Hybrids (2010) at the MIC Media and Interdisciplinary Arts Centre, Auckland, New Zealand.

MIC Toi Rerehiko is pleased to present Hybrids, an exhibition featuring nine local and international artists who integrate rapid prototyping processes with other media. Rapid prototyping technology has largely been used by industrial manufacturers and has since been adopted by architects and digital media artists. Considered within an artmaking sphere, the process raises issues over ontology, authenticity and place amongst others. The works in the exhibition seek to address these while still embracing their own materiality, in model making technology and digitalculture. As the title Hybrids suggests, the works comprise a combination of these ideas with a range of media including live performance, social and formal sculpture, video installation and painting. Hybrids articulates itself as an extension of Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, which plays on the ontological properties of an object. His theory on the unification of concept and realisation has been re-interpreted, taking into account the undefined and evolving limitations of rapid prototyping. Kosuth’s statement that art is to embody an idea that remains constant despite changes to its elements will be tested within a digital framework. Concerns of the exhibition curators include existence and what constitutes the identity of an object, authorship of digitally created work, the fluidity of transformation from data set to three dimensional object, and the relational aspect between prototyping,audiences and real-time. Hybrids investigates the ability of rapid prototyping to blur the interface between manufactured truth and objective reality.