CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2017
Striking a balance: Jacob Tonski
July 2017 by Michael Abatemarco , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"Artist Jacob Tonski uses balance in his work in much the same way a person would use it to stay upright — through internal forces."
On the Road: Currents 2017
June 2017 by Cory Metcalf , Cycling 74 Blog
"One of my favorite events of the year, it is an opportunity to spend time in my New Mexico homeland, share work with the community, and meet incredible artists from around the world engaged in the discourse between art and technology."
That synching feeling: Currents New Media 2017
June 2017 by Pasatiempo Staff , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"It’s time again to get in sync with the Currents New Media festival, which opens on Friday, June 9, and runs through Sunday, June 25."
Currents New Media 2017 / The Satanic voices: Alisa Yang
June 2017 by Jennifer Levin , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"Alisa Yang’s mother — a devotee of the evangelical Christian movement — towed her teenage daughter to two or three churches every weekend. "
Currents New Media 2017 / The roots of digital art: Jonathan Morse
June 2017 by Michael Abatemarco , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"The Artworlds prints show what could be a single object, ostensibly our Earth, as though it has been pulled apart and recombined, sometimes haphazardly and sometimes with a sense of order and precision."
Currents New Media 2017 / Behind the mask: “Burnish”
June 2017 by Paul Weideman , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"People are looking into a tent through little holes. Whether it’s a simple aperture or a fisheye lens or actually a window to a video, they see and hear extraordinary things inside this mini-theater."
Currents New Media 2017 / Disorganized labor: Joerg Staeger
June 2017 by Paul Weideman , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"Joerg Staeger’s piece at Currents New Media is a psychedelic montage of images based on a vision of stretching and tearing fabric, with accompanying sounds and music that include a lovely rendition of “Hush, Little Baby.”"
Currents New Media 2017 / Head space: Installing Currents New Media
June 2017 by Paul Weideman , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"The super-inventive and often kinetically lively artworks presented in the annual Currents New Media festival dazzled more than 7,000 attendees last year and promises to at least match that number during its 2017 run."
Currents New Media 2017 / Long live the mall: Claire Hentschker
June 2017 by Casey Sanchez , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
""Abandoned” is one of the most alluring words to type into a YouTube search bar. Mansions, asylums, hospitals, and amusement parks are among the places suggested by autocomplete. Dead malls are particularly fertile search grounds, returning 595,000 results."
Currents New Media 2017 / Hologrammatical: “Aura Kinetica”
June 2017 by Michael Abatemarco , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"The holograms we make here have somewhere between 10 and 300 billion pixels per inch. It's an immense amount of information." — artist August Muth.
Currents New Media 2017 / Smartphone home: Ronnie Karfiol
June 2017 by Jennifer Levin , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"If you had to leave your home indefinitely, under threat of violence, and you were unable to take much with you, chances are the first thing you would grab is your smartphone."
Currents New Media 2017 / Group chat: Lynne Sachs
June 2017 by Jennifer Levin , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"As she approached her fiftieth birthday, Sachs, whose art tends to sit at the intersection of personal knowledge and world history, sought out other New Yorkers who were born between 1958 and 1964, invited them to her apartment for the weekend, and filmed them telling stories about their memories."
Currents New Media 2017 / Let’s table this: Anne Farrell
June 2017 by Michael Abatemarco , Pasatiempo / Santa Fe New Mexican Weekend Supplement
"There’s a delightful component to Farrell’s two- and three-dimensional works and her Currents installations that make experiencing them fun."
CURRENTS Kicks off Summer Festival Season in Santa Fe
June 2017 by Billiam Rodgers , Meow Wolf Blog
"One of our favorite art festivals of the year is just around the corner, a FREE event that showcases artists who create futuristic work at the nexus of art and technology. Everyone in Santa Fe knows CURRENTS New Media Festival, but if you’ve never gone or are visiting us from out of town, you should definitely make the time for it this year. We promise that you’ll be telling your friends about it for weeks to come."
CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2016
Tune in, turn on, and vice versa: Currents 2016
July 2016 by Michael Abatemarco , Pasatiempo
New media has a leg up on the phantoms of the digital world — you know, those files you can’t hold in your hands and can’t feel and that exist only as a series of zeros and ones in an invisible cloud that is no cloud and is located nowhere. That might be oversimplifying the digital realm, but new media, which includes digital but is not limited to it, has substance.
THE Magazine covers CURRENTS
July 2016 by Jordan Eddy , The Magazine
"For an exhibition that's known for it's interactivity, this is by far its most experiential entry. It's like going to a show of wet clay sculptures and gleefully leaving your fingerprints everywhere. There's something irresistible about an exhibition that ripples with the slightest wave of your hand."
Adobe Airstream Currents 2016 Review
July 2016 by Ellen Berkovitch , Adobe Airstream
"Judging by Currents festival, it appears to mean more and more the license of the user to determine the parameters of the experience based in a confluence of screens and viewing possibilities."
Dipping the City Different’s Toes into Currents New Media
June 2016 by Devon Jackson , The Swivel Blog (Poster Boyz)
“Currents is just fantastic. The concept, the execution, the manpower—everything was amazing. And the works themselves, there was a really a nice variety. They were aesthetically and technologically different.”
CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2015
“Body + Technology + Landscape” in Flame Schon’s INterzone
September 2015 by JC Gonzo , Sensitive Skin
In-line with psychedelic methods and their place in contemporary art history, Schon surpasses this concept of unifying the organic and digital on a materialistic level, allowing her to exhibit ineffable states of existence through the medium.
Time brings rewards at Currents in the Railyard
June 2015 by Jackie Jadrnak , Albuquerque Journal North
One of the key things to keep in mind about the Currents new media exhibition at El Museo Cultural in Santa Fe’s Railyard is that it takes more than one visit.
The mesmerizing “Noisefold” by David Stout and Cory Metcalf, for instance, takes many minutes of watching the intricate patterns morph to the solemn sounds that occasionally almost gong forth. Even after you think you’ve seen it all, minutes or days later you can walk back into the room devoted to the two-wall projection and see a pattern or colors that you hadn’t viewed before.
Co-organizer Mariannah Amster confided that one family was trying to leave the room, but the little girl protested, “I can’t go. I’m watching a movie.” It takes a child to see the storyline in abstraction.
Art in Review: Currents International New Media Festival
June 2015 by Michael Abatemarco , Pasatiempo
Munich-based artist Karina Smigla-Bobinski’s Simulacra, a cube composed of four seemingly blank video screens that emit a white light, is an interactive installation. Hand-held magnifying lenses allow visitors to see the imagery on the screens. A tangle of the necessary wires for providing power hangs above and beneath the monitors, carefully arranged into sculptural form.
Summer In Santa Fe
June 2015 by Sasha Levine , Departures
Santa Fe’s arts scene might be best known for its prodigious southwestern aesthetics (fans of Spanish, Indian, Hispanic, and folk arts and crafts have a slew of dedicated festivals to choose from this summer), but there’s more to explore in this small, global, city. Get a dose of the future from June 12–28, when interactive and fine art video installations, multimedia performances, and web based art forms created by nearly 500 artists from around the world hit venues throughout town.
Currents takes viewers on a Journey to different locations
June 2015 by Jackie Jadrnak , Albuquerque Jornal North
Some art shows give you pretty or interesting things to look at. Others let you play with the art, making it morph and respond to your motions, voice, temperature or nerve impulses. And some can make you a star. Currents offers all three.
Plug-ins required: Currents International New Media Festival
June 2015 by Michael Abatemarco , Pasatiempo
Subway Stories, an installation at this year’s Currents International New Media Festival, allows visitors to tap into the interior states of the train passengers and hear their innermost thoughts. “I saw the sketches and thought it would be an interesting scenario to hear what these people are thinking,” Ong told Pasatiempo. “It’s a common thing we do in public places; we’ll project our own thoughts onto other people, imagining what they’re thinking.”
Music for chameleons: Myriam Bleau at the Currents festival
June 2015 by Paul Weideman , Pasatiempo
“One thing that is very important to me is to be at risk in some way when I perform, so I always add new elements so I’m not completely sure what’s going to happen. I want to keep myself on the edge, and I want the performance to be as visceral as possible. Also, in the performance, I truly have to run around and make sure the tops don’t fall off, and it can be quite stressful, so that also keeps me on the edge.”
Installing at Currents (Video)
June 2015 , Santa Fe New Mexican
The New Mexican spotlights Karina Smigla-Bobinski and Harvey Moon installing their works at Currents.
Electric City
June 2015 by Gussie Fauntleroy , Trend
"We've never been afraid of beauty. Our main focus is the art - technology in service of the art."
New and Dirty, Just Like the Land of Enchantment
May 2015 by Blake Driver , Arts + Culture Texas
“One of the cool things about this festival is it started out as a collective and a community thing, and the impact is global,” says University of North Texas professor and research artist David Stout
21 Best Things to Do in Santa Fe, New Mexico
April 2015 by VacationIdea Staff , VacationIdea - Dream Vacation Magazine
"...an annual media festival that takes place in Santa Fe that unites and celebrates both established and emerging artists from all over the world."
CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2014
Hyperallergic Online Magazine
June 2014 by Erin Joyce
In what is essentially a hybrid nuit blanche meets exhibition, Currents presents the work of local artists as well as nationally and internationally exhibited artists in a slick and cohesive manner.
Adobe Airstream
June 2014 by Ellen Berkovitch
What in new media art today marks an equivalent to the question that was asked about Dan Flavin sculpture: is it still art when the light switch is turned off?
Adobe Airstream
June 2014 by Ellen Berkovitch
Visiting Currents New Media Festival in the past has purveyed the reliable sense of new media work wanting to tease apart essence from effects and substance from appurtenance.
Arts+Culture Magazine
May 2014 by Nancy Zastudil
...in large part, artists’ engagement with recent hardware and software developments, as well as pressing issues and conversations around new media arts, determine the festival’s direction.
Art Ltd. Magazine
May 2014 by Matthew Irwin
A joint project to explore and advance new media art begins this summer in Northern New Mexico. Uniting the efforts of Albuquerque’s 516 ARTS and Santa Fe’s Parallel Studios, the aptly named “New Media New Mexico” launches with 516’s exhibition-centered “Digital Latin America” and Parallel’s annual festival of new media, “Currents 2014.”
CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2013
The Future is Here, That Much is Clear
August 2013 by Marina La Palma , THE Magazine
"This annual festival, truly a community effort, unfolds in partnership with numerous local galleries and organizations. Next June plan to dedicate some time to Currents."
Art ltd. New Mexico Supplement
July 2013 by Jon Carver , art ltd.
"If digital is your thing, Currents—Santa Fe’s yearly homegrown and international new media arts festival—is a must-have experience. Way beyond your weird uncle’s kinda cool digital prints, (pic-
ture even weirder aunts and uncles) this awesome show makes Santa Fe a genuine cutting edge for new media/video work at this point."
Electrons on parade: The new-media carnvival of Currents 2013
June 2013 by Michael Abatemarco , Santa Fe New Mexican/Pasatiempo
"Between gallery exhibitions, performances, and the new-media exposition at El Museo, Currents offers a lot to take in and is, without question, among Santa Fe’s largest annual community art happenings. It’s local, it’s international, it’s fun, it’s free, and it’s huge."
New media festival kicks off
June 2013 by Kathleen Roberts , Albuquerque Journal North
“We create kind of a wonderland, so people aren’t intimidated. People get it right away.”
SFR Picks/New Media Fest KIcks Off
June 2013 by Enrique Limone , Santa Fe Reporter
“New-media art brings traditional fine arts together with science and technology, transmuting them into something entirely different,” she says. “New Mexico has a history of being a home to both disciplines, and Santa Fe has a reputation of being the City Different, so it’s a natural fit.”
Suspended Animation
June 2013 by Nancy Zastudil , Arts and Cullture
“Our emphasis is more on the artistic side of New Media Arts rather than the purely technological, says Ragano. “The artistic merit must be equally as strong as the gadgets, hardware, and programming employed, which is especially a concern with interactive media.”
CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2012
Currents 2012
August 2012 by Jon Carver , THE Magazine
"Santa Fe’s contemporary art at its best. The
festival is home-grown and international."
Santa Fe Grows Its New Media Festival
July 2012 by An Xiao , Hyperallergic
"This year’s edition of Current represents exciting new growth for the festival, as it has expanded its installation and programming and recruited a fresh slew of international artists."
Scientific Animation Shortfest: Weighing Bigness and Smallness
July 2012 by Lucy Madeline , Adobe Airstream
"Art plus science allows highly specialized fields to become accessible to the average person, opening up new avenues for education and appreciation of biology and nature’s doings. Perhaps the message is that in seeing through technology what we otherwise cannot possibly see, we somehow are able to perceive a thing, or a reality, as it really is."
Santa Fe: New Partners and New Media
July 2012 by Michael Abatemarco and Nancy Salem , art ltd.
"Among the most significant landscapes in which new media plays a key role, two are central to the state's identity: that of art and that of science. New Mexico has a history of art and science. Currents represents their coming together. Many of the video artists have backgrounds as scientists or as programmers."
Santa Fe Takes on International New Media Festival
June 2012 by Hannah Hoel , Adobe Airstream
"Before sunset all the action was inside El Museo Cultural, which offered more artworks than can be seen in a single night. Over ninety international artists had space to display the best from their digital portfolio."
It’s A Jungle
June 2012 by Jordan , Santa Fe Fizz
"The digital age has ushered in a new era of experimentation, and the best pieces here take the medium for a spin in the spirit of Steina and Woody Vasulka or Peter Campus."
Currents events: New Media Festival
June 2012 by Rob DeWalt , Santa Fe New Mexican/Pasatiempo
"We're not interested in serving only the art elite. We want to serve everyone and, in doing so, to enrich Santa Fe's reputation as a hub of contemporary art."
Worth the Trip
May 2012 by Michael Wade Simpson , Arts and Cullture
“The goal is to create an immersive environment, a space where attendees can wander in a unique atmosphere of light, sound and image."
CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2011
Currents
July 2011 by Iris McLister , THE Magazine
"Blazing an innovative trail even by the most cutting-edge contemporary art standards,
this broad medium makes use of a variety of technological, experimental elements with many unique qualities and one consistent theme—that of being informed by technology."
New Mexico Contemporary Art
July 2011 by Kathryn Davis , art ltd.
"this year's "Currents" had its own sense of "gestalt." "The place was full of people... I heard a few languages; there was an urban energy. I felt as if I could have been in any American city, but for the fact that I kept bumping into people I knew. It was Santa Fe at its best, at once intimate and sophisticated.""
Currents 2011: New Video Reviewed
June 2011 by Katy Crocker , Adobe Airstream
Currents 2011—truly a mixed bag, included explosive, disco-poppy pieces to atmospheric, contemplative works; playful to socio-political; as well as flat-out formally beautiful—had everything from low-tech to high-tech with a particular focus on interactivity.
Tools Meet Imagination
June 2011 by Malin Wilson-Powell , Albuquerque Journal North
"In today’s art world, this gathering of work feels like the proverbial breath of fresh air running in a parallel stream alongside narrow insider playing fields where one-liners and pointless extravagance are passed off as art."
The There Is Here: Currents 2011 (at Digital Dome)
June 2011 by Ellen Berkovitch , Adobe Airstream
"Proof perhaps that all we really need to do is recognize this intriguing and edgy new international video event as grounds to interrogate a medium changing as fast as the meaning of “applications.”"
High Tide
June 2011 by Robert B. Ker , Santa Fe New Mexican/Pasatiempo
" Our Philosophy is that anybody off the street could come into an exhibition like this and experience something they have never experienced before and be open to it."
CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2010
Currents 2010
August 2010 by Jon Carver , THE Magazine
"Currents 2010 didn't make it onto the Santa Fe map in the most recent issue of Art in America, though it was hands down the best show in Santa Fe this summer..."
CURRENTS NEW MEDIA 2016
