COLOR, LIGHT, MOTION is an online series featuring media artists and scholars in dialogue about artworks from the Bermant Collection of media and kinetic arts. Each featured presenter will discuss selected artworks in history and context and in relation to their own work and connections. This series is produced in collaboration with Harvestworks NY and the David Bermant Foundation.
Important Info
Start at North campus (Broad Arts center) – immerse yourself in the Noise Aquarium, and then follow the map and guided soundscape to South campus (CNSI. End by immersing yourself in [Alien] Star Dust. Experience the walk from the arts and humanities (N) to the sciences and engineering (S) while listening to the in between spatialized sounds of outer space and underwater noise.
Date + Time
September 23, 12-2pm (start is at half hour)
Duration
30 minutes
Bring
Cell phone + Headphones
Parking Info
Public parking is available at a wide variety of parking lots on the UCLA campus for $13.00 per car per day. The closest parking to the Broad Arts Center is Lot 3.
Cristina Albu is an art historian, educator, and writer focusing on crossovers between contemporary art, cognitive sciences, and technology. She is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Albu is the author of Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art (Minnesota University Press, 2016) and the co-editor (with Dawna Schuld) of Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2018). Her writings have appeared in scholarly anthologies (e.g. Nervous Systems, Hybrid Practices, Framings, The Permanence of the Transient, Crossing Cultures) and journals (e.g. Afterimage, Artnodes, Camera Obscura, and the Comparative Media Arts Journal). At UMKC, Albu teaches courses on global contemporary art, participatory and site-specific tendencies, museum studies, and the role of emotion in art reception. She is currently working on a book which charts how artists have paired neurofeedback technology with sounds and video images to cultivate an embodied understanding of our entanglement in more or less visible systems.
Alvaro and Sam present to you a small show. Though one deals with the ecological and botanical and the other with games and [power]fantasy, the works of both attempt to contain massive systems, ecologies, and histories within small objects. Attempting to retain in each the contingencies, nuances, complexities, and contradictions of their colossal subjects. Collected are 3 works by each artist:
In Tortilla Maps, Alvaro burns the 600 year drainage process of the Valley of Mexico [Anahuac] into the surface of hand-made tortillas. Sam’s Dust Knights transforms the coincidences and constraints of a player's home into a treacherous fantasy-land for microscopic creatures. Maize Should be Capitalized seeds 10,000 years of human/maize interaction in a plot at the UCLA Botanical Gardens. In Game Pieces 0: Rules for the Construction of the Role Playing Games interpretations of game design are illustrated through the perspective of the lowest and most numerous game piece, the pawn. In Alvaro’s newest work a science lab briefcase sprouts rows of plastic corn. And in A Modern Wargame, a 250 gigabyte video game with millions of active users is re-built through printed zines and 1 centimeter tall game pieces.
Come examine the results of these experiments.
Where to meet: We will be meeting in front of the EDA June 7th at 5pm and walking together to the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) ArtSci Gallery.
Location: Art|Sci Gallery (Room 5419), California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). In front of the Bombshelter Bistro.
COLOR, LIGHT, MOTION is an online series featuring media artists and scholars in dialogue about artworks from the Bermant Collection of media and kinetic arts. Each featured presenter will discuss selected artworks in history and context and in relation to their own work and connections. This series is produced in collaboration with Harvestworks NY and the David Bermant Foundation.
Toni Dove is considered an innovator in the field of interactive and immersive narrative, New York-based artist Toni Dove creates hybrid performance, installation and screen-based art that fuses film, game or instrument-based interaction with experimental theater. In her work, performers and participants interact with an unfolding narrative, using technologies such as motion sensing or machine learning to connect with on-screen characters.
Projects include Spectropia: feature length live-mix movie performance: premiered: Wexner Center for the Arts; REDCAT, LA Nov 2007; EMPAC, Troy NY, 2008, the Kitchen, NYC, 2010, Roulette, NY, 2012. Lucid Possession, a live mix music cinema performance, a co-production with Issue Project Room, Roulette and HERE, premiered in NYC in 2013 after a preview show at Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. An interactive cinema and robotics installation ‘The Dress That Eats Souls’, premiered in a survey of 20 years of Dove’s interactive work “Embodied Machines” at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, 2018.
Dove was Hirshon Artist/Director in residence, New School for Social Research in Media Studies 2014/15. She has received numerous grants and awards including support from the Rockefeller Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts. She received the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T. And a lifetime achievement award from I.D.M.A.a. Dove was appointed to the 2000/2003 Government Advisory Committee on Information Technology and Creativity, National Research Council, USA. She was Artist in Residence at Bell Labs E.A.T. Program 2020, Pioneerworks Immersive Lab 2019, and Integrated Digital Media, Tandon, NYU, ongoing. Her current project uses motion and machine learning to animate responsive characters in a narrative and is a collaboration with Yale CCAM, Brown CRCI and The Fralin Museum at UVA.
Knotting the memory//Encoding the Khipu_
From a decolonial perspective, I am working on the vindication of the memory contained in the ancestral interfaces of the Andes of South America taken away by colonization and their connections with art and science. I reuse this ancient technology in new artistic processes related to sound, New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIMEs), tangible live coding, and multimedia performance.
With a focus on socially engaged art practices in the twenty-first century, this book explores how artists use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities, create change, and bring forth social impact through new technologies and digital practices.
Suzanne Lacy’s Foreword and section introduction authors Anne Balsamo, Harrell Fletcher, Natalie Loveless, Karen Moss, and Stephanie Rothenberg present twenty-five in-depth case studies by established and emerging contemporary artists including Kim Abeles, Christopher Blay, Joseph DeLappe, Mary Beth Heffernan, Chris Johnson, Rebekah Modrak, Praba Pilar, Tabita Rezaire, Sylvain Souklaye, and collaborators Victoria Vesna and Siddharth Ramakrishnan. Artists offer firsthand insight into how they activate methods used in socially engaged art projects from the twentieth century and incorporated new technologies to create twenty-first century, socially engaged, digital art practices. Works highlighted in this book span collaborative image-making, immersive experiences, telematic art, time machines, artificial intelligence, and physical computing. These reflective case studies reveal how the artists collaborate with participants and communities, and have found ways to expand, transform, reimagine, and create new platforms for meaningful exchange in both physical and virtual spaces.
Xtine engages participatory audiences at the intersection of media art, remix, and digital poetry. Her creative practice rests on the communicative power of art-making as a vehicle for exploring the boundaries between humans and the technologies they create, embody, and employ. Her practice is iterative; it is conceptual and poetic. She collaborates within and outside the university with diverse populations from students to virtual factory workers in projects that yield multiple layers for various forms of participation in the creation of poetic moments of collaborative meaning-making. Strategically, she archives her work and process, and articulates the relationships between what she makes and does with how she thinks about technology and culture in articles, chapters, and books. burrough uses remix and appropriation as strategies for activism and speaking back to structures of power; and she has edited volumes and portfolio sections for other artists to write, reflect on, expose, and archive their practices.
xtine received a commission as part of "Data/Set/Match" at the Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020); a microgrant from the Nasher Sculpture Center (2019); and grant funding from the Puffin Foundation (2018), Humanities Texas (2017), and California Humanities (2015). She received a Terminal Net Art Award (2011), a UK Big Lottery commission developed by Cornerhouse for the Abandon Normal Devices and Looping the Loop Festivals (2010); and she is a 13th Annual (2009) Webby Award Honoree in the Weird category. Her 2005 project, Delocator.net was positively reviewed in a wide range of media outlets including newspapers, radio, television, and film.
As an author, x has written, edited, and co-edited several books including Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change (burrough and Walgren, 2022), The Routledge Handbook to Digital Humanities and Remix Studies (Navas, Gallagher, burrough, 2020), Keywords in Remix Studies (Navas, Gallagher, burrough, 2018), The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (Navas, Gallagher, burrough, 2014), Foundations of Digital Art and Design with Adobe Creative Cloud (burrough, 2013 and second edition in 2019) and Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design (burrough, 2011). She was the editor of the Visual Communication Quarterly (January 2015- January 2019).
A Professor and Area Head in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at UT Dallas, burrough directs LabSynthE, a laboratory for the creation of synthetic and electronic poetry.
From interactive remote-controlled foam rubber sculptures to performances and video/installations, Nina Sobell's practice has been driven by a desire to visualize non-verbal communication and create intimate connections. Her works invite attention to otherwise invisible phenomena and the mutability of our surroundings and relations to others. She will be talking about this trajectory in a continuum that is present in her work today.
Nina Sobell is an interdisciplinary artist who thinks of herself as an electronic medium led her to originate BrainWave Drawings, the interactive synchrony of brainwaves between two or more people, creating a combined physical and mental portrait by visualizing non-verbal communication, as evidenced by Dr. B Sterman’s Neuropsychology Lab in 1974 in collaboration with Mike Trivich and has been involved in extensive collaborative work. She pioneered video, Brain-Computer Interfaces, and was part of the feminist video
performance movement of the 1970s.
Sobell created the first live interactive wireless mobile webcam and transcontinental web performances at NYU’s Center for Advanced Technology in collaboration with Emily Hartzell with the historic internet collective, ParkBench, where they were Artists-in-Residence 1994-1999. Sobell was artist-in Residence at NYU Tisch1990 -1993. She was in shows curated by S. Lacy, B. Viola, P.McCarthy, and invited by Joseph Beuys to speak about her social sculpture, Videophone Voyeur at Documenta 6.
Her work has been shown at or is in the collection of DIA, the Whitney, Hammer, LACMA, LAICA, LBMA, CAM Houston, Blanton Museum, MIT, Getty, ZKM, Whitechapel, Zwirner, WP Phillips Gallery, Louisiana MOMA, Denmark,
Kunst Forum, Cornell, and the Kramlich collection among others. She has taught at UCLA, SVA, and received an Arts Council of Great Britain, NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, Turbulence, Franklin Furnace awards, an Acker Award in Video. She holds an MFA in sculpture from Cornell University, where she is credited with doing the first thesis in video and founding interdepartmental collaboration 1969-71.
Jess Irish will be talking about the making of her short documentary film This Mortal Plastik (2021), how she took an interdisciplinary approach to both the research and craft of making it, and what we might do towards changing the plastics crisis.
Jess Irish is an artist, designer, and writer who makes lyrical nonfiction films and cross-genre media. Her recent films include This Mortal Plastik, For While, and The Phantasmagoria of Offense: the male version which have won many awards including Best Director of Documentary Short, Best Long Short Film, Best Inspirational Film, Best Environmental Film, Best Hybrid Film, Best Experimental Documentary, Best Video Art, and Best Editing. Her films and artworks have screened in festivals both nationally and internationally. Her collaborative design practice focuses on environmental justice and empowering forms of new media. She is the principal designer for Visualizing Pipeline Impacts, which creates media and analyses on shale gas infrastructure in the northeast.
Irish is an Associate Professor of Design and Technology in the School of Art, Media & Technology at Parsons, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in design research, hybrid works, and new media. She received her studio MFA from UC Irvine and her creative writing MFA from The New School. She lives in the Hudson River Valley, NY with her family of humans and dogs.
