Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Dark Fiber, an inaugural collaboration between Chicago-based artists Marissa Lee Benedict (BOLT Resident & Mentor) and David Rueter.

Streamed into the gallery over a fiber optic cable that snakes up from CAC’s lower-level studios, Dark Fiber is a single-channel video projection that makes an oblique cut through the darkened exhibition space. In their video, Benedict & Rueter labor to fabricate – through acts both practical and imagined, factual and fictionalized – the infrastructure of a new unauthorized high-speed global telecommunications network. The new network operates alongside, but in the shadows of, the public Internet.

Dark Fiber traces a different approach to network representation, drawing lines that hop between systems and scales, through vast landscapes, industrial infrastructure, media apparatuses, walls and conduits, lived space and imagined worlds. The result is not an understanding delivered whole, but an experience afforded by walking a path.

Line of Sight

Video series screeningChicago Artists Coalition | BOLT exhibition spaceThursday, March 19, 2015 7:00-8:30 PMFree and open to the public

On March 19th, Dark Fiber – a video installation by Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter on view at CAC – will go dark. A series of video projections solicited via an open call to artists and filmmakers, in the Chicago region and beyond, will take over the screen. Arriving by radio link, messenger or anonymous dead drop, the videos selected for the Line of Sight festival will ask those who submit work to consider the method of the video’s transmission from author to gallery.

Call for Submissions

More information and details for submitting to the Line of Sight screening are available on the Dark Fiber website.

A native of Southern California, Marissa Lee Benedict is a sculptor, researcher, writer, explorer, teacher and avid amateur of many fields and disciplines. Motivated by a sense of critical wonder,but rooted in research and experimentation, her projects range from growing algae under fluorescent lights to digging up geological core samples in the California desert.

Currently based in Chicago, IL, Benedict received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an MFA in 2011 from the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she currently teaches. She has shown most recently in Chicago at threewalls (threewallSOLO), the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago Artists' Coalition, Harold Washington College, Columbia College, Mana Contemporary, the Sullivan Galleries, and in NYC at the Cue Art Foundation. She is currently an artist-in-residence and mentor for the BOLT Residency program (Chicago Artists Coalition), and was a 2011 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Fellowship.

David Rueter is a visual artist, programmer, and instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His creative practice makes use of a range of new technologies — including custom software, custom electronics, data dumps and feeds, GIS software, and computer-assisted manufacturing — and a variety of traditional media, including sculpture, photography, film, and performance. At the core of his work is a focus on the social practices embedded in both new and old technologies, the ways these practices either challenge or reinforce established categories and hierarchies, and the politics of visibility these practices engender and operate within.

A graduate of SAIC’s MFA program in Art and Technology Studies, Rueter was awarded a 2013 Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in the category of Interactive Art, and received a John W Kurtich scholarship for travel to Scandinavia. His work has been exhibited at galleries and festivals across the US, including the International Symposium on Electronic Art and Northern Spark. Born in Ann Arbor, MI, he graduated from Oberlin College with a BA in Politics and a focus in Political Theory.