The Museum of Craft and Design presents Bull. Miletic: Proxistan Vision from November 19, 2022 to March 19, 2023.
Bull.Miletic: Proxistant Vision, on display at the Museum of Craft and Design through March 19, 2023, features art by Bull.Miletic. Bull.Miletic, an artist pair located in Oslo, were among the first graduates of the San Francisco Art Institute’s MFA New Genres department and previously called San Francisco their creative home for nearly a decade.
Proxistant Vision, guest curated by Carol Covington, is the culmination of Bull.Miletic’s seven-year creative research project focused on the dissemination and advancement of aerial, moving-image technologies. It comes on the heels of a recent boom in digital zooming and surveillance technology, including as satellites, remote sensing activities, and drone cameras. Bull.Miletic defines “proxistance” as the capacity to visually depict geography from close-ups (proximity) to overviews (distance) in the same image, as demonstrated most noticeably by Google Earth’s “digital ride” from a global view to street-level detail.
Ferriscope, Venetie 11111100110, and Zoom Blue Dot are three robotic video installations at Proxistant Vision. Each piece has a distinct focus, although they all track the various courses and genealogy of the “proxistant” (overview to detail) impact.
Ferriscope studies how the visual paradigm of proximal distance becomes dominant beyond the screen. Bull.Miletic analyzes the phenomenon of huge observation wheels cropping up in cities all over the world with this installation. This tendency exemplifies how proximity is injected into the urban environment as a kind of gentrification and to increase real estate. The 135-meter-high London Eye (re)launched interest in large-scale urban observation wheels in 2000, igniting a global thirst for progressively greater versions. Bull.Miletic analyzes how these wheels participate in the smooth proxistant vision that is currently multiplying across the 21st-century mediasphere as they take their passengers on circular travels between detailed close-ups and vertiginous overviews.
The cartographic masterwork View of Venice 1500 (Venetie MD), a large-scale woodcut credited to the great Italian artist Jacopo de’ Barbari, is at the heart of Bull.installation Miletic’s Venetie 11111100110. Bull.Miletic regards de’ Barbari’s 500-year-old map as a tremendous breakthrough in technological achievement and an outstanding example of an early trace of proximal vision. It moves the mind between detail and overview with its display of numerous perspectives on the same plane, resulting in a vision that summons both totality and close-up at the same time. The artists discovered various connections between this early map and the present digital paradigm of proxistance as exemplified by Google Earth and other online maps during their research.
Bull.Miletic focuses on the proximal Earth models provided by orbiting satellites mixed with ground and aircraft images in Zoom Blue Dot, established at UC Berkeley. This research into proxistance is largely focused with the subject of scale in relation to Earth’s representation as a speck of dust photographed by a spaceship from a distance of four billion miles. The artists studied a variety of nearby conceptions of Earth, which lead them to discover a historic endeavor to visualize, recognize, and manage the world as a single globe. A proximal voyage in which the most distant image of Earth meets the solid materials of rocks and crystals, where scientific models of computation and prediction shaped an artistic vision beyond visualization, was directed by different concepts of size.
Proxistant Vision is a forward-thinking initiative that increases awareness about the impact of emerging aerial imaging technologies, as well as their influence and power in everyday life. Bull.Miletic considers San Francisco to be their genuine artistic “home base” in the United States, and they are thrilled that Proxistant Vision will have its world premiere at the Museum of Craft and Design.
