Shaping Experimental Arts @ Harvestworks NY 1982-2025
Carol Parkinson, Executive Director of Harvestworks, NY, for 37 years since 1987, has focused on the development of experimental artworks that explore sound, data, and other emerging technologies. Parkinson’s professional services include panel participation at the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Parkinson is the Executive Producer of the New York Electronic Art Festival, a series of workshops, concert performances, and exhibitions centered on art and technology. Parkinson is a founding member of TELLUS, the Audio Cassette Magazine, a cassette–based magazine of experimental music and sound art published between 1982 and 1996.
In her talk, Shaping the Experimental Media Arts in New York City, former Executive Director and current Board Member Carol Parkinson will discuss works from artists in the collection, including Blue Morph by Victoria Vesna in the New York Electronic Art Festival (2011), Alan Rath in The Interactive Show (1992), and Christian Marclay in SoundWave NYC (1987), as well as a few current exhibitions.
Following the talk,
Carol will be joined by special guests: PAUL GELUSO and IVANA DAMA
Dr. Paul Thomas, Honorary Professor at UNSW Art and Design and founder of the Studio for Transdisciplinary Art Research as well as the founder and series-chair of the Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference series 2010-2022. In 2000 he instigated and was the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth 2002, 2004 and 2007. As an artist he is a pioneer of transdisciplinary art practice. His practice led research takes not only inspiration from nanoscience and quantum theory, but actually operates there.
Throughout the 20th century, radical experimental artists have challenged the fundamental questions brought to the surface by quantum mechanics, highlighting the invisible forces at play. Here, the observer is integral to quantum physics, becoming part of what is observed, shaping the visualisations of the elusive quantum phenomena. Drawing examples of two artists, Thomas Wilfred, and Takis from the David Bermant Foundation, and artwork from Dr. Paul Thomas' own practice, he will discuss the concepts of duration from a quantum perspective in connection to related visualising phenomena. The artworks create visual sensations and expressions of the immense complexity of visualising the invisible, ineffable, and intangible.
Following the talk, we will be joined by special guests: Kurt Hentschläger, Andrea Rassell, and Bill Seaman
In this presentation, Beavers will discuss Nam June Paik’s Virtually Wise (1994), a work from the David Bermant Foundation Collection, and Anne Niemitz’s Kihikihi (2024), which was supported by a David Bermant Foundation grant. Drawing from these pieces, Isabel will explore how hybrid media, ecological awareness, and embodied experience can shape new frameworks for resilience and collective imagination.
Isabel Beavers (they/she) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles working at the intersections of new media, ecology, and collective action. Across artistic production, curatorial practice and teaching, their research challenges us to imagine adaptive climate futures–ones that rely on alternative modes of knowing as structures for living. Embodied and site-specific research are central to their practice through which they have explored Arctic sea ice melt, plant and human adaptation to wildfire in the American west, deep sea mining, the ethics of artificial intelligence, and eco-feminist re-imaginings of Western mythologies.
Beavers’ work on deep sea mining was recently included in Getty's 2024 PST Art + Science Collide as part of Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean. Beavers is the Artistic Director of Supercollider LA, and the Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in STS at Harvey Mudd University. Through artistic practice, teaching, and curating, they foster communities of care and experimentation, inviting audiences to sense the unseen and imagine new eco-futures.
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.
EPISODE 21:
George Quasha
The Syntax of Moving Awareness
RESPONDERS: Gary Hill and Toni Dove
George Quasha is a poet, artist, musician and writer working in diverse mediums to explore certain principles (e.g., axiality, ecoproprioception). For his primary medium poiesis he has invented the genre preverbs as a medium of axial language and “linguality at zero point.” He extends axiality & poiesis to art, music, performance, and conscience body practice.
His ongoing video work was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), principally for art is/music is/poetry is (Speaking Portraits), for which during the last twenty-three years he has recorded over a thousand artists, poets, and composers in eleven countries saying what art, music, or poetry is (art-is-international.org)—represented in the book art is (Speaking Portraits) (2016).
For many years he has collaborated with Gary Hill and Charles Stein in performance. His sculpture (Axial Stones), drawings and video have been exhibited in various venues, including the Snite Museum of Art, the Manfred Baumgartner Gallery, White Box, the Samuel Dorsky Museum and biennials (Poland, Switzerland, New York). Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (foreword by Carter Ratcliff, 2006) explores the axial principle in his sculpture. Other writing on art includes An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works & Writings (with Charles Stein, foreword by Lynne Cooke, 2009—now online at https://www.academia.edu/28928186/An_Art_of_Limina_Gary_Hills_Works_and_...).
His main work in axial language poiesis is preverbs, of which seven of the thirteen books have been published to date, including Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole and Waking from Myself. Poetry in Principle: Essays in Poetics (foreword by Edward Casey, 2019) contains recent writing on “the poetics of thinking.” Zero Point Poiesis: George Quasha’s Axial Art (2022) is a collection of writings on his poetry, art and thought by sixteen authors, edited by Burt Kimmelman, foreword by Jerome McGann. He was awarded the T-Space 10th annual Poetry Award in 2022.
Edited anthologies include America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Colombian Times to the Present (with Jerome Rothenberg, 1973/2012), Open Poetry: Four Anthologies of Expanded Poems (with Ronald Gross, plus Emmett Williams, John Robert Colombo, & Walter Lowenfels, 1973), An Active Anthology (with Susan Quasha, 1974), and The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (with Charles Stein, 1999).
He lives in Barrytown, New York, collaborating with Susan Quasha on photography/preverbs), and together they publish Station Hill Press.
Claudia Schnugg is curator and artscience scholar. She holds a PhD in social and economic sciences with an additional focus on cultural sciences and media arts. Her practice is twofold: as scholar she is researching artscience collaborations by investigating effects, impact, and value of processes and the relevance of the outcome. As a curator, she supports and develops projects, programmes, and exhibitions at the intersection of art and science. Currently, she is curating projects at ESA/ESTEC, Institute of Stem Cells and Epigenetics at Helmholtz Center Munich, Science Gallery Berlin, works with Pro Helvetia, co-curator of Naturarchy Resonances IV of the SciArt Project at the European Commission’s JRC, and leads a project at Johannes Kepler University. Upcoming shows are CORALS at Science Gallery Berlin and Intersecting Realities in Timisoara.
