The First Circle: Radical Humanism
Peggy Ahwesh, Nancy Burson, Copper Frances Giloth, GRANULAR-SYNTHESIS (Kurt Hentschläger & Ulf Langheinrich), Claudia Hart, Julia Heyward, Les LeVeque, Michael Rees, Chico MacMurtrie, Will Pappenheimer, Jennifer Steinkamp, Nina Sobell, Leslie Thornton, Penelope Umbrico, Susan Gamble & Michael Wenyon, Paul Wong, Grahame Weinbren, Adrianne Wortzel
Curated by Claudia Hart and Natasha Chuk
July 17 – August 16, 2025
Opening Reception Thursday July 17, 6-8pm
w/ performance by Chico MacMurtrie at 7pm
Installation Views
Press:
“Computer Dreams: On Information and Images,” by Justin Kamp, IMPULSE Magazine
Microscope Gallery is pleased to present “The First Circle: Radical Humanism,” a group exhibition of works and live performances/presentations by groundbreaking digital artists curated by Claudia Hart and Natasha Chuk.
The exhibition was inspired by Hart’s personal search to identify and bring together a group of artists of her generation with similar artistic trajectories such as: transitioning into digital technologies from other mediums; working with “expressive, figurative and representational” imagery, rather than algorithmic and abstract; and creating innovative works that do not easily fit into prevailing and historical narratives.
The works in “First Circle: Radical Humanism” were made between 1974 and 2022 and represent a wide-range of approaches and technologies including computer drawings, 3-D animations, Machinima, installation, sculpture, holograms, mixed-media, photography, video, robotics and more. Restorations of several of the historical works that were completed within the past two years will be on view.
The curators also have plans for a catalog for their project which will feature the “computer origin stories” of thirty-seven artists including those in this exhibition.
From Hart and Chuk:
“The First Circle: Radical Humanism focuses on the early adoption of computers by a pioneering generation of artists who worked creatively to lay the foundation of contemporary digital art by integrating a wide range of mediums, artistic practices, and theoretical approaches. It seeks to expand the current discourse on the history of digital art — highlighting the evolution of digital creativity outside of the framework that triangulates science, technology and industry — to demonstrate its relevance in today’s artistic landscape.
The First Circle: Radical Humanism is an archaeological project that began with intermedia artist Claudia Hart’s personal quest for identity. Her desire to expand her own story into a broader historical context resulted in a set of criteria emerging from her own life yet demarcating a type of artist who she felt reflected the pioneering spirit of her own generation. According to Hart’s rule set, artists must be born between 1945 and 1960, coming of age in America during the tech-industry explosion that took place during that era. These artists do not work with a documentary or social justice approach; were not trained as computer or engineers nor embraced scientific methods; produced images which were post-photographic rather than abstract and algorithmic; and above all, integrated computers as a significant force in their practice in the period between 1995-2005. Hart’s schema located a group of disparate artists running on parallel creative tracks, bridging experimental film, video, audio, photography, painting, and sculpture. The findings of this rubric identify a first circle of artists working with computers, but also working in free-wheeling, unexpected ways, to create uncanny, symbolic, expressive, and ultimately humanistic art works. Tracing the origins of this post-war generation of artists also tells the story of the foundations of contemporary digital art through the voices of an eclectic group embracing a wide range of mediums and artistic practices. The exhibition brings this first circle of artists and their bodies of work together for the first time.”
The First Circle: Radical Humanism runs from July 17 through August 16, 2025.
Opening Reception: Thursday July 17, 6-8pm
Opening Performance: 7pm by Chico MacMurtie
Other Performances/Presentations:
Sunday July 20, 4pm: Will Pappenheimer / Grahame Weinbren
Sunday August 3, 4:30pm: “Gamma Time” by Nina Sobell
w/ Ed Bear & Lucinda Jacobson
More info about performances will appear on our event page.
ARTIST BIOS
Peggy Ahwesh is an artist working primarily with film, video, and installation whose practice is an inquiry into feminism, cultural identity and genre. Her work engages political and social topicality, handled with theoretical rigor, while at the same time using humor and mistakes in an open embrace of the inexplicable. Her works have screened and exhibited extensively in the US and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY; Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France; Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Spike Island, Bristol, UK, Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway; JOAN, Los Angeles, among others. Ahwesh has received grants and awards including from the Jerome Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA), and the Alpert Award in the Arts. Peggy Ahwesh was born in Canonsburg, PA and currently lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and the Catskills.
Nancy Burson is an acclaimed artist/photographer who combines art and innovation in a way that challenged photographic truth at the birth of digital manipulation. She is best known for her pioneering work in morphing technologies, which age enhance the human face and still enable law enforcement officials to locate missing children and adults. Her Human Race Machine, commissioned by Zaha Hadid for the London Millennium Dome, was used for over a decade as a diversity tool that provided viewers with the visual experience of being another race. Her work is included in museums worldwide including the MoMA, Metropolitan Museum, and the Whitney Museum in NYC, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the LA County Museum of Art and the Getty Museum, MoMA (San Francisco), the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, as well as many others. She has collaborated with Creative Time, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Deutsche Bank in completing several important public art projects in NYC.
Copper Frances Giloth is digital media artist whose work has been featured in international festivals, galleries, and museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA); the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA); and ACM SIGGRAPH. In 1980, Giloth became the first master of fine arts candidate and woman to graduate from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1982, Giloth chaired the first ACM SIGGRAPH juried public exhibition of experimental two-dimensional, three-dimensional interactive, and time-based works by artists and scientists. In 1985, Giloth and Jane Veeder co-authored “The Paint Problem,” an influential essay on issues around the future of artists’ digital tools. Giloth is Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Kurt Hentschläger is a New York-based Austrian artist who creates media installations and performances for both physical and virtual venues. His works have characteristically been visceral and immersive, as in ZEE, FEED & more recently in SOL, SUB and EKO, and are known for their perceptual effects. They challenge an audience psychologically but also offer a meditative respite from the day-to-day stress of digitally enhanced life. His representational body of work, including MEASURE and ORT, suggests a semi-synthetic form of nature that serves as a metaphor for our life in the Anthropocene. Hentschläger’s work practice embraces experiment and interdisciplinary approach, most prominently displayed in his ephemeral audiovisual environments and live shows in between fine arts, music and theater. Between 1992 and 2003 he collaborated in the groundbreaking media art duo “Granular=Synthesis”, known for emotionally intense works, developing amongst others what is now often referred to as immersive art. Selected presentations include the Venice Biennial, the Venice Theater Biennial, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, PS1 New York, MAC – Musée d’Art Contemporain Montreal, MAK – Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, ZKM – Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, National Art Museum of China Beijing, National Museum for Contemporary Art Seoul, ICC Tokyo, Arte Alameda Mexico City, MONA – Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Sharjah Art, UAE, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, The Momentary, Bentonville.
Julia Heyward‘s work centers around the orchestration of music, image, and language in the areas of multimedia performance, new media and visual art. After a decade of solo performance, Heyward staged No Local Stops which won a BESSIE for ‘Outstanding Performance of the Year for 1984’, presented by DTW New York Dance and Theater. Heyward has written, produced and performed three other large scale multimedia performances: Mood Music (premiered May 1988, The Kitchen, NY), Miracles in Reverse (premiered 1996, Potsdam, Germany), and 29 SpaceTime/The Gabriel Frequency (premiered 2017, Roulette, NY). In addition to writing, directing, and creating the visuals for each of these works, Heyward also co-composed the music.
Les LeVeque is an artist based in New York who works with digital and analog electronic technology. Their work includes single and multi-channel videos, video/computer-based/film installations and live video synthesizer performances. LeVeque’s work often utilizes algorithmic structures, statistically distributed elements, experimentation with the boundaries of interfaces, the use and misuse of current and obsolete technologies and may provide new views of existing narratives.
Chico MacMurtrie is internationally recognized for his large-scale, performative, kinetic installations, and interactive public sculpture exploring the intersection of robotic sculpture, new media installation, and performance. His work investigates organic life from deep within, finding geometry in all living systems. MacMurtrie and his interdisciplinary collective Amorphic Robot Works/ARW have received numerous awards for their experimental new media artworks, including five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, VIDA Life 11.0, and Prix Ars Electronica. Chico MacMurtrie was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2016 and the Map Fund Grant in 2019.
Michael Rees is an artist working in themes of figuration, language, technology, and the social to weave a sculptural mélange. He has shown his work widely including the Whitney Museum in the 1995 Biennial and again in “Bitstreams” in 2001, the MARTa Museum in Germany, Art Omi, The Pera Museum in Istanbul, The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and in private galleries such as 303, bitforms, Basilico Fine Art, Pablo’s Birthday, Favorite Goods and elsewhere. Current exhibitions include Grounds for Sculpture, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the Aldrich Museum of Art. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, and numerous private collections. Rees has received grants from Creative Capital, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Jennifer Steinkamp is an installation artist who works with video and new media to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception. Steinkamp employs advanced technologies to animate organic and abstract forms, offering a poetic lens into the often-invisible complexities of the natural world. Her large-scale, immersive installations respond directly to the architectural interiors they inhabit, transforming the viewer’s spatial perception and disrupting conventional modes of encounter within the gallery.
Leslie Thornton is an American filmmaker and artist who creates vigorously experimental film and video. All her work delves into the mystery and ongoing investigations into the production, creation, and distribution of meaning through and within media. One finds that with Leslie Thornton both form and content are critical and inform each other. Leslie Thornton’s film and media works have been exhibited across the world, in venues including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Biennial Exhibition; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Rotterdam International Film Festival; New York Film Festival; CAPC Musée, Bordeaux; Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley; and festivals in Oberhausen, Graz, Mannheim, Berlin, Austin, Toronto, Tokyo, and Seoul, among many others. Leslie was the only female experimental filmmaker noted in Cahiers du Cinema’s “60 most important American Directors” publication. Leslie Thornton’s project Peggy and Fred in Hell received numerous accolades in various annual best lists including: The Village Voice and The New York Times.
Penelope Umbrico’s installations, video, and digital media works utilize photo-sharing and consumer-to-consumer websites as an expansive archive to explore the production and consumption of images. Her work navigates between producer and consumer, local and global, the individual and the collective, with attention to the technologies that are produced by (and produce) these forces. Umbrico’s work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; MassMoCA, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Art Museum Gosta, Finland; Foto Colectania, Barcelona, Spain; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Daegu Photography Biennale, Korea; Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany; Rencontres d’Arles, France; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia; among many others, and is represented in museum collections around the world. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; Sharpe-Walentas Studio Grant; Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship; Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her monographs have been published by Aperture NYC and RVB Books Paris.
Susan Gamble and Michael Wenyon are a collaborative duo of visual artists known for their pioneering work using holography and exploring the intersection of art and science. They are recognized for artworks stemming from residencies in observatories and other scientific institutions and have worked with photographic technology since the 1980s. They combine backgrounds in art and science, with Gamble holding a PhD in the History of Science from Cambridge University and Wenyon holding an MSc in Optics from Imperial College London.
Paul Wong is a pioneering figure, known for his innovative work in visual and media art. With a career spanning over five decades, Wong has continuously pushed the boundaries of storytelling, working outside mainstream conventions making art for site-specific spaces and screens of all sizes. He is an award-winning artist and curator and founder of several artist-run groups, and organizing events, festivals, conferences and public interventions since the 1970s. Wong has produced projects throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
Adrianne Wortzel is a new media artist based in New York City. She has exhibited her work for over six decades at various venues, including the Asheville Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Ars Electronica (Austria), and Moderna Museet (Stockholm), amongst others. Since the 1990s her work has integrated robotics into performance art, installations, and electronic literature in order to examine technology’s impact on both quotidian experiences and broader society. Wortzel’s digital text Solace and Perpetuity, a life story was awarded a 2015 New York Foundation on the Arts Award for Fiction. Her digital and electronic literature are in collections such as the Morgan Library and Museum, Duke University David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the Pratt Institute Artist’s Books Collection, amongst others. Wortzel received a B.A. in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Ad Reinhardt, Burgoyne Diller, Jimmy Ernst, and Louise Bourgeois. She also has an MFA in Computer Arts from The School of Visual Arts. She is presently a professor emeritus in the Departments of Entertainment Technology and Emerging Media Technologies at the New York City College of Technology.
PERFORMERS/PRESENTERS
Will Pappenheimer is a Brooklyn-based artist working in new media, performance, and installation with an interest in spatial intervention and the altered experiences of the artwork as site. His current work explores the collage of the virtual and physical worlds in the recent medium of augmented reality (AR) and “mixed reality.” He is a pioneer of AR medium and a founding member of the AR collective, Manifest.AR, formed in 2011. His projects and performances have been shown internationally at Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, Los Angeles; SFMOMA and bitforms in San Francisco; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; FACT, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair, Istanbul; Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles; the ICA, CyberArts Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington; Xi’an Academy of Art Gallery in China; the New Museum and the 2017 Moving Image Art Fair in New York. He recently debuted a solo show of new mixed reality sculptural works at the Alpha Gallery in Boston. The artist’s works have been reviewed in the Whitney Museum curator, Christiane Paulʼs recent historical editions of “Digital Art,” a chapter of Gregory Ulmerʼs theoretical book “Electronic Monuments,” Art in America, New York Times, Hyperallergic.org, WIRED, Modern Painters, the Boston Globe, EL PAIS, Madrid, Liberation, Paris, and Art US. A documentary on his work is part of Bloomberg TV’s Art + Technology series.
Nina Sobell pioneered the use of video, computers, and interactivity in art, as well as performance on the Web since 1969, when she first used video to document participants’ undirected interactions with her sculptures at Cornell. She investigates the extent to which video enables her to manipulate the relation between time and space, and to create a vortex for human experience, in which the mediated event coincides with public experience, memory and relationships. As a digital artist focusing on experimental forms of interaction and performance, Sobell uses tools such as wireless EEG headbands, MIDI sound, webcasts, and closed-circuit video surveillance. She was part of the feminist video performance movement of the 1970s with works such as Chicken on Foot (1974) and Hey! Baby, Chicky!! (1978), but she is also known for her work with Emily Hartzell on ParkBench and ArTisTheater (1993). Since the early 1970s, Sobell worked with closed-circuit video to explore the relationship between artist and audience. With the series Brain Wave Drawing in collaboration with Mike Trivich 1973, Sobell set up a system Interactive Electroencephalographic Video Drawings, in which two participants could see their brainwaves changing in real time as they simultaneously watched their own images on closed-circuit video, creating an improvisational feedback loop as they silently communicated with each other.
Grahame Weinbren is a pioneer of interactive cinema. His installations have been exhibited since 1985, including the Whitney Museum, ICA (London), the Guggenheim Museum, the Bonn Kunsthalle, and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Commissions include the National Gallery of Art, the City of Dortmund, and NTT/ICC Tokyo. His documentaries and experimental films are widely screened, recently at the 2011 Montreal Festival of Films on Art. Weinbren has published and lectured for three decades on cinema, interactivity, and new media. He is the senior editor of the Millennium Film Journal and has been a key member of the graduate faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York.
CURATORS
Natasha Chuk, PhD is a media theorist, writer, educator, and independent curator whose work explores the historical, philosophical, and creative dimensions of media and technology. Her research focuses on how media systems shape perception, embodiment, and cultural imagination. Bridging critical theory, media history, and artistic practice, she investigates the recursive logics and material residues that inform contemporary visual and technological culture. Her writing has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Chronogram, IMPULSE Magazine, FLAT Journal, and other periodicals and edited volumes. She is the author of Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects (Intellect, 2015) and Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography (Intellect, 2025). She teaches courses in the areas of film, photography, video game studies, new media art, and media theory at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons in New York City.
Claudia Hart emerged as part of that generation of 90s intermedia artists producing what was known then as Identity Art, that she later interpreted in relation to developing simulations technologies. Hart’s work is about issues of the body, perception and nature, charting the natural as it collapses into technology. Her work mixes realities. She also thinks of her intermedia installations as sites of contemplation and transformation. Hart is a pioneer of 3D animation and, as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR, along with tangible objects made by computer-driven production machines, created using related computer models. She took a feminist position in a world that was then without women, 30 years ago, and was inspired by the French media artists of the 1960s. Hart calls her work, “post photography,” and has also created a body of theoretical writings and exhibitions based on this concept. Her 3D worlds are generated by mathematical models rather than captured by a camera on film. In 2007, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she developed a pedagogic program based on this concept. Experimental 3D was the first art-school curriculum wholly devoted to teaching simulations technologies. Hart was a professor at SAIC for 16 years.