[-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: Paul Vanouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Penacost, and Heidi Kumao

[Renate Ferro]

Thanks to Antoinette and Brooke for being our guest this week on empyre.

Antoinette your last post on some of the historical precedents
involving women and cellos was interesting.  I am also reminded of the
various collaborations that cellist Charlotte Moorman accomplished
with Nam June Paik. A quick image search of the two artists brought up
a number of images.
Thanks so much for the post.

This week on empyre we welcome Paul Vanouse, Amanda McDonald Crowley,
Claire Penacost, and Heidi Kumao. Their biographies are posted below
and welcome them warmly to -empyre soft-skinned space. I am hoping
that all of our guests from other weeks will feel free to post as
their schedules permit and that any -empyre subscriber that is lurking
in on our conversation who knew Beatriz or was inspired by her work to
please post.  For anyone missing the discussion thus far, the entire
conversation can be accessed in our archive at:

http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2013-February/date.html

Best to all of you. Renate Ferro

Biographies
Week 3
Paul Vanouse is a Professor of Visual Studies at the University at
Buffalo. and has worked in emerging technological media forms since
1990.  His biological experiments, electronic cinema, and interactive
installations have exhibited in over 20 countries and across the US.
His recent projects, “Latent Figure Protocol”, “Ocular Revision” and
“Suspect Inversion Center” use molecular biology techniques to
challenge “genome-hype” and to confront issues surrounding DNA
fingerprinting.

Paul and Beatriz began their friendship at Carnegie Mellon in the late
Nineties, while Paul was a  Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry
and Beatriz was finishing her degree. They taught together at the
University at Buffalo, exhibited alongside one another in group
exhibitions, and organized panels and workshops together, including
Wetware Hackers workshop for ISEA 2006 in San Jose.  Paul and Beatriz
have dialoged and collaborated for over fifteen years and she will be
dearly missed.

Amanda McDonald Crowley is a cultural worker, curator, and facilitator
who creates media and contemporary art programs that encourage
cross-disciplinary practice, collaboration and exchange. Recent
curatorial efforts include Our Haus, the 10th Anniversary exhibition
for the Austrian Cultural Forum, NY. In late 2012 she did a residency
as a Bogliasco Fellow, working on curatorial research at the
intersection between art, food, and technology. Amanda is also
currently a Board member of the National Alliance for Media Art +
Culture (NAMAC) in the USA. She has been Director of the Australian
Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) where she made significant links
with science and industry by developing a range of residencies for
artists in settings such as science organizations, contemporary art
spaces and virtual residencies online. She was Associate Director of
the Adelaide Festival 2002 in Australia, and also co-chair of the
working group that organized the exhibition and symposium ‘conVerge:
where art and science meet’. Critical Art Ensemble were to present
their collaboration with Beatriz at that Festival. Alas, the Festival
wasn't able to support the performance. While Executive Producer at
ISEA2004 (the International Symposium for Electronic Arts 2004) held
in Tallinn,  Estonia and Helsinki, Finland, and on a cruiser ferry in
the Baltic sea, she finally met Beatriz who suggested that she
consider professional options in the USA post ISEA. Amanda told
Beatriz she would never move to the USA. 18 months later, when she
became  Executive Director of Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New
York City, Beatriz commented "never is not a very long time in your
language it seems". When Amanda first arrived at Eyebeam in late 2005,
Beatriz, with Preemptive Media, were commissioned to develop Area's
Immediate Reading. Beatriz was also a member of the last residency
program cohort Amanda oversaw at Eyebeam in 2011, where Beatriz was
researching and developing her final projects Dying for the Other and
Anti-Cancer Survival Kit.

Claire Penacost: Claire Pentecost’s work engages diverse
strategies—collaboration, research, teaching, field work, writing,
lecturing, drawing, installation and photography—in an ongoing
interrogation of the institutional structures that order knowledge.
Her work has long addressed the contested boundary between natural and
artificial, focusing the last fourteen years on food, agriculture and
bio-engineering. Pentecost was a presenting artist at dOCUMENTA(13) in
Kassel, Germany, and is represented by Higher Pictures in New York.
She is a Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago and often collaborates with Compass in
the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor.

Heidi Kumao:  Emerging from the intersection of sculpture, theater and
engineering, Heidi Kumao’s installations, experimental films, and
machine art works generate artistic spectacle in order to explore the
psychological underpinnings of everyday situations.  Each work
restages simple behaviors (e.g. gardening, writing, standing upright,
reading) within a larger cultural construct (such as a prison,
family/home or traditional gender roles) through projection, kinetic
elements or electronics. Through these performative tableaus and
hybrid art forms, Kumao demonstrates how small gestures, even the most
private and poetic, can become acts of defiance.
She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in the USA,
Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Canada including solo shows at the Museu
da Imagem e do Som (São Paulo), Museu de Arte Moderne (Buenos Aires)
and Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. Group exhibitions include
SIGGRAPH 2011 (Vancouver), Wing Luke Asian Art Museum (Seattle), and
Usina do Gasômetro Cultural Center (Porto Alegre, Brazil).  She has
been awarded numerous national fellowships, grants, residencies and
awards including: a Guggenheim Fellowship, an AAUW Post-doctoral
Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields/Robotics, and
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York
Foundation for the Arts, and Art Matters (NYC).
Heidi Kumao is an Associate Professor in the Stamps School of Art &
Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she teaches a
range of classes in media, time-based art forms, and conceptual art
practice.


-- 

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