in Contemporary Video, Curated by Stefano Basilico, Travelling Museum Show: Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK.

Solo exhibition, "Reentry: From Primordial to Precocial", March. Bitforms, NYC.

Video and commentary, April 2006 exhibition, "Reentry: From Primordial to Precocial" .

Hedonistic Imperative, Curated by Graham Guerra.Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, TX,

2005:

Art of Listening, Curated by Kathleen Forde, 34th International Rotterdam Film Festival, Amsterdam.

CUT/FILM: Film as found object in Contemporary Video, Curated by Stefano Basilico, Travelling Museum Show: MOCA, North Miami, Milwaukee Art Museum, (Catalog), 2004, Milwaukee, WI.

The Black Box, Curatorial Project “The Fourth Flavor”, ARCO’05, Madrid, Spain.

Installation - "Missing Curious Yellow", DiVA Art Fair, NYC.

Hedonistic Imperative, Curated by Graham Guerra, Jack the Pelican, NYC,

Installation - "Missing Curious Yellow", Koln Art Fair, Koln, Germany.

Solo exhibition - Weather Reports and the Matter of Media: Please Follow the Yellow Line, Bitforms, Seoul, Korea.

Installation - "Mold Matter Media", Miami/Basel, North Miami Beach.

Michael Joaquin Grey started in the center of the art world in 1990 and rapidly developed a new type of creative practice, which is a prototype of today’s new media artist. His work has extended in this last decade from the gallery into biotechnology, information technology, product design, social sculpture and mass media. Most recently he has explored computational cinema and choreography with sound, motion and video primitives. His collaborations and practice have been a model and precursor to how artists would adapt their practice and escape postmodern limits.

Grey was influenced very early on by Charles and Ray Eames film, The Powers of Ten. As a sculptor coming to maturity in the middle of "postmodern" dogma he found refuge in exploring other orders of magnitude, behavior, and expression that are beyond the personal scale. The microcosmic, the macrocosmic, information space, and the body (or biological) were the territories he wanted to investigate as a sculptor, as a 'spatial philosopher.' Grey was driven to decode, to communicate, and to create with the form, material and spatial behavior observed on these different scales.

Grey has exhibited at Brooke Alexander Editions, New York, Lisson Gallery, London, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, and Stuart Regen Gallery, Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Loppem, Belgium. Museum shows include Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Serpentine Gallery, London, Museum of Modern Art, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY. He has been published globally including, The NY Times, Washington Post, Artbyte, Flash Art, ID Design, Leonardo Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. He is the inventor of Zoob, a modeling system and toy that emulates dynamic and living systems. Grey received a BS from UC Berkeley in Genetics and an MFA from Yale. He lives in San Francisco and New York.

Michael Joaquin Grey : Born April 6, 1961.

Creative Origins - "I was born between the Sputnik and the Space Race. I grew up living between California and New York. My mother is Mexican Catholic, my father Russian Jew, my second mother is Chinese. I graduated from Berkeley with degrees in Genetics and Art and as I started to mature in my own thinking and expression, I realized that so little of what I knew was from primary experience. My education was steeped in Post Modern theory, a re-examination of history creating doubts about who we were, where we came from, and where we are going. High culture was reporting that there was nothing new, but I felt a faith and confidence in the potential of creating on new scales and territories only recently discovered and explored. The frontiers of the macrocosmic, microcosmic, information space, and the biological were barely examined with creative practice. Artists were mostly working on the limits of the scale of the body and architecture, however our science, culture and language had extended itself far beyond and below. I believed that both artists and scientists should be doing primary research. I was concerned about how much the artist's stature and position had retreated as a creator of the primary cultural record to a secondary or even tertiary role."Michael Joaquin Grey - Micro:

"My early work was a contemplation of primary experience from cultural critical moments and the explanation of phenomenon occuring before my birth. In 1990 I took one of the first Electron Microscopes (Electron M.) and covered it in modeling clay. The act was the undifferentiation of the actual object of observation that takes us beyond our perceptual limits and into scientific faith. My Sputnik (1990) and Electron M(1990) helped me to explore the first cultural moments of capturing the microcosmic and macrocosmic respectively."

Michael Joaquin Grey - Macro:

"In 1990, before the fall of the Soviet Union, I decided to create my own Sputnik Satellite, the new born, the Brancusi of the macrocosmic. My Sputnik (1990) and Electron M (1990) helped me to explore the first cultural moments of capturing the macrocosmic respectively. My early work was a contemplation of primary experience from the many phenomenon and cultural critical moments occuring before my birth."

Michael Joaquin Grey - Biological:

"In the mid 1980's in the midst of growing media and postmodern orthodoxy in high culture, I decided to go back to primary experience and re-examine the lost art of observation. After the macro and microcosmic, I saw the new territories of the biological and information (computation) as undeveloped space for creative development. Artificial Muscle Contraction (1984) was my first self - organizing system. The narrative of Actin and Myosin, the muscle proteins, are filmed in a micro video narrative cycle. "

Michael Joaquin Grey - Information:

"With the development of super computers by the late 1980's it was possible to model a system close to the order of complexity of natural systems, a new territory for the art of observation. I started to record the ontogeny (development) of information: experience, observation, description, explanation, and exploitation of form in this new iterative space. Just as Leeuwenhoek looked at cells (biological) for the first time, or Kepler looked at the macrocosmos, I saw the rare opportunity to experience first hand the hubris and problems of the early development of discovery. I worked with Randy Huff to develop proprietary software to visualize some of the first neural networks and genetic algorithms capable of autonomous learning and behavior. I was interested in recapitulating the dreams of causality that were part of exploring any new frontier.

I found the language to describe and explain the behavior of information and Artificial Life programs very challenging linguistically. I eventually developed the Citroid System and ZOOB modeling system to have a manipulative to share and express the unity of complexity and dynamics of information, micro, macro, and biological behavior. I found the linguistic syntax limited to modeling spatial syntax and complexity. Prior to the Citroid System and ZOOB, there were only two variations of manipulative modeling; stereotonic modeling, or stacking, based on the development of the city, the brick, and tectonic, based on engineering from the Industrial Revolution to Buckminster Fuller. My modeling system is Dynamic, based on how the body works, micro, macro and information behavior. This was the basis for the Citroid System and ZOOB, with body empathy and self similarity from molecular behavior (DNA and protein formation) to the scale of the joints and anatomy of the human body (animation), to celestial formations (network and macro models)."

Michael Joaquin Grey - Pedagogy:

"I believed that artists as well as scientists should be practicing primary research. I was concerned about how much the artist's stature and position had retreated as a creator of the primary cultural record to a secondary or even tertiary role. I started Primordial to shared from the bottom up: tales, toys and tools about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going as social sculpture. In 1993 I began inventing the Citroid System Technology. In 1995 I created the ZOOB play system followed by the formation of Primordial LLC in 1996.

In developing Primordial I looked back historically at the tools, tales, and toys of our common individual and cultural early development. In my research I reflected on the history of Kindergarten, founded in Germany in the 1830's by Friedrich Froebel, a crystallographer heavily influenced by Goethe and Pestalozzi.

I also encountered a remarkable fact in the actual regions of Modernism and its origins in the Bauhaus: both were clearly the product of the Kindergarten. Many of the greatest artists of the past century were some of the original Kindergarteners. Also compelling was the fact that their mature work was almost identical and untransformed from the exercises. Their early play had a profound influence on their adult work. Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Albers, Braque, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius either taught Kindergarten or were students of Kindergarten."

Michael Joaquin Grey - Modeling:

"Spatial Syntax vs. Linguistic Syntax. I found the language available to describe and explain the behavior of information and artificial life programs very challenging linguistically, as most of he behavior of complex systems is kinesthetic. I eventually developed the Citroid System and ZOOB modeling system to have a manipulative to share and express the unity of complexity and dynamics of information, micro, macro and biological behavior.

Prior to the Citroid System and ZOOB, there were only two variations of manipulative modeling; stereotonic modeling, or stacking, based on the development of the city, the brick, and tectonic, based on engineering from the Industrial revolution to Buckminster Fuller. My modeling system is Dynamic, based on how the body works, micro, macro and information behavior (DNA and protein formation) to the scale of the joints and anatomy of the human body (animation), to celestial formations (network and macro models).

I made ZOOB as a 'trojan horse', as the best learning of new language comes from children and play. ZOOB is a learning and operating system in the tradition of the Gifts and Occupations used in the original Kindergarten that was the primary influence of the Bauhaus and many, if not most, of the artists of the early Modernist era."

Michael Joaquin Grey - Media:

"In examining the behavior of media, I have always looked at the construction of narrative from the bottom up. I first played with actual clay to parse 'clay sentences' in the early 1980's. In the early 1990's I used photographic plates to physically create editing, syntax and storyboard experiments with the same physical behavior. In 2000 I started to play with the algorithmic primitives of media, questioning the assumptions held from the structure of film and video syntax based on the assembly line and Industrial Revolution. I began to research and develop software to understand the behavior and form of perceptualization. Most recently, I have been experimenting with synaesthesis, multidimensional video and sound objects in virtual and real space, and the idea of cellular films. I am interested in new thresholds of envisioning. The resultant artworks are my first combination of top down and bottom up experiments using both primordial and appropriated critical cultural moments."

Michael Joaquin Grey - Meta:

"Metaperspective and Metaphysics. I often consider the reexamination of the arcane biogenetic law to hypothesize that the development of the individual in our culture recapitulates the history of our entire cultural development; a creative/cultural metathesis and interpretation of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This faith in the potential of the artist has as an origin of the primary cultural record is what keeps bringing me back to the practice of art.

Michael Joaquin Grey - Movement/ Design:

Movement is my catalyst for understanding form, language and behavior. I have been working for the past decade on developing and understanding a place beyond the limits of ergonomics and functional design. I have empirically, with help from thousands of observations from the ZOOB play system, developed a model based on the limits of sensory integration. I have experimented with definitions of proprioception, tactile and vestibular perception, combining instability, to form fundamental design elements. I believe the dynamics of movement and the machine language of media can be turned into tools for rapid learning and functional optimization to reduce language limits and communication blocks.

Michael Joaquin Grey - Narrative / Play:

"Serious Play. As I became more conscious of the cosmology of my artwork, and as I saw my peers imitating the form, I awoke to a complete and very personal epic creation story about recapitulating my origins individually and culturally, a creative/ cultural metathesis and interpretation of Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny. My own creation myth, Zoey and the ZOOTS, and the Primordial ZOOP (1993) lead me to take a step toward opening up my hermetic art practice and sharing more of the pedagogy of my artwork and research leading to the development of the ZOOB play system and Primordial LLC.

I saw the origins of Modernism in Kindergarten and felt I could contribute to the fundamental development of how we learn about and understand the dynamics of systems with a modeling system based on micro, macro, bio and information behavior. The work I had done in the early 1990's as both art and research needed to have a different and broader creative audience as the pedagogic vallue of the work became apparent.