BRANCHING SYSTEM
(butterfly hurricane)
new installation
by Ryan Wolfe

An installation inspired by the theories of Edward Lorenz opens one week after his death. This one man's giant impact on contemporary thinking leaves everything after him forever changed...

BRANCHING SYSTEM (butterfly hurricane) Masses of robotic leaves flutter like butterflies, transforming the gallery space into a jungle-like network of complex, serendipitous motion. Individual viewers have an impact on this motion, and their physical interactions with the piece ripple out across the network like wind.

Branching Systems (butterfly hurricane) is an interactive installation exploring Lorenz's famous "butterfly effect" which signalled the beginnings of modern Chaos Theory. It tangibly reimagines cause and effect wrapped into a single moment, and demonstrates how small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamic system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system.

The technological and biological merge to create a unique hybrid living system which inverts the fundamental biological relationship between inside and outside...

STUDY FOR LIT FROM WITHIN In a sun-less room, plants thrive using light that emanates from within their own living tissue. Ryan Wolfe's newest installation redefines how a living form can relate to its environment.

Clusters of Equisetum Hyemale (Common Horsetail) are equipped with the equivalent of internal sunshine. staggered throughout a dark room, each plant contains a number of surgically-embedded LEDs. These LEDs have been selected to enable the plants to photosynthesize in darkness. Sunrise and sunset programmatically occur from within each plant, allowing the viewer to navigate a field of organisms flourishing off their own internal sun cycle.

Wolfe's installation reminds us how modern advances increasingly reconfigure lives while offering an imaginative glimpse of the future of this intertwining.

IN THE SHADE OF AN OLIVE TREE Leaves rustle in wind that is not there. Chirping fills the air from birds that have flown farther than could possibly be heard. The seemingly straight forward pleasures of a sunny day spent "In the Shade of An Olive Tree" provides playful fodder for Frant's interactive installation.

The logic ingrained in how one distinguishes a common setting such as a tree in the sun's rays is skewed. Video and sound are utilized to manipulate light, contrast, touch and “reversity” within the installation, producing an environment where nothing is rationally as it is naturally perceived. As spectators enter the frame of projected light- he/she participates in the creation of an image and is transported, on the associative level, to a suggested world by inference.

FUR DIE STADT (for the city) Pigeons foraging in cold snow of St Petersburg this past winter migrate all the way to New York for spring. Anna Frants' multimedia installations of Russian city street pigeons scavenging for food have landed on both sides of the East River. Undeterred by the bustling public street around them, Frants video/sound projections of feathered city inhabitants go about their business in the front window of Dam Stuhltrager Gallery in Brooklyn at the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhattan.

Connecting life as an artist in Russia and in America, Frant's video is set in a frozen, harsh and unforgiving setting where occupants are filmed amidst routine of working hard to find and claim their daily bread. Among the crowd, one bird has notably different movements and it becomes clear he/she is sick or injured. Set to Beethoven's Sonata, the impeded pigeon is the weakest in the bunch but nonetheless uniquely different, and thus rises as the star.

(Dedicated to Nina Zakharovna Kunina)

"First, there is a great rush to be different. On the other hand, they are all just a pigeon trying to eat." - Anna Frants