A.I.: Artistic Intelligence

SFMOMA's digital art exhibition "010101" may offer an inkling of what high-profile artists will create given a wad of cash and the techie means, but New Langton Arts' "LifeLike" ups the ante. The exhibition brings together 10 visual artists to ponder the connection between life and what increasingly passes for such in a world edging into the virtual. As robotics, biotechnology, and advances in computer science blur the natural and the artificial, "LifeLike"'s artists weigh in on the cultural impact of such "progress."

John Slepian's version of Mr. Potatoheads strikes up rich conversation in Incommunicate.

Details

Opens Wednesday, June 27, with a reception on Thursday, June 28, from 6 to 8 p.m., and continues through July 28

Gallery artists discuss the relationship of art and technology Friday, June 29, at 8 p.m.

Admission is free

626-5412

New Langton Arts, 1246 Folsom (at Eighth Street), S.F.

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• Olympia
• Philip Ross
• Todd Dayton
• Science and Technology
• Biotechnology

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Some of the work uses low-tech methods or materials to make highbrow points. Reuben Lorch-Miller's Fallsriffs on the graphic artist's unequaled ability to manipulate natural images. To create the piece, Lorch-Miller ripped a photo of a waterfall from the Internet, blew it up, and animated it using the lo-fi technology of yesteryear's Olympia beer signs. Philip Ross' Pure Culture skewers the human need to shape nature through biotechnology, presenting a living sculpture of cloned fungi trained to grow into architectural forms.

Other pieces make you think. John Slepian's tandem video installation Incommunicate offers two fleshy, misshapen potatolike beings with mouths, attempting to speak to one another in sounds manipulated from human infant babble. Perhaps more confounding is Eliot Anderson's What's a Tortoise? -- inspired by the disconcerting opening scene from Blade Runner -- which gives viewers a chance to sympathize with the artificial by watching an inverted robotic tortoise painfully toast beneath a heat lamp. And in a region that artists flee due to pressures created by technology, Gail Wight's whimsical Star Struck may probe deepest. She depicts a toy robot sobbing as it watches Fritz Lang's Metropolis, perhaps posing tomorrow's definitive question: What becomes of art when only the robots remain to view it? -- Todd Dayton