"I always knew there was someone else in Pittsburgh who had a similar name to mine, and, to my frustration, was also an artist who always seemed to be one step ahead of me. How would I ever make a name for myself in the Pittsburgh art scene if it had already been made by someone else? I found her online. It was hilarious and sci-fi to see her name next to mine as we chatted: Ashley Andrews, meet Ashley Andrykovitch.
We found our common interests: art, technology, and humor. It was inevitable then, I suppose, that we formed an artistic collaboration incorporating art, technology, and humor. We called it “The App Expo.” Our first “IRL” art meeting in 2011 changed our artistic directions forever. We laid out a plan for an epic show at Unsmoke Systems in Braddock, that would highlight the many creative minds we had come to respect in our collective years living in this region. The artists were to make “apps” - a relatively buzz-wordy term at the time - in their typical medium. We tasked the painters, sculptors, and techies to create tangible, interactive pieces that referenced the Internet, mobile computing, and how this new method of information hyper-interactivity is affecting society.
Ashley and I, formerly a painter and a photographer, became performance artists overnight when we assumed the characters of Bill and Jackie - naive and star-struck tech geeks from the dawn of the Internet age - who facilitated the enjoyment of spectators at our first show. We were taken aback when we realized that our performance was what people talked about when referencing the show months later. We were on to something unexpected and grand.
Since then, we have created several opportunities for our tech-critique. We hosted a group show at Assemble, wherein artists upgraded their apps from the previous show. Our characters participated in the very first Steel City Codefest at Google, where we worked seamlessly alongside professional programmers. We won an honorable mention and the judge's choice for artistic merit for our 6 foot tall foam-core “computer,” modelled after the Commodore 64 personal computer unit- and for the app which “ran” on it via a projector - Whoa, Buddy!
We look for perfect, calculated moments to share our characters with Pittsburgh- such as when we took the winner of our team’s Assemble Maker Date Auction on an actual date to Station Square to enjoy the incline, the Hardrock Cafe, and the singing fountains. Media documentation is key in these pop-up performances. The Warhol Museum and Carnegie Museum of Art have both invited us as performers to one-night events. We installed a broken app in the Warhol’s first floor gallery and an in-real-life “minesweeper” experience as part of CMOA’s Culture Club event.
We intend to expand our project’s reach from hyper-local to national by taking Bill & Jackie to technological conferences and institutions and world-wide through the big Web."
- Ashley Andrews on The App Expo
