WHAT’S IN THE BOX
A collaborative piece by Lucas Geronimas, David Horvitz and The Black Hole Space
One Day Only: MARCH 26th, From 3PM-7PM

Artists David Horvitz and Lukas Geronimas are touring the United States and Canada during March and April 2009 with their art project The Box Game (boxgame.org), a traveling performance where the artists ask the question: “What’s in the box?”

The premise is simple: write your guess for what's inside the box on a paper ballot and insert it into the box. Each participant’s guess counts as a vote that will determine what is inside the box once the game ends. Through this process, the artists hope to use The Box Game to make a thought-experiment tangible. The Box Game is the first stage of Horvitz and Geronimas’s larger project What’s in the Box? The game is also the inaugural exhibition for the Black Hole Space (blackholespace.org), a traveling art venue conceived by Joshua Kit Clayton and curated by Terri C. Smith.

Answers received during The Box Game tour will be compiled and analyzed during the artists’ ten-day residency at the nascent Madiman Arts Interaction Center in New Haven, CT. The artists will have access to data analysis software and the advice of Yale faculty as they parlay the guesses from the game into the democratically desired object. In the end, Horvitz and Geronimas will exhibit their created “answer” as well as ephemera from the tour and residency. This performative art project highlights how constantly changing states only become 'real' once observed. What’s in the Box is also designedto question the ability of objective methods (the survey, analysis of data) to produce successful artworks. The Box Game asks, “What does democracy do
for art, and science?”

The Box Game allows all contestants to participate in the distribution of the identifiable qualities of an artwork, arguably shrinking the gap between the thoughts and actions of the viewer and those of contemporary artists. Using the history and aesthetic of U.S. roadside attractions, these emerging artists take survey projects by predecessors such as Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid (e.g. People’s Choice series, 1994-1997) into a swampier place where the objective and the sensory temporally collide.

http://www.boxgame.org/

 

 

 

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