lovely shirt, Noah, but don't try to eat it

I found Noah Lyon in the middle of the largest of the pieces in Jennifer Steinkamp's show, "Daisy Bell", last Sunday when Barry and I visited Lehmann Maupin's beautiful Lower East Side space. Noah was covered with sections of Steinkamps' gently-waving projection of flowers as they paraded down the far wall of the darkened gallery on a black ground.

My thoughts about the show itself while I was in the gallery were something on the order of, "yes, it's beautiful, but (especially because of the extravagant high-tech element) so what?" I didn't actually read the press release until much later (in fact only after looking on my computer screen at the picture above) and then it came together. I have to remind myself that sometimes you shouldn't leave a show without looking at the "instructions". Here's an excerpt from the gallery website, edited for some typos:

The title, Daisy Bell, refers to a particular moment in the history of science and culture: when in 1962, Bell Labs used the IBM 704 to synthesize the popular 19th- Century English song of the same name. The song was also used in the climactic scene of the epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the supercomputer HAL 9000 begins to sing Daisy, Daisy as his consciousness is degraded.

Steinkamp's Daisy Bell series is comprised of a variety of poisonous flowers that appear to cascade down the gallery walls.

Much as Bell Lab's Daisy Bell consisted of a human application reinterpreting nature, Steinkamp reprises the idea, and defines this new series of artwork by its relationship to human innovations.