This pop-up exhibition and panel discussion will explore Frampton’s pioneering computer work at UB and will feature former members of UB’s Digital Arts Lab and Center for Media Studies, as well as media art, equipment, and ephemera from the lab.

Part of CEPA Gallery’s summer-long celebration of Hollis Frampton—presented in partnership with Dean Brownrout Modern/Contemporary— and Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center. Free and open to the public.

Panelists Bob Franki, Barbara Lattanzi, John Pittas, and Keith Sanborn, will be joined by others—all of whom worked directly with Hollis during the late 1970s and early 1980s—at one of the first programs in the world dedicated to New Media and Digital Arts. These early explorers of digital media will discuss their experiences and relay stories, in conversation, of their times at CMS and DAL.

The pop-up exhibition, 'Enter the Age of Electronic Consciousness: Hollis Frampton and the Digital Arts Lab' culls a variety of early computer equipment and digital ephemera—including Frampton’s computer workstation. In addition the display includes never-before-exhibited media works made on the very hardware and software being developed at that time by Frampton and his cadre of young artists, programmers, and engineers.

Also on view will be Sanborn’s multi-media piece entitled V2N and Lattanzi’s digital media work HF Critical Mass software applied to la revolución. Sanborn’s V2N, though not in direct response to Frampton’s work but rather, in the spirit of, “attempts to turn portraiture into intellectual history by employing a parallel between visual morphing and transformative spatial structuring of sound.” Whereas Lattanzi, in a direct response to Frampton’s film, Critical Mass (1971), uses Frampton’s fascination with mathematics and algorithmic sequencing as a foundation for software that functions “as a filtering device that foregrounds the political stagecraft of a speech by Fidel Castro.”