Select Press for Joe Mckay
joester5@mac.com

NYFA Interactive Introducing Joe McKay
Excerpt: "Operating at the edges of what we think this consumer technology should and should not do, McKay’s art leads us into the gap between expectation and evidence, challenging the viewer to consider what one sees and how the technology works. But unlike the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain, McKay has thrown the curtain away and places the apparatus of his works before us without concealing his tricks."

From Artnet Magazine January, 2006 Review of "Superlowrez" at vertexList
"Joe McKay's box shows a blocky hand playing a continuously iterating game of "paper-scissors-rock," creating a not-very-intelligent artificial intelligence to set your mind against."

Endgadget June 30th, 2005
http://www.engadget.com/entry/ 1234000090048778

Tom Moody June 30th, 2005
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/pageback/32457
Good piece by Joe McKay
McKay's work often features klutzy robotic simulations of the sleek cool computer trappings that enhance our lives, for example, his mechanical progress bar, or a recording light that "blinks" by slowly spinning on a wall-mounted rotor. Maybe in the future he can tackle the "Start" button the majority of the world's computer-users still have to press to shut down their machines. On second thought, Windows is beyond satire at this point.

Italian online Digital art Magazine Neural, June 29th 2005 http://www.neural.it/nnews/pressentertoexitprogressbar.htm

Makezine, june 2005
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/06/index.html
I really like the scroll bars. Joe McKay's Progress Bar is moved by a stepper motor which is connected to the computer. The computer screen displays a message which changes as the bar gets closer to completion. Press Enter to Exit has two mesh screens inside a box, one that's shaking and one that's not. This shaking makes the letters shimmer with a moire brilliance that mimics a computer screen. The text comes from the artists's local deli's ATM machine. See also the Scrollbars by Jan Robert Leegte. The installation isolates elements of the Windows interface, which are in turn projected onto various structures; previously internet-based, the scrollbars moved to physical installations through a desire to develop a more meditative relationship between the audience and the work.

New York Times, Friday Jan 23, 2004, Section E page 29
Excerpt from "Sampling Brooklyn , Keeper of Eclectic Flames" by Holland Cotter
"Elsewhere, the artist-run Vertexlist has opened with a solo show by the new-media artist Joe McKay. A kind of electronic fun-fair, it includes a wide-screen voice-activated video Ping-Pong game and a motorized version of a paleo-Macintosh screen icon, sure to have geek appeal. Of most interest, though, is an online database of clips produced by digital camera users who accidentally used movie mode when they meant to take still pictures of family and friends. The results have the unflattering awkwardness of old-time candid snapshots and are just as funny and touching."

New Yorker, What's on, July 4th, 2003, p15
"OUTPOST"
Orange power cords uncoil slowly, like snakes, in Greg Simsic's multi-monitor installation, Amy Barkow sets up a little camera transmitting live feed from the nonspace behind a wall, and the collaborative group E-team integrates viewers into a billboard-size projected desert landscape. In other words, "Outpost" stands at the point where video meets sculpture. But digitization is just a tool here - the collective subject is "interactivity" in the good old-fashioned sense of minds perceiving and reacting to objects. Best is Joe McKay's "Colour Game," a low-tech, hands-on cross between Nintendo and Josef Albers' color squares. Through July 20. (Smack Mellon Studios, 56 Water St. 718-834-8761.)

Excerpt from the web blog by writer/artist Tom Moody ( www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody)
Last night was the opening of "Outpost," an exhibition curated by Ada Chisholm at Smack Mellon (50 Water St, Dumbo, Brooklyn). Highlights were Joe McKay's big screen video game (pics here) where players achieve heights of competitive blood lust in order to...match colors, and Cory Arcangel's power-point-presentation-with-Van-Halen-guitar-solo. In the McKay piece, players sit at a console and work simple RGB sliders (levers raising and lowering the amount of red, green, and blue light). Each player is arbitrarily given a "starting color" and must shift the levers until a "target color"--say, a large dot moving around the screen--is duplicated. When one player hits the exact hue (and it takes some concentration), he or she is declared the winner of that round and the game resets. Each new game has a different "op art" pattern--circles, stripes, spirals--and the color-combinations are often quite dazzling. The installation does something often claimed for color field painting that invariably never happens when you look at it: that is, it teaches you about the physical properties, relativity, and context-specificity of color. A few rounds of the game are equivalent to a short Bauhaus course with Albers and Itten, and I love that the competition is centered around Kandinskyesque harmonics rather than blowing apart zombies or whatever. back