[-empyre-] June 2007 on -empyre- soft-skinned space: "Constructions of identity: performance life"

[traceyb@byte-time.net]

June 2007 on -empyre- soft-skinned space: "Constructions of identity:  
performance life"


with

Barbara Campbell (AU), Jill Magid (US) and Stacia Yeapanis (US).

subscribe at
http://www.subtle.net/empyre


Constructions of identity: performance life

This month on ?empyre- will concentrate on the construction of  
identity among artists who have explored notions of 'feminine'  
identity at one point or another - especially how it relates to space  
and landscape. The emphasis of the discussion will focus on the play  
between 'real' and 'virtual' space, as it is so much a part of the  
everyday and a powerful tool for artists to promote and create their  
works. The discussion will also focus on how curators have worked with  
artists with these concerns.


Please join our guests for a month's reflection and debate.


------------------------> Barbara Campbell is a performance artist who  
has worked with the contextual properties of all kinds of sites since  
1982. Back then, her sites were physical: galleries, museums,  
stairways, atriums, piers, to name some. At the moment her performance  
site is actually a website. "But I don?t think this qualifies me as a  
new media artist. In fact I waited until the internet acquired the  
patina of age before
I became really interested in it, because then it became possible to  
discern user patterns and the messages of the medium itself.  
Community, distribution, globalisation, interactivity, citizen-media,  
were some of those messages, and these are what I?m employing now."  
Barbara's current project is 1001 nights cast, in which she performs a  
short text-based work for 1001 consecutive nights. The performance is  
relayed as a live webcast to anyone, anywhere, who is logged on to  
http://1001.net.au

------------------------> Stacia Laura Yeapanis is an  
interdisciplinary artist  living and working in Chicago, IL. She  
received her MFA from the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at  
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Her work can be  
seen in the Museum of Contemporary Photography's Midwest Photographers  
Collection and in the Rhizome Artbase. Stacia is an avid Buffy the  
Vampire Slayer fan and has two wonderful cats, Gertie and Gloria.

"Everybody Hurts," a hybrid fansite/conceptual art piece exploring  
mediated emotion and the fansite as a performance of identity:  
www.everybodyhurts.org

"My Life as a Sim," documentation of this ongoing project on my  
portfolio site:
http://www.staciayeapanis.com/sims.html

"Commercial-Free: The Museum of TV on DVD," another hybrid  
fansite/conceptual art piece exploring fandom in relation to museum  
curation:
www.commercial-free.com

------------------------> Jill Magid, Artist statement:
I seek intimate relationships with impersonal structures.

The systems I choose to work with- such as police, secret services,  
CCTV, and forensic identification, function at a distance, with a  
wide-angle perspective, equalizing everyone and erasing the  
individual. I seek the potential softness and intimacy of their  
technologies, the fallacy of their omniscient point of view, the ways  
in which they hold memory (yet often cease to remember), their  
engrained position in society (the cause of their invisibility), their  
authority, their apparent intangibility? and, with all of this, their  
potential reversibility.
www.jillmagid.net

__________________________________________________________
Tracey Meziane
www.byte-time.net