SYNAPSE: the exhibition

Victor Acevedo, David Em, Kate Johnson, Tony Longson, Michael Masucci, Michael Wright, Anneliese Varaldiev

produced in association with EZTV, the CyberSpace Gallery,the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery and the SIGGRAPH Guerilla Studio

Opening Sunday July 31 2005 8-10pm

through August 27th, 2005

at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art

On Gallery Row in Downtown Los Angeles at 107 West 5th Street between Main and Spring.

SYNAPSE is a group exhibition of seven artists who made a difference by not only pursuing their
personal aesthetics but because they operated in such a way as to build bridges between art forms and art communities.

SYNAPSE highlights some of the key accomplishments of the last quarter-century in the
development of the Southern California digital art scene. SYNAPSE presents the work of David Em and
Tony Longson, two of the first artists anywhere to use computers in their art making process. Victor Acevedo and Michael Wright two early practitioners of PC based computer graphics for desktop printing and video. Michael Masucci and Kate Johnson who are writers, filmmakers and musicians who were early adapters of using desktop technology to create broadcast quality productions using sound, dialogue and visual
art, Annaliese Varaldiev who is a photographer and filmmaker who used early digital technology in her creative process.

All these artists are veterans of the seminal Los Angeles digital art community who gathered around EZTV, whose CyberSpace Gallery was clearly among the world’s first to dedicate itself to the advocacy and exhibition of computer-based art.

At a time when most of the Los Angeles art world ignored the significance of the digital imaging
revolution, these particular artists advanced a variety of ideas and aesthetic strategies that
have since become prevalent. Each, in their own way, began to explore the then relatively
uncharted computer assisted art-making territory. Many of these artists have been exhibited in
museums, galleries, festivals and conferences, and are included in critical books, journals and
periodicals concerning digital art.

SYNAPSE in the tradition of the Digilantes, those EZTV-affiliated artists who mounted a series of seminal
computer art exhibitions throughout Southern California in the 1990s and in conjunction with
ACM/SIGGRAPH 2005, the 32nd International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive
Techniques will be presented as a site-specific exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art in
downtown Los Angeles. SYNAPSE is part of the ACM/SIGGRAPH Conference outreach program as
sponsored by the SIGGRAPH Guerilla Studio and SIGGRAPH 2005 Art Gallery.

SYNAPSE is the 2nd installment of the traveling series "Hacking the Timeline" which attempts to
inform and integrate into popular art history an appreciation and acknowledgment of digital art.