Ron Rocco

In the late 1950s and '60s Rocco grew up in the Bronx in New York City.

His was an ethnically Italian neighborhood, surrounding Arthur Avenue, known as the Little Italy of the Bronx.

The neighborhood scrap metal yards, inspired an early interest in working with metals, and a sense of the latent potential of found materials to evoke memory and associations.

Rocco went on to study the visual arts at Purchase College, State University of New York, with classmates Jon Kessler and Fred Wilson, studying with sculptor Tal Streeter, photographer and musician John Cohen and printmaker Antonio Frasconi.

Later he began graduate study at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. under the instruction of the German Group Zero artist, Otto Piene, filmmaker Ricky Leacock, and anthropologist Heather Lechtman.

Here Rocco began projects, which would result in his Guggenheim, New York performance entitled Zaroff's Tale.

Rocco's earliest work in sculpture grew out of an interest in the tension generated forms, made famous by the American artist, Kenneth Snelson and German architect, Frei Otto.

Rocco's work was based on arced segments of aluminum or wood, in constructions which displayed a balance between tensile and compression forces, subject to the effects of gravity.

His exploration of these structures appeared in the exhibition, Models for Large Sculpture, presented at the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York and later in a solo exhibition at Toronto's Galerie Danielli.

Ron Rocco (born 1953, Texas, U.S) is an American artist who has worked in New York City, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Berlin, Germany and China.

His work entails performance, mixed media installations and sculptural constructions employing a mix of found objects and prepared elements.

As a child Ron Rocco traveled with his parents to Germany, where his father served as an American soldier in the post-war occupation army.

The artist attributed his early experience with German culture as a defining element in the background to his interest in Europe and his sometimes social and political themes.

While residing in Ithaca, New York Rocco's work through a public commission from Festival Ithaca and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1977, resulted in Altair, a matrix of arc segments and stainless steel cable, occupying an area of 1200 cuft, suspended five stories above the city center.

Meketra a second large scale commission from this period was exhibited at Cornell University's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

In the period of 1979-80, Rocco returned to New York City and it was during this time that he met and was influenced by the work of German artist, Joseph Beuys who was producing his solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum at the time.

As a result of this new influence later work in tension sculptures began to encompass performance activities, employed string figures taken from Inuit and Oceanic sources; forms, which in their traditional context possessed a social facet, in the communication of communal beliefs and ritual.

Rocco used these as mechanisms for presentation to his audience in performance works like Zaroff's Tale Guggenheim Museum, New York), A String form for Binding Nations United Nations, New York) and Laser Sculpture Dance Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York.

Building on earlier work at M.I.T.'s Visual Language Workshop and Owego, New York's Experimental Television Center, Rocco authored computer software to produce an early image processing system for video.

Resident in New York 1979–1989 on the Lower East Side and later in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Rocco's sculptural work focused on New York Real Estate as a defining force in the life experiences of artists.

This performance was funded by a 1984 Inter-Arts Grant from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Sony Corporation, and may well have been the first live, on-stage application of computer generated imagery for dance.

Other media projects in-residence at Canada's Banff Center in Alberta, involved musician David Hykes, of The Harmonic Choir.

Together they developed a computer assisted laser/video work, which generated kinetic cycles of visual phenomena from Hykes's music.

One such installation, provided real-time, graphic representation of sound, employing a laser scanner and a digitally processed, video feedback loop to create images that were abstract and strikingly calligraphic.

This appeared in the work, In Light of Sound, one of Rocco's Andro-Media Series installations, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

The New York State Council on the Arts funded event in collaboration Hykes and his Harmonic Choir used the two-thousand-year-old tradition of Mongolian overtone chanting, practiced by these musicians, to control the visual phenomena created by the system of scanning lasers, video displays and computer processor.

This resulted in his 1985 collaboration with dance choreographer Mel Wong and The Mel Wong Dance Company.

Together they presented, Buddha Meets Einstein at the Great Wall during an American tour and at New York's Asia Society.

This presentation used dance in combination with pre-recorded and real-time computer/video image processing to explore varying perceptions of time from both an American and Asian viewpoint.

It was a performance that New York Times dance critic, Jennifer Dunning called one of the most successful integration of video imagery and modern dance.

At the time, Rocco clarified, "The formal concerns of movement in dance could accentuate the effects of my equipment on the flow of time, providing a suitable format for the beauty and complexity of this subtle video processor".

Working in the later 1990s, Rocco explored the potential of web based projects in works like Rabinal Achi/Zapatista Port Action of 1997, a collaboration with Ricardo Dominguez, for the M.I.T /List Center Gallery's exhibition PORT/Navigating Digital Culture, and Communicating Vessels with Dutch artist Arnold Schalks.

Rabinal Achi/Zapatista Port Action, was a fusion of drama and social commentary into a work spanning eight hundred years of Mayan History.

Eight broadcast events were produced (via Pseudo Media in New York), bringing together news clips, interviews and discussion groups from Chiapas, Mexico, and the U.S. along with Mayan theater, for the List Gallery exhibition and the Internet.

Rabinal Achi/Zapatista Port Action was a composite work, and used a VRML bridge, to join live audio and video streams, chat groups and an enactment of the Rabinal-Achi, a classic Mayan theater work of highland Guatemala.

Communicating Vessels, was presented as a maritime contribution to the Snug Harbor Cultural Center's program in 1998.

As a site specific and web based project located at the St. George terminal of the Staten Island Ferry, this project joined maritime subjects, navigation technology and historical documents to explored the relationship of Snug Harbor Cultural Center's past, as a home for retired seamen, to the present refuge for aged sailors in Sea Level, North Carolina.

Through interviews with the residents of the North Carolina facility, Communicating Vessels presented the Atlantic Ocean as the connective element between the two locations via the Internet, using an information kiosk at the St. George site to present the web site, track ferry navigation via software provided by MapTech corporation, and to distribute newspapers and other publications.

Communicating Vessels, was funded by the Netherlands Consul to North America and CBK Centrum Bildende Kunst, Rotterdam.

His works "Plotzensee" (2000) and "Berlin Diaries" (2000) can be found in the Experimental Television Center Repository, in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.