25 Years at the Beall Center for Art + Technology

by Liz Goldner

UCI Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, California

Continuing through October 11, 2025

Great Park Gallery, Irvine, California

October 26 to December 28, 2025

The Beall Center, founded in 2000 at UC Irvine, has blazed a path into digital media art in the United States and beyond, all the while engaging visitors with a variety of non-traditional approaches. Its exhibitions embrace computational media and the impact of technology on society, among other hi-tech topics. Exploring the relationship between the arts, science and engineering, the Beall’s shows address how technology can be used to create new forms of art.

Considering the depth, complexity and variety of the dozens of exhibitions mounted at the Beall over 25 years, the curators of the show — longtime Center director David Familian and frequent Beall curator Gabriel Tolson — included detailed, artistically wrought posters for every show held there. That daunting, yet well-executed task provides more than 15,000 words of text and numerous photos, affording techno geeks the opportunity to delve into the vicissitudes of tech-driven interdisciplinary art.

The Beall’s inaugural exhibition, “SHIFT-CTRL” (2000), examined the culture of video and computer games and other new technologies that were then helping to alter social systems. The show included artworks created specifically as games, those that appropriated game-like metaphors and design principles, stand-alone games and networked games. But the exhibition went further, displaying a plethora of surprising gaming effects, including the convergence of games with fiction and art, shifts in representation and the deployment of games, the rise of cheating and hacking, the reevaluation of the win-lose dichotomy, and the emergence of immersive role-playing and cooperative relationships as central to gameplay. “SHIFT-CTRL’s” examination of games and their effects on our lives 25 years ago has proved to be prescient today, considering the sometimes-dark internet world that so many Gen Z’s appear to inhabit.

Eighteen years later, “R. Luke DuBois: Music into Data::Data into Music” (2018-2019) was a multidisciplinary show detailing how videos can be manipulated to sound otherworldly and/or cacophonous, thereby addressing the deluge of sensory ephemera we are constantly exposed to. DuBois, an artist-musician who works with IT platforms in music, processed sound and video to depict time-lapse photography or music (contained within videos) that is slowed down. His video “Vertical Music (for 12 musicians filmed at high speed)” featured musicians playing a chamber piece composed by DuBois, with each player recorded separately. The videos were then slowed down, resulting in nuanced concentration by the performers, along with a sound that borders on the surreal. The poster of the exhibition explains that Dubois’ interest in language manipulation and his intense political reflection adjoin his approach to translating images into sounds and sounds into images using what were then technologically advanced tools. His works helped redefine what is considered interactive art.

“American Monument” (2019-2020) was a profoundly political exhibition, related to explosive times in our county during the first Trump administration. The show explicitly “examined the cultural conditions under which Black Americans lose their lives to police brutality." The display began on the grounds outside the Center, where an installation was imprinted with the names of 22 African Americans who had lost their lives to police brutality since the late 1990s. The grounds also included wind chimes, representing flowing water, and a ground cover of various red hued plants. 

In the galleries, 22 turntables on pedestals formed the core of the exhibition, with each turntable featuring an audio recording, representing one murdered victim, while containing police reports, court transcripts, witness testimonials and audios of bystanders. A second gallery displayed 22 large metal boxes containing legal documents, one for each murder. Visitors were welcome to open the boxes and read the documents.

Another compelling show, “Ian Ingram” (2021-2022), featured work that the artist referred to as “animal morphology, robotic avatars, interspecies communication and technology in natural environments.” The 21 pieces in the exhibition involved 14 robots — all appropriating animal forms and behavior — that Ingram built and filmed over 20 years in the high, desolate landscapes of treeless arctic terrain; in city streets, parks and ponds; and in back-country lakes and mountains. Indeed, much of his work focuses on synanthropic animals, or on those most closely tied to ourselves and our habitations. As wall labels in the show explained, “Ingram’s robots were often designed to function similarly when their subjects appeared on the scene …The result was a collection of robotic objects that get excited when they sense a rat.”

Presenting this compilation of past exhibitions makes for a wide-ranging exploration of the evolving field of art as it intersects with technology. This retrospective look at the Beall’s first quarter-century sets a high bar and a helpful starting point for the coming years’ aesthetic investigations.

Liz Goldner is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009. 

Liz Goldner’s Website.