iARTA News

Jennifer Way and Maia Toteva, PhD (art history), are collaborating as chairs of the session, From Utopian Teleologies to Sporadic Historiographies: “Interfaces” of Art and Cybernetics, for the 39th Annual Association of Art Historians Conference scheduled for the University of Reading (UK) 11-13 April 2013. The call for papers reads:

It has been more than six decades since cybernetics was introduced to the English-speaking world by Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Warren Weaver.  Stimulated by the information explosion in the 195Os, it grew as an international phenomenon that challenged disciplinary boundaries and preconceptions.  Cybernetic models of “self-reproducing automata” brought about an enhanced understanding of informational and communication systems, engendered artificial intelligence and machine-biological interfaces (cyborgs), and impacted game theory. In the West, cybernetics had a lasting effect on art and popular culture from interactive art, performance, and computer art, to telematic art and American Idol.  The “new science,” however, received a different reception in USSR.  After its initial hostility, the Soviet government endorsed cybernetics as a panacea ensuring the rational control of a failing centralized economy. The interdisciplinary umbrella of Soviet cybernetics protected underground art—from kinetic constructions and installations, to conceptual art and performance. The session redresses a lack of attention to cybernetics globally.  It invites presenters in the visual arts and from non-art disciplines to reconsider or generate new knowledge about generations and geographies of art and cybernetics, including practices that create, distribute, and theorize art forms, concepts, and histories. Papers may explore cybernetic phenomena in artistic environments; examine artistic play on logic and reason; consider how art or non-art agents treat cybernetics as a social and cultural paradigm, or question how cybernetics is presented in historiographies of recent art and what interfaces of cybernetics and art bode for intra- and inter-disciplinary research and practice.

Professor Toteva will be a Visiting Scholar at the College of Visual Arts and Design during spring 2013. She will present a lecture, “The Role of Soviet Cybernetics in the Creation of the Russian Nonconformist Art Movement,” provide an informal survey of Eastern-bloc Art since the 1960s, with emphasis on art and technology, and discuss the development of her research including her education in Bulgaria and the U.S. facilitated by fellowships from the Menil Foundation,  Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery, Getty Research Institute and the Council of European Studies.

NoiseFold (iARTA professor, David Stout and research associate, Cory Metcalf) will present a new series of interactive audio-visual works in collaboration with cellist Frances Marie Uitti at The Santa Fe International New Media Festival < www.currentsnewmedia.org > and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art < www.bmoca.org/2012/04/noisefold-with-frances-marie-uitti > in July, 2012.

Jennifer Way (art history) presented her paper “Women Art Technology: subjects of convergence” in the session, “Feminisms of Multitudes” at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians, UK. It examined Women Art Technology, a project she initiated during 2009 to generate information about contemporary women using technology in the art world. By continuing to conduct oral history interviews inquiring about their definitions, perceptions about, uses of, comparisons regarding and training to use technology in and outside of the art world, Women Art Technology perpetuates an ongoing, open-ended ethnography that digitally records and archives women speaking as subjects who live at the cultural and social convergences of discursively freighted art world and technology forms and practices. The project is grounded in feminist approaches to the history and theory of technology. Its activism includes that it foregoes questions of representation to inquire about use, or practice, as articulated by its subjects, maintains an inclusive approach to identifying interview subjects, creates an archive of interviews for teaching and research, and confounds objectivity by asking interviewers to study their own lived relation to the project autoethnographically.

Her essay on training students to serve as the project’s oral history interviews, “Women Art Technology,” will appear in the 2012 special edited, refereed issue of Trends, The Journal of the Texas Art Education Association focusing on theoretical, social, educational and cultural issues influencing art education. In addition, her paper, “Contemporary Art History in the Age of Critical Theory,” about the ways art history has used critical theory to galvanize its own vanguardism and consequently rendered selected examples canonical, with emphasis on the essay English-language readers know as Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” was selected for presentation at After the New Art History, the annual conference sponsored by the Journal of Art Historiography at the University of Birmingham (UK).

David Stout premieres Variation 2 of  "Shadow Box Attractions" at CURRENTS 2012 opening June, 22, 2012 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The work explores the cinematic potentials of a virtual particle chamber. This software environment designed in collaboration with programmers Luke DuBois, Reiner Kramer and Cory Metcalf, facilitates the perturbation and observation of semi-autonomous particle interactions. This live simulation allows the artist to place positive or negatively charged nodes at various locations within the chamber to create complex force fields. These multiple interpenetrating fields interact to yield intricate states of attraction and repulsion. The resulting visual behaviors are rich and varied, from very slow accumulations of atmospheric clouds to swiftly multiplying branches or tree-like structures. In some scenarios the placement, positioning and scaling of the charged nodes give rise to self-perpetuating feedback phenomenon in the form of classic strange attractors. At other times isolated particles perform graceful arcs and swirls or vibrate in stuttering bursts between magnetic poles.

Narrative, Mechanism and the Digital Thread
David Bithel, Ali Momeni and Jenny Vogel
Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University Museum, Ashland OR
March 16 - April 28, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, March 16, 5-7PM
Artist Talk Thursday, March 15, 5:30pm-6:30pm in the Meese Auditorium, Art
Building-

 Jenny Vogel will perform "Cruelty of Pirates" at the opening beginning 5:00 P.M.

Please note: a second performance has been added -- May 10th at 7:30 pm

New Media Caucus, Art in the Age of High Security

David Stout and Jenny Vogel, University of North Texas.

Email:david.stout@unt.edu and jenny.vogel@unt.edu

Artists have characteristically explored the potential of emergent technologies, often subverting intended functions and stimulating new design developments in the process. In an environment where security concerns accumulate a kind ofpervasive ambient narrative, artists play an important role to reveal, redefine, and repurpose the mechanisms, relationships,and unintended consequences engendered by advancing securityand defense research. Whether examining the implications of anonymous webcams, amplifying the anxiety surrounding biometric scanners, or turning the first-person shooter game backon itself, artists have critically engaged with the form, content, and cultural context surrounding systems of control. This“experimental” Open Form session seeks to integrate individual performative and/or media-rich presentations to be moderatedby a roundtable panel discussion. We invite participants using an interdisciplinary approach combining aspects of theory, prac-2013 Call For Participation 23 tice, and/or innovative pedagogy relative to the high-security apparatus increasingly embedded in our daily lives. Proposed possibilities for performance-presentation topics may include such concepts as repurposing surveillance technologies, ubiquitous profiling, the unintended consequences of control systems,weaponizing abstraction in digital art, voyeurism, and (in)voluntary surveillance.

In conjunction with "The Mirror and the Monitor" exhibition, the Haggerty Gallery will host a public talk by Jenny Vogel entitled "Images for and Unknown Public." Vogel's video, photographic, and computer-based artworks have been exhibited widely, nationally and internationally. Based in New York and North Texas, Vogel is currently Assistant Professor of New Media Art in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas.

iARTA Professor, David Stout premieres a new generative animation work titled, “Shadow Box Attractions – variation .01” as part of The First International Conference and Exhibition SCIENCE ART’2012 sponsored by Lomonosov Moscow State University (http://www.msu.ru/en/). The Exhibition takes place at DNK Hall of The Central House of Artists (http://www.cha.ru) in Moscow. The event explores the field of Science-Art from multiple perspectives including,the philosophic and aesthetic grounds, art criticism, and attendant cultural and psychological foundations, theory and history, new technologies in art and design, and emerging practices in the field of science art.

http://www.science-art.ru/e.php

The video "Coms Device" will be shown in the following venues in January-February 2012:

  • Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, taking place in the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre between January 28 and February 5. From the festival website: “BEFF6, scheduled to open in Bangkok in January 2012, uses the platform of an experimental film festival to explore histories that await excavation from audio-visual archives in Southeast Asia and beyond.”
  • "Conflux", a show curated by Kate Shannon at the Pearl Conrad Gallery at Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus, running from January 19 to March 2 and featuring 25 artists from around the world, dealing with cross-disciplinary approaches to intersections of art and technology. More details at: http://www.confluxexhibition.com/
  • The film/video program “Satellite Stories”, curated by Marcel Schwierin for the 25th edition of the Transmediale Festival, a large scale annual festival for digital art and culture in Berlin, Germany. Transmediale 2012 takes place in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) from 31 January – 5 February and explores the theme of in/compatible. Find much more information at: http://www.transmediale.de/.

The video "Strip Studies / Lakefront East" will be shown in the exhibition and symposium "Sonic Views 2" , curated by Adiya Porat, running from February 19 to 23 at Minshar Art Academy, Tel Aviv, Israel. The exhibition deals with connections between sound and architectural and emotional landscapes.

Pages