[-empyre-] Empyre Welcome January Revised:

Patrick Lichty pl at voyd.com
Sat Jan 4 13:21:04 EST 2014 

Welcome to January on –empyre soft-skinned space: 

The Notion of Interactivity: What Now?

Moderated by Patrick Lichty with invited discussants 

 

January 3 to 10th: Interaction, Performance and Introductions to Bodies and Space

Patrick Lichty (US), K.A. Wisniewski (CA), Second Front (Global), Alan Sondheim (US)

 

January 11th to 17th     Week 2: Implicit Bodies, Affect, and Embodied Media Art 

Sandy Baldwin (US), Alan Sondheim (Continued), Nathaniel Stern (US), Katja Kwastek  (DE)

 

January 18th to 24rd     Week 3:  Glitch as HCI Conversation

Curt Cloninger (US), Daniel Temkin (US)


January 25th to 31st     Week 4: Display and Response: Bodies, Wearables, and Interaction.  Also: Interaction in Social Spaces (Hamilton)

Susan Ryan (US), Matt Kenyon (US), Sarah Hamilton (CA)

 

 

Welcome to the January discussion, The Notion of Interactivity: What Now?

In the 1990's, the trope of interactivity was one of the key mythological staples of the emergence of "New Media". The contested ground in which Manovich, Galloway, et al problematized the cybernetic tug of war between author, interactor, and computational process created endless debate in community listservs (Rhizome, Nettime, Furtherfield, Empyre, Spectre). As we pass the 10th anniversary of Manovich's seminal text, we are currently in an era of "posts"; "post-Internet", The Art Formerly Known as New Media (Dietz, Cook), and so on. As Katja Kwastek posits in her book, Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, this area of aesthetic investigation has been problematic for curators and critics for years. Furthermore, the intellectual community has brought objecthood and materialty back into question, while, as Nathaniel Stern writes, interactivity has become the product of a process-based affective process. Clearly, the morphology of Interactivity in media art has shifted greatly since the publication of Manovich's seminal book, (and even underlined by his new book, "Software Takes Command.") I only use this as a milestone as it institutionalized the phrase, and embedded interactivity as part of the debate concerning media art. For this month of Empyre, we will entertain the morphology of interactivity in media art in the last 15-20 year (at least), inviting dialogue in the areas of interactive art, glitch as dialogue, and much more.

 

Biographies:

Moderators:

Patrick is a media “reality” artist, curator, and theorist of over two decades who explores how media and mediation affect our perception of reality. He is best known for his work as an Artistic Director of the virtual reality performance art group Second Front, and the animator of the activist group, The Yes Men. He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow and Whitney Biennial exhibitor as part of the collective RTMark. He has presented and exhibited internationally at numerous biennials and triennials (Yokohama, Venice, Performa, Maribor, Turin, Sundance), and conferences (ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Popular Culture Association, SLSA, SxSW). He is also Editor-in-Chief of Intelligent Agent Magazine, and a writer for the RealityAugmented blog. His recent book, “Variant Analyses: Interrogations of New Media Culture” was released by the Institute for Networked Culture, and is included in the Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. He is a Lecturer of Digital Studio Practice at the Peck School of the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.



Weekly Guests: 

Week 1:

January 3 to 10th           Interaction, Performance and Introductions to Bodies and Space

Patrick Lichty (US),

K.A. Wisniewski (CA),
Second Front (Global)
Alan Sondheim (US)

 

Week 2:

January 11th to 17th     Implicit Bodies, Affect, and Embodied Media Art 
Sandy Baldwin (US)

Alan Sondheim (continued – US)

Katja Kwastek (DE)
Nathaniel Stern (US), 

Week 3:

January 18th to 24rd     Glitch as HCI Conversation

Curt Cloninger (US)
Daniel Temkin (US) 

 

Week 4:

January 25th to 31st     Display and Response: Bodies, Wearables, and Interaction.  Also: Interaction in Social Spaces (Hamilton)

Susan Ryan (US)

Matt Kenyon (US)
Sarah Hamilton (CA)

 

BIOS:
WEEK ONE:
Alan Sondheim 
-was born in Wilkes-Barre, Penn­syl­va­nia; he lives with his part­ner, Azure Carter in Providence, Rhode Island. A cross-disciplinary artist, writer, and the­o­rist, he has exhib­ited, per­formed and lec­tured widely. In the past year, Sond­heim has had a suc­cess­ful res­i­dency at Eye­beam Art + Tech­nol­o­gy­Cen­ter in New York; while there he worked with a num­ber of col­lab­o­ra­tors on per­for­mances and sound pieces deal­ing with pain and anni­hi­la­tion. He also cre­ated a series of texts and 3d print­ing mod­els of ‘dead or wounded avatars.

K. A. Wisniewski 
-is a doctoral student in the Language, Literacy, and Culture PhD Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and lecturer in the Public History program at Stevenson University.  A poet, translator, and book artist, he is the editor of The Comedy of Dave Chapelle: Critical Essays and has published articles on topics including film, new media, and comedy and satire.  His current research investigates the history of reading, critical practice, networked writing, and digital publishing.

SECOND FRONT:
Bibbe Hansen
- born in New York City, 1953, to Fluxus artist Al Hansen <http://www.alhansen.net/>  and actress Audrey Hansen <http://www.bibbe.com/audrey.htm> , began performing professionally at age eleven playing leading child <http://bibbe.com/miracle.htm>  and ingenue roles in prestigious east coast summer stock companies. In New York City, concurrently, she regularly performed in her father's avant-garde theater pieces called "Happenings" and participated in the presentations of his contemporaries at such historical venues as La Mama, Circle in the Square and Judson Church. She studied dance with Phoebe Neville and Lucinda Childs, sang in an Elizabethan music group and was filmed by underground cinema champion Jonas Mekas <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTTTeAfqU9w> .  A chance meeting with a record producer at age 13, led to her recording a single for Laurie recordswith her friends Janet Kerouac (daughter of Jack) and Charlotte Rosenthal. They were called  <http://lostinthegrooves.blogspot.com/2005/12/secret-history-of-whippets-nyc-girl.html> "The Whippets" and their hastily recorded single hit the pop charts in Canada. After a stint as a delinquent street kid, runaway and truant she became a "guest" of the State of New York at the infamous Spofford Street Youth House and several other NY institutions for child criminals where she was able to refine her survival skills and work on her freestyle group dancing techniques. Directly following her release, Bibbe met Andy Warhol who suggested they collaborate on a film about her recent experiences. The film was called Prison and stars Bibbe Hansen, Marie Mencken and Edie Sedgwick. Bibbe also made three other films with Warhol and danced briefly with the Velvet Underground. A random late-60's sojourn brought Bibbe to Los Angeles where she founded a theater company, acted in "B" movies and participated in the local punk scene as musician, and documenteur. She is the mother of three wonderful children, Beck, Channing <http://www.channinghansen.com/>  and Rain; a pop musician, fine artist and poet respectively. From 1990 -1995 she operated Troy Cafe <http://www.bibbe.com/troy.htm> . The café became thecenter of a multicultural renaissance in downtown Los Angeles and was home to a generation of musicians, comedians, artists and filmmakers. 

Today Bibbe is part of the Second Front Collective and is represented by Gracie Mansion Gallery <http://www.artnet.com/gallery/697/gracie-mansion-gallery.html>  in New York City. She recently completed the first draft of her memoirs and she lectures frequently on art and the creative process.

Patrick Lichty
- is a media “reality” artist, curator, and theorist of over two decades who explores how media and mediation affect our perception of reality. He is best known for his work as an Artistic Director of the virtual reality performance art group Second Front, and the animator of the activist group, The Yes Men. He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow and Whitney Biennial exhibitor as part of the collective RTMark. He has presented and exhibited internationally at numerous biennials and triennials (Yokohama, Venice, Performa, Maribor, Turin, Sundance), and conferences (ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Popular Culture Association, SLSA, SxSW). He is also Editor-in-Chief of Intelligent Agent Magazine, and a writer for the RealityAugmented blog. His recent book, “Variant Analyses: Interrogations of New Media Culture” was released by the Institute for Networked Culture, and is included in the Oxford Handbook of Virtuality.

Liz Solo 
- is a performance artist, media artist and musician currently creating live performances and media events in online virtual communities and MMORPGs. Liz is also a punk rock musician and singer/songwriter with seven independent audio releases - solo and with her bands The Black Bags and the Lizband. Most recently The Black Bags released a full length recording on CD and vinyl in June 2013.  She is co-founder of the St. John's based artist's collective The Black Bag Media Collective, is a founding member of the notorious online performance art collective The Second Front and is a composer and player with the online orchestra – The Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. She is manager of the Odyssey Contemporary Art and Performance Simulator in the virtual environments of Second Life.  Her performances, videos and online events continue to be screened and presented around the world. Recent online performance and video work has been seen at: ISEA Istanbul; FILE Electronic Language International Festival, São Paolo; Chromatose Anymation Festival, St. John's; MaMachinima International Machinima Festival, Amsterdam; The Big Screen Project, Times Square NYC; Inhuman Resources (co-exhibit with Mez Breeze), Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna BC; The Festival of New Dance, St. John's, NL.

Also of Second Front: 
Doug Jarvis
Yael Gilks
Scott Kildall

 

WEEK TWO:
Alan Sondheim (See WEEK ONE)

Sandy Baldwin
- is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. He received his PhD from New York University and is a Fulbright Scholar. His work imagines the future of literary studies in a digital age. He is on the Electronic Literature Organization'sBoard of Directors, where he serves as the ELO Treasurer, and is Executive Editor at Electronic Book Review.

KatjaKwastek 
- is an art historian with a focus on new media art and media aesthetics. Currently, she is professor of modern and contemporary art at the VU University Amsterdam. Prior to this, she has been teaching at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (Munich), the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research (Linz, Austria), and at the Humboldt-University (Berlin). Early on, she extended her research into the fields of media history and theory and aesthetics, performance and game studies, as well as the so called ‘digital humanities’. In 2004, she curated the first international exhibition and conference project on “Art and Wireless Communication”. She has lectured internationally and published many books and essays, including her most recent “Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art” (MIT Press, 2013). 

Nathaniel Stern
- is an artist and writer, Fulbright grantee and professor, interventionist and public citizen. He has produced andcollaborated on projects ranging from ecological, participatory and online interventions, interactive, immersive and mixed reality environments, to prints, sculptures, videos, performances and hybrid forms. His book, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance <http://implicitbody.net/> , takes a close look at the stakes for interactive and digital art, and his ongoing work in industry has helped launch dozens of new businesses, products and ideas. Stern has been featured in the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Guardian UK, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Washington Post, Daily News, BBC’s Today show, Wired, Time, Forbes, Fast Company, Scientific American, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Leonardo Journal of Art, Science and Technology, Rhizome, Furtherfield, Turbulence, andmore. According to Chicago’s widely popular Bad at Sports art podcast, Stern has “the most varied and strange bio of maybe anyone ever on the show,” and South Africa’s Live Out Loud magazine calls him a “prolific scholar” as well as artist, whose work is “quite possibly some of the most relevant around.” Dubbed one of Milwaukee’s “avant-garde” (Journal Sentinel), Stern has been called ”an interesting and prolific fixture” (Artthrob.co.za) behind many “multimedia experiments” (Time.com), “accessible and abstract simultaneously” (Art and Electronic Media web site), someone “with starry, starry eyes” (Wired.com) who “makes an obscene amount of work in an obscene amount of ways” (Bad at Sports). According to Caleb A. Scharf at Scientific American, Stern’s art is “tremendous fun” but also “fascinating” in how it is “investigating the possibilities of human interaction and art.”

Stern is an Associate Professor of Art and Design in Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, and a Research Associate at the Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg. He is represented by Gallery AOP in South Africa, and Tory Folliard Gallery in the American Midwest. [Images from  <http://nathanielstern.com/artwork/giverny-of-the-midwest/> Giverny of the Midwest.]

Week THREE:
Curt Cloninger
- is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville (US). His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. By layering, restructuring, hashing, eroding, exhausting, and (dis)splaying language, he causes language to perform itself until its "meaning" has less to do with what it denotes and more to do with how it behaves. His work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Digital Art Museum [DAM] Berlin, L'Instituto de México à Paris, Living Arts of Tulsa, and The Art Gallery of Knoxville. 

Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of seven books, most recently "Fresher Styles for Web Designers" (New Riders). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.

Daniel Temkin
- creates work exploring miscommunication between people and the mistranslation between systems; thehumor as well as the loneliness and isolation that come from the impossibility of being understood.  Daniel has an MFA from the International Center of Photography / Bard College, and has worked as a programmer for fifteen years. He has exhibited his work in galleries and festivals in the US and Europe and is currently an Artist in Residence at Harvestworks. 

WEEK FOUR:
Sarah Hamilton:
is a writer, editor, instructor and researcher based in Phoenix, Arizona. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alberta in Art History and Film Studies and most recently received her Master of Arts from the School of the Art Institute in Visual and Critical Studies. She has written for CBC Radio One, The Edmonton Journal, and Art Slant, and is currently researching the use of image macros and internet memes in China, India and the Middle East.

Matt Kenyon: 
- is an artist and educator who focuses on critical themes addressing the effects of global corporate operations, mass media and communication, military-industrial complexes, and general meditations on the liminal area between life and artificial life SWAMP (Studies of Work Atmosphere and Mass Production) of was founded in 1999 by artists Douglas Easterly and Matt Kenyon who collaborated from the years 1999-2012. Kenyon now runs SWAMP solo in addition to being an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan in the UnitedStates. Kenyon has been making work in this vein since 1999 using a wide range of media, including custom software, electronics, mechanical devices, and often times working with living organisms. Kenyon’s work received the distinguished FILE Prix Lux Art prize as well as first prize in VIDA 7.0 Art and artificial life completion. Kenyon’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Exit Art, NYC; Science Gallery, Dublin Ireland; The Edith Russ Site for Media, Oldenburg, Germany; The Foundation of Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, England; SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, San Diego, California.

Susan Ryan:
- is Professor of Art History and Emogene Pliner Professor of Art at Louisiana State University and Fellow of the LSU Center for Computational Technology (CCT).  She teaches contemporary and new media art history and helped found an interdisciplinary Art/Engineering undergraduate minor at LSU entitled AVATAR.  Currently she is researching artists' wearable technology.  With Patrick Lichty, she curated Social Fabrics, an exhibition sponsored by the Leonardo Educational Forum, for the College Art Association, Dallas 2008 ( <http://www.socialfabrics.org/> http://www.socialfabrics.org/). She has lectured internationally on dress and creative technologies, and contributed articles to Leonardo and the online journal Intelligent Agent. In June 2014 her book, Garments of Paradise: Wearable Discourse in the Digital Age, will be published by MIT Press.









 

 

 

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