(Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii, Peter Halley at Modern Art)
Arakawa's funneling of history into technologic codes (1959 Gutai represented on arduino Lite-Brite) isn't so interesting a metaphor for whatever societal technologic umbrella* as it is for artists use of history as content pre-legitimated, as a caricaturesque. And CAD's comparison to Halley here today is apt: expressionist rendered binary, computational, circuitry and cells. History reappears, history still shines through, but you get to exist as it. "Contemporary Art, a system in which the production of artistic meaning is itself made clear as a series of gestures and movements that encode work with whatever aura is distinct to contemporary art separate from the objects subsumed."
See too: “Room & Board & Crate & Barrel & Mother Vertical” at Midway Contemporary Art, Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.
*e.g. PR's "Furthermore, the digitalized and re-appropriated paintings question how our current digital condition and networked society influences the state of painting"