bitforms: A Chelsea Gallery Opens for Digital Art, 2001
In November 2001 Steven Sacks opened bitforms at 529 West 20th Street, a commercial gallery devoted to digital and digitally influenced art. Its inaugural show ran November 15 to December 2 with Casey Reas, Golan Levin and five others.
In November 2001, two months after the Twin Towers fell and as the dot.com bubble finished bursting, Steven Sacks opened a gallery on the second floor at 529 West 20th Street in Chelsea devoted to digital and digitally influenced art. He called it bitforms, a merge of the fundamental unit of digital information with the gallery's priority on form. The inaugural exhibition ran November 15 to December 2, 2001, with seven artists from Italy, New Zealand and the United States. Among them were Casey Reas, in what Le Random later marked as his first commercial gallery showing of the Path prints, and Golan Levin.
Sacks had co founded the branding agency Digital Pulp in the 1990s. What pushed him into a commercial gallery was a cluster of museum shows the same year: Bitstreams and Data Dynamics at the Whitney, and 010101: Art in Technological Times at SFMOMA. Designed by Archi Tectonics, the Chelsea space paired a rotating featured exhibit with a permanent digital display and an Interactive Digital Catalog of recessed touchscreens. "bitforms will position digital art as an influential and innovative art form that is evolving and warrants recognition," Sacks said at the opening. The Art Newspaper, writing on the gallery's 15th anniversary in 2016, called the risk of opening then "prescient."
The program that followed treated history and experiment as one stable. Software, generative and interactive work sat beside older media art lineages, and artists associated with the gallery later entered collections at MoMA, Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian and Centre Pompidou. A Seoul branch opened in 2005 and closed in 2007; in 2014 the New York gallery left Chelsea for a ground floor space on the Lower East Side. Nearly 25 years after that first Chelsea opening, bitforms remains one of the few commercial galleries built from the start around ephemeral, time based and digital work.
Sources
- Inaugural Exhibition, bitforms gallery
- About bitforms gallery
- Can you digit? A media art pioneer celebrates 15 years, The Art Newspaper, November 11, 2016
- Steven Sacks: 20+ years at the forefront of new media art, Niio
- Inaugural Exhibition at bitforms, Le Random Generative Art Timeline
- Thumbnail: Golan Levin, Transmission, from the inaugural exhibition, courtesy bitforms gallery