[-empyre-] Week 2 on empyre, Welcome Brooke Singer, Antoinette LaFarge, and Tad Hirsch

[Renate Ferro]

-empyre soft-skinned space
February 2013: Art, Engineering, and Politics: In Memoriam, Beatriz da Costa

It was such an honor to have both Robert Nideffer and Christiane Paul
begin our monthly discussion in honor of the memory of the life and
work of Beatriz da Costa. We have spent the week talking about
Beatriz' process and how remarkable her life and work were
intertwined.  Both Robert and Christiane you were so generous to
enlighten our subscribers about her most recent work especially the
conceptual projects that have not been realized thus far.  Over the
next three weeks there will be others who share with us their
recollections and collaborations with Beatriz. I would like to
introduce to our list-serve Week 2's guests:  Brooke Singer,
Antoinette LaFarge and Tad Hirsch.  They will be our guests for the
entire week and I know the three of them have much to share. Welcome
to -empyre soft-skinned space:  Week 2: Art, Engineering, and
Politics: In Memoriam, Beatriz da Costa.  Below please find their
biographies.
Best, Renate

Brooke Singer  When Brooke was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon
University in the late1990s she met Beatriz who was on an exchange
program from France. They became good friends. In 2002 they began to
collaborate with Jamie Schulte on a project called Swipe and later
co-founded the collective Preemptive Media. Brooke Singer engages
techno-science as an artist, educator, non-specialist and
collaborator. Her work lives "on" and "off" line in the form of
websites, workshops, photographs, maps, installations and performances
that often involves public participation in pursuit of social change.
Recent awards and commissions include a Madrid Council’s Department of
the Arts commission, Turbulence.org commission, New York State Council
on the Arts (NYSCA) Individual Artist award, a Headlands Center for
Arts residency and a fellowship at Eyebeam Art + Technology. She is
currently Associate Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State
University of New York, and co-founder of the art, technology and
activist group Preemptive Media.
I respected Beatriz deeply as an inspiring colleague interested in
similar areas to mine. She befriended me when she moved to NYC and we
met more often while she lived there to compare notes and discuss her
work. I would consider Beatriz a friend, a colleague, an inspiration,
a collaborator and a mentor. I miss her deeply.

Antoinette LaFarge is an artist-writer who is interested in deception,
actuality, and enactment. Her areas of activity include mixed-reality
performance, interactive installation, avatar improvisation, and
fictive art. Recent projects include Galileo in America (2012),  WISP
(World-Integrated Social Proxy) (2010), Hangmen Also Die (2010), World
of World (2009), and Playing the Rapture (2008-09). She has been
working between digital and analog media for over a decade, and in the
1990s she founded one of the first net-based performance troupes, the
Plaintext Players. She co-curated two early exhibitions on computer
games and art: “SHIFT-CTRL” in 2000 and “ALT+CTRL” in 2003, both at UC
Irvine, where she is Professor of Digital Media in the Art department.
Her projects website is www.forger.com, and her blog is
www.artisallwehave.com.
I have known Beatriz since she came to UC Irvine in 2003, and as
colleagues in new media we worked closely together on curriculum and
related issues. Our practices are different enough that we never
collaborated on an art project together, though we had discussed the
possibility. Our friendship grew after she moved to Long Beach, where
I also live, and we could meet up for dinner or a yoga class or an
impromptu beach walk.

Tad Hirsch is Assistant Professor of Interaction Design at the
University of Washington, where his research interests lie at the
intersection of design, urban space, and collective action. He directs
the Public Practice Studio, a multidisciplinary, public-interest
design group, and was a founding member of the Institute for Applied
Autonomy, an internationally-renowned art/technology/activism
collective.


-- 

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre