Take an audio tour of a 2022-23 exhibition at The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum! Listen to artist Lee Boot chat about his show "Lee Boot: Abstracts & Artifacts," on view at The Peale from November 2022-January 2023. You can see videos and interact with more media files using Smartify, the ultimate cultural travel app! Includes 21 narrated stops.

Lee Boot (00:00): So now you're looking at a computer monitor that was made in the 1980s by a company Commodore. This was their Amiga model. And this really gave artists, regular artists who were not millionaires, the ability to use computing in our artwork. And this piece that you're seeing on this monitor was produced in 1995. It's called Web Form, and it's actually a video recording of what was a, what was an artwork that you could see on the internet back then. This was reputed to be, I can't completely confirm this, but reputed to be the first online exhibit of a significant museum. And the contemporary museum here in Baltimore, which was just a fantastic organization that George Si started, worked with the Goethe Institute in Germany to produce this exhibition. I was the American artist and Frank Fitzek from Hamburg, Germany was the German artist. This was the work that I did.

(01:11): Frank did his own work for this exhibition and this in this piece, I'm talking to neuroscientists and philosophers and art curators as well as technologists, people who worked in the field of technology and computing back then. About the fact that the brain and the internet had some things in common, their structure for one thing. They are both kind of opportunistic, growing networks of communication that grow and thrive based on the information that flows through them. I was making all kinds of comparisons, uh, between those two forms. And I was talking about that form, that kind of rhizomic tree-like branching form that we think of when we think of neurons, when we think of networks and so on. I was really very interested in the meaning of that form as an artist.