Bitrates is the first New Media Art exhibition in the city of Shiraz in Iran, curated and organized by artists Morehshin Allahyari and Mani Nilchiani, hosted by Dar-ol-Hokoomeh Project at Shiraz Artist House. With a vision to create a space dedicated to emerging artistic practices, workshops, talks, presentations and exhibitions, Dar-ol-Hokoomeh Project (co-founded by Mohsen Hazrati and Milad Forouzandeh) seeks to expose the creative community and general public to the potentials of new technologies and New Media theory and practice.

In their curation process, Morehshin and Mani have selected artists that each use variety of digital tools, material, and software in their works to present a specific category and technological aesthetics of new media art; from artgame, creative coding, experimental 3D animation to glitch art and animated GIF. The significance of the term “Bit Rate” is two fold: On the one hand, every digital art work at one point or the other needs to navigate the bottleneck of “bits”. Ideas turn into bits, bits are streamed over a network, to a screen, or to a tangible output such as a 3D printer to form an experience. While simultaneously, as a generation who sought their exposure to the world outside through slow, clunky dial-up modems, our interaction with the world at large was at the mercy of “bit rate”. بیت بر ثانیه (Bitrates) draws attention to these ideas through the presentation of the work that engages and explores technology and internet as a medium.

Featuring: Morehshin Allahyari, Benjamin Bacon, Andrew Blanton, Alex Myers, Brenna Murphy, Ramsey Nasser, Mani Nilchiani, Daniel Rourke, Alfredo Salzar-Caro, Angela Washko.

A lecture and a Q & A session will be held with Morehshin Allahyari and Mani Nilchiani at Daralhokoomeh on Sunday May 25th, 6:30 PM.

Website: http://daralhokoomeh.com

***GIFbites is one of the projects of Bitrates exhibition (curated by Daniel Rourke). For the opening of Bitrates, a selected version of this project was displayed in the gallery, followed by a complete showcase of all the GIFs for the GIFbites exhibition, May 30th-June 6.