KINGSTON, RI.- The Main Gallery at the University of Rhode Island presents From The Engine: Experiments in Self-evolving, through March 6. Lutz Hamel, Judd Morrissey, and Lori Talley are a collaborative team, based in Chicago, examining in their projects the potential for installing complex temporal structures within digital narrative, and the role of machines in their authorship. Lutz Hamel also teaches Computer Science at the University of Rhode Island, where he is an expert in machine learning and evolutionary computing. Their latest exciting project makes its debut in the premier Main Gallery.

Karen Shaw is an artist based in New York City, where she has long been involved in mixed media and collage derived from conceptual word and number games. With materials including cast body parts, acupuncture needles and Chinese fortune diagrams, Shaw translates numbers into a visual language of words and images where once recognizable, even mechanical, patterns are rendered moot.

Together, these complementary exhibitions address the signifying role and meaning of words in our culture and posit alternative, frequently playful (if subversive) systems through which to communicate. Language, whether recognizably written or presented as “hyper” text, is undermined delightfully by both exhibitions. Words are encouraged to multiply and mystify.