If you’re anything like us, some days may see you spending half your waking hours staring at one screen or another — typing your way toward a case of carpal tunnel at work, texting your updated ETA while traveling the T, and twittering way too much information to friends before collapsing in front of the TiVo at night. So it’s nice to know that all that screen time can inspire more than just eyestrain. In Syntax, an exhibit staged as part of the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival, eight artists interrogate the language of digital information, creating works that are right at home in an age in which pixels and digital data have replaced daubs of paint and celluloid still frames as the major modes of visual representation. Mark Stock, an aerospace engineer and artist who lives in Newton, writes a new program for each of his works — oftentimes using code so complex it can take his computer a week to process. The results translate hard-to-fathom thought experiments into vivid visuals like “Inside the Bomb,” a work that transports the viewer to the interior of a bomb in the milliseconds after it detonates. Meggan Gould of Maine likewise puts her mad programming skills to work in “Go Ogle,” a series that relies on Google image searches to chart changes in the popular imagination. The UMass Dartmouth grad creates her amorphous yet evocative images by averaging the top results of search terms like “mugshot” pixel by pixel over a period of several months. And Somerville’s Matthew Swarts blends 21st century techniques with those of the 20th, scanning old family photographs and his own hand drawings into Photoshop to create new veiled images that, like memories themselves, obscure as much as they reveal. The works of these and other tech-savvy artists will be on view from March 27 through May 10 at the Photographic Resource Center (832 Comm Ave, Boston, 617.975.0600), the nonprofit gallery and education center at Boston University. Dazzle both your right and left brain by checking out the show’s opening reception on April 2 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.prcboston.org/syntax.htm.
