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Review: Laumeier show explores park's relation with culture

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 14, 2011 - "Electric is the Love," the latest installment of the Kranzberg Exhibition Series at Laumeier Sculpture Park, offers a series of immersive environments that play out at the intersection of the natural and technological, the physical and the digital. The works also explore the relationship between the cultural and the natural that forms the foundation of Laumeier's unique identity.

A selection of videos from Robin Assner and Adam Watkins include a rapid-fire collage from the sculpture park, along with a triptych presenting surveillance-style footage that turns viewers into unwitting voyeurs.

The surveillance theme is carried over into Eric Hall's "Reconnecting to a server...," in which viewers activate zones of sound as they move through the space.

Christopher Ottinger's "Cybercar" is a minimalist monolith, pulsating with light and emitting the trancelike hum of a computer processor at work--it's a strangely spiritual altar to technology.

Yo_Cy (Christine Yogiaman and Ken Tracy) have created an ethereal installation using fiber optic cables and a flexible mirror grid that mimics wave effects of sound, wind and water.

Dave Derington's "Virtuallaumeier.net" is a video game that offers an entirely new, delightfully low-tech way to engage with the park.

Ivy Cooper is the Beacon visual arts reviewer and a professor of art at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.