[-empyre-] Welcome to the March discussion:
Renate Ferro
rferro at cornell.edu
Tue Mar 2 04:28:30 AEDT 2021
Welcome to March 2021 on –empyre- soft-skinned space:
The Dawn of Aquarius: Art, Intuition and Technology
Moderated by Renate Ferro and Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala
March 1st : Week 1: Arshiya Lokhandwala, Renate Ferro, Tim Murray
March 8th Week 2: Kat McDermott, Margueretha Haughwort, Margaret Rhee,
Judy Walgren, xtine burrough
March 15th Week 3: Jennifer Gradecki, Derek Curry. Rithika Merchant, Vora Darshana,
Vandana Jain
March 22nd Week 4: Jennifer Fisher, Serena Keshavjee, Bev Pike, Jamelie Hassan, Alex
Borkowski, Sally McKay, Ann Cvetkovich, Celina Jeffery, Chrysanne
Stathacos
Welcome to the March 2021 discussion on -empyre- soft-skinned space. This month we welcome curator, Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala, who will collaborate with -empyre-curatorial moderator, Renate Ferro to introduce the topic, The Dawn of Aquarius: Art, Intuition and Technology. The title of this month’s discussion is inspired by the anthology and collected writings published by our colleague Jennifer Fisher, a Canadian curator from York University.
We have spent several months discussing the global crises of the Covid pandemic presented by the technologies of health and safety. This pandemic has simultaneously been compounded by an environment of rising international tides of conservatism, nationalism, and fascism that ride the waves of xenophobia, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Additionally, the complications of the precarity and health of our environment and the costs of climate change include rising temperatures driving natural disasters, food and water shortages, and economic fragility all having political consequences.
Arshiya proposed that we spend the month of March taking a few deep breaths. A recent change in astrological changes shifted the cycle of the stars based on the precession or tilt of the earth. In her exhibition curatorial statement Arshiya writes, “This extraordinary moment began on December 21st, 2020 with the winter solstice, marking a shift from the Piscean Age dominated by hierarchy and power to an Aquarian Age prophesized as an epoch of science, truth, expanded consciousness, individual freedoms, connections, communications, and networks which include technology. The Age of Aquarius is anticipated as a moment of heightened intuition, creativity, intelligence and the moment when we collectively as humanity care for our planet, its bio-diversity, ecology and all sentient life. Taking cue from this momentous planetary shift the exhibition The Dawn of Aquarius is an invitation to artists to respond to the new world they envisage.”
Since the Age of Aquarius is about collective community and communication, we extend to all of our -empyre- guests and subscribers to take a few deep breaths to respond to the world they envision through cross-disciplinary perspectives. How can we as artists, academics, technologists, and theoreticians consider the zones between intuition, art and technology to consider the future.
Our discussion will be held in tandem with two special events:
1. A zoom mini-conference sponsored by -empyre- soft-skinned space and The Tinker Factory on March 19th at 9:30 am EST. The registration link is
https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUqdemsrzspH9Qs924AZuHFNHHXudUcSdaA
2. An online exhibition of art work curated by Arshihya Lokhandwala. The curatorial statement for the exhibition, The Dawn of Aquarius a New Beginning, can be accessed at < www.arshiyalokhandwala.com>
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Biographies:
Week 1
Renate Ferro is a conceptual media artist who toggles between the creative skins of old and new technologies. Her work mobilizes opportunities for creative interactivity that incorporate issues relating to feminist psychological and sociological conditions. Ferro’s work takes on create skins whose configurations include installation, interactive net-based projects, sculpture, digital time-based media, drawing, text, and performance-based work. These creative skins include participatory, collaborative, generative, and customizable characteristics impacting the networked quality of her work. Her artistic work has been featured at the University of Virginia, Hunter College Gallery (NYC), The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NYC), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), Peking University (Beijing), Johnson Art Museum (Ithaca, NY), and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Her image-based work has been published in Diacritics and Theatre Journal. Her writing has been published in journals such as Media-N and several anthologies.
She is the managing curator and moderator of the online international listserv, -empyre-soft-skinned space that brings together artists, theorists, and technologists. Joining the moderating team in 2007. Since 2010 she has been the curatorial moderator organizing and vetting monthly topics and guests as well as technically monitoring the moderation site and website.
She has taught in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University since 2004 as a Visiting Associate Professor teaching digital media and theory, drawing and advanced Thesis studios. She is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
www.renateferro.net
https://aap.cornell.edu/people/renate-ferro
Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala is an art historian and curator and [Ph. D. Cornell University] Master’s of Arts in Curating, Goldsmith College, London], and the founding director/curator of Lakeeren Gallery, Mumbai, India. Her recent museum curatorial projects include The Future is Here: Art and Technology in Millennial Age [2019], Beyond Transnationalism: The Legacy of Post –Independent from India at Dr. Bahu Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai [April 2017] and Raza Foundation, Delhi [January 2017], India Re- Worlded: Seventy Years of Investigating a Nation [2017] for which she was awarded the curator of the year award by India Today, Given Time: The Gift and Its Offerings [2016] both at Gallery Odyssey, Mumbai. After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997 [2015] at the Queens Museum, and Of Gods and Goddesses, Cinema Cricket: The New Cultural Icons of India for the RPG Foundation in Mumbai, and Against All Odds: A Contemporary Response to the Historiography of Archiving Collecting, and Museums in India at the Lalit Kala Academy, Delhi [2011]. She was been teaching South Asian Feminism in the Art Institute of Chicago, USA in the Art History department since 2019. She has curated over 200 shows at Lakeeren Gallery, which included an international program of artists from India, Pakistan, Iran, and Germany & Mexico City. Dr. Lokhandwala writes on globalization, feminism, performance, and new media with a specialization in biennale and large-scale exhibitions. Arshiya Lokhandwala lives and works in Mumbai and New York.
www.Lakeerengallery.com
Tim Murray
A longtime member of the -empyre- moderation team, Tim Murray is Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, and Founding Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library. He has curated the international exhibition “Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom” (https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu), and with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, the conceptual internet art journal, “CTHEORY Multimedia” (http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu). More recently, he joined Sarah Watson and Sherry Miller Hocking on “The Experimental Television Center: A History, ETC” at Hunter College Galleries in New York City, and at Cornell, he curated “Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive” (http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/signaltocode/) as well as the 2018 and 2020 Cornell Biennials (http://cca.cornell.edu/?p=2020-biennial.
He is awaiting production of Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art(Minnesota, 2022). Among his books are Medium Philosophicum: Pensar tecnológicamente el arte (Universidad de Murcia, 2021), Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), ed. Xu Bing’s Background Story and his Oeuvre (Mandarin), co-edited with Yang Shin-Yi (Life Bookstore Publishing, 2016), ed. with Irving Goh of The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy, 2 Vols., diacritics (2014-16), and ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997).
Week 2
Margaretha Haughwort’s (she/they) creative work is a kind of multispecies worlding — a phrase introduced by Donna Haraway, who understands it to be the “patterning of possible worlds,” a co-becoming that occurs through entanglements with other species. Haughwout collaborates with humans, and the more-than-human, across technologies and ecologies, to enact possible worlds — worlds that generate abundance, presence and relationship — and in doing so, antagonize proprietary regimes, colonial temporalities, and capitalist forms of labor. Speculative fabulation, intervention, participatory event, walking tour, experimental pedagogy, installation, and biological processes articulate stages of her worlding processes.
Kathleen McDermott is a media artist with a background in installation and sculpture. She uses a combination of textiles, sculptural materials and open-source electronics to craft absurd wearable technology pieces that explore the relationship between human bodies and technology in both real and imagined scenarios. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and Dezeen, and has been exhibited internationally. She has held residencies at the Museum of Art and Design in NY, Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Maine, and Textile Arts Center in NY, among others. McDermott received her PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2019. She is currently an Industry Assistant Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, in the area of Integrated Digital Media.
Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar, and new media artist. She is the author of Love, Robot, named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. Her poetry chapbooks include Yellow and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love, and forthcoming collection Poetry Machines: A Letter to a Future Reader, a collection of lyrical essays on poetry, and the intersections of cinema, art, and new media. Currently, her monograph How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body is under review at Duke University Press. She was a College Fellow in Digital Practice in the English Department at Harvard University and a member of MetaLab @ Harvard. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic studies with a designated emphasis in new media studies. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo and co-leads Palah 파랗 Light Studios, a creative space for poetry, participation, and pedagogy through technology.
Judy Walgren is the associate director and a professor of practice/documentary photography and immersive media for the Michigan State University School of Journalism. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, as well as a seasoned photo editor, curator and visual artist. Walgren has worked on visual staffs at the Dallas Morning News, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. As the director of photography at the San Francisco Chronicle, she led a staff of Emmy-award winning filmmakers, photojournalists and photo editors. In 2016, she received an MFA in Visual Art from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and began her exploration into the relationships between visual archives and power structures. Her latest body of work explores representation, identity and archive-making through collaborative portraiture with Survivors of sexual violence.
xtine burrough uses emerging technologies to engage networked audiences in critical participation. burrough values the communicative power of art-making to explore the boundaries between humans and the technologies they create, embody, and employ. Recent projects, such as A Kitchen of One’s Own, An Archive of Unnamed Women, and The Laboring Self yield multiple layers of participation and collaborative meaning-making. These were awarded with a commission for "Data/Set/Match" at the Photographers’ Gallery, London; a microgrant from the Nasher Sculpture Center; and funding from the Puffin Foundation and Humanities Texas and a residency at the Center for Creative Connections in the Dallas Museum of Art. She archives her work through writing. burrough has edited volumes and portfolio sections for other artists to write, reflect on, expose, and archive their practices. With Judy Walgren she is currently working on an anthology, Social Practice Art: Technologies for Change. She is the Editor of Net Works: Case Studies of Web Art and Design (2011), and Co-Editor of The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (2015), Keywords in Remix Studies (2018), and forthcoming The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities (2021) with Eduardo Navas and Owen Gallagher.
Week 3
Vandana Jain is an artist and textile designer based in Brooklyn. Her work explores the intersections of pattern and symbol, and spirituality and consumerism through a variety of media including embroidery, masking tape, sugar and shattered auto glass.
Her work has been exhibited widely and in the last few years, she has had solo projects at Hallwalls Contemporary, Buffalo; Lakeeren Gallery, Mumbai, India; Station Independent Projects, Lower East Side, NY; and Smack Mellon and BRIC House in Brooklyn, NY. Jain's selected residencies and grants include the Emerging Artist’s Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, and the Foundation of Contemporary Emergency Grant. Her work has been profiled in Artforum, The New York Times, Art Slant, Mumbai Boss, Kyoorius and Beautiful Decay.
She is also an active member of the Visual Arts Collective at ABC No Rio, a space for community arts and activism on the Lower East Side, and a founding member of the arts collective, artcodex.
Darshana Vora is a London-based conceptual artist with a multidisciplinary practice in digital artwork, moving image and site-specific installation. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally since 1997. Her aesthetic choices are informed by a background in architecture, an interest in spatial dynamics and an exploration of Buddhist philosophies. Her works are inspired by the urban fabric of the city, it's rituals, processes and imagery - fusing the public with the private in a dialogue. Some exhibitions include Alternative Art Education (Slow) Marathon UK 2020, VAICA Festival Mumbai 2019, 'Mind|Mirror' at the Video festival at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, 2015, ‘The Home and The World’ Contemporary Photography - Aicon Gallery, New York, USA, 2010. Website: https://darshanavora.portfoliobox.net/
Rithika Merchant (b. 1986) received her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School of Design, New York (2008). Since graduating, she has exhibited her work extensively, including a number of solo exhibitions in India, Spain, Germany, France and the United States.
Her most recent solo shows include, Birth of a New World at TARQ, Mumbai (2021), Mirror of the Mind at Galerie L.J, Paris, France (2019); Where the Water Takes us at TARQ, Mumbai (2017) and Ancestral Home at Galeria Bien Cuadrado, Barcelona (2017).Her recent group exhibitions include a two-person show Osmosis at TARQ, Mumbai, curated by Shaleen Wadhwana (2019); Spring! A Group Show of Contemporary Drawing at Galerie LJ, Paris (2019) and Chloe Couture at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, Kieve, Ukraine (2019).Other groups shows include Homo Faber at The Michaelangelo Foundation, Venice ( 2018) ; Portal at October Gallery, London (2018) and Sensorium / The End Is Only The Beginning Sunaparanta, Goa Centre for the Arts, Goa (2018).She has also collaborated with Chloé, a French fashion house on multiple collections for which she was awarded the Vogue India Young Achiever of the Year Award at its Women of the Year Awards 2018. She was also named one of Vogue Magazine’s Vogue World 100 Creative Voices.She currently divides her time between Mumbai and Barcelona.
Derek Curry
Derek Curry is an artist-researcher whose work critiques and addresses spaces for intervention in automated decision making systems. His work has addressed automated stock trading systems, Open Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT), and algorithmic classification systems. His artworks have replicated aspects of social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. Derek earned his MFA in New Genres from UCLA's Department of Art in 2010 and his PhD in Media Study from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
Curry has exhibited his work internationally at venues such as Ars Electronica (Linz), Science Gallery Dublin, NeMe Cultural Center (Cypress), North East of North (Scotland), the Athens Digital Art Festival, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the AC Institute (New York), Hallwalls (Buffalo), and the USF Institute for Research in Art (Tampa). His projects have been funded by Science Gallery Dublin and the Puffin Foundation, and the NEoN festival. http://derekcurry.com/
Jennifer Gradecki
Jennifer Gradecki BFA Sculpture/Psychology, MFA New Genres, PhD Visual Studies, is an artist-theorist who investigates secretive and specialized socio-technical systems. Her artistic research has focused on social science techniques, financial instruments, mass surveillance, intelligence analysis, artificial intelligence, and the spread of misinformation on social media. She has presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), New Media Gallery (Zadar), Media Art History (Göttweig), The New Gallery (Calgary), Critical Finance Studies (Amsterdam), ISEA (Vancouver), ADAF (Athens), and the Centro Cultural de España (México). She is an Assistant Professor of Art + Design at Northeastern University in Boston. Her research has been published in Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Her artwork has been funded by Science Gallery Dublin, the Puffin Foundation, and the NEoN Digital Arts Festival. www.jennifergradecki.com
Week 4
Jennifer Fisher’s research focusses on exhibition, display practices, contemporary art, performance, feminist epistemology, affect theory and the aesthetics of the non-visual senses. Her anthology Technologies of Intuition was published by YYZBOOKS in 2006. She is cofounder and joint editor of the Journal of Curatorial Studies, and has co-edited special issues of PUBLIC: “Civic Spectacle” as well as Senses and Society: “The Senses and Art.” Her writings have been featured in such books as The Ashgate Companion to Paranormal Culture, The Senses in Performance, Caught in the Act and Foodculture; and journals such as Performance Research, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affective Inquiry, Senses & Society, C Magazine and Public. Fisher is a founding member of DisplayCult, a collaborative curatorial framework whose exhibitions include underpressure (2015), NIGHTSENSE (2009), Odor Limits (2008), Do Me! (2006), Linda M. Montano: 14 Years of Living Art (2003), Museopathy (2001), Vital Signs (2000) and CounterPoses (1998). Fisher co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Curatorial Studies: “Museums and Affect” and “Affect and Relationality” (2016) and performed with Linda M. Montano as “orange” – the Svadhisthana chakra – at the New Museum: 40 Years New at the New Museum New York (2017). She is professor of contemporary art and curatorial studies at York University, Toronto.
Bev Pike is a Winnipeg artist known for gigantic immersive paintings of architectural utopias. Amid climate and pandemic catastrophes, she bases her research on three-hundred year-old subterranean shell grottos. Pike shows her work in public art galleries across Canada, most recently at the Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), Museum London (London), and St. Mary’s University Art Gallery (Halifax). In addition, she is the recipient of major grants from the Canada Council, Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. Pike also creates humorous, provocative and feminist Agony Aunt columns in artist books which are in international special collections such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Modern and others. She has been a guest speaker from coast to coast. Finally, as a long-time community activist, Pike writes evidence-based satire for the Winnipeg Free Press, CBC as well as other publications.
https://bevpike.com/
Serena Keshavjee
Professor of Art History, University of Winnipeg
Serena Keshavjee coordinates the Curatorial Practices stream of the Masters in Cultural Studies while teaching Modern Art and Architectural History at the University of Winnipeg. Her academic publishing focuses on the intersection of art and science in visual culture at the fin-de-siecle. In 2015 she co-edited with Fae Brauer, Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture (Cambridge Scholars Press) for which she was awarded an SSHRC-funded research grant. In 2009 she edited a special issue of Canadian Art Review (RACAR) entitled “Science, Symbolism and Fin-de-Siècle Visual Culture”(no. 34, vol. 1, 2009). Her chapter, “Emile Gallé and Aestheticization of Science,” was published in Symbolist Origins of Modern Art (eds., Michelle Facos and Thor Mednick; Ashgate Press, 2015). Keshavjee’s current research project, funded by 2019 SSHRC grant, is an anthology and exhibition on photographs of ectoplasm taken by a Canadian medical doctor during the 1920s and 1930s in Canada. The exhibition which will include contemporary artistic responses to the historical photographs is planned for 2023.
Jamelie Hassan, born in London, Ontario, is a visual artist who is also active as a lecturer, writer, and independent curator. She has organized both national and international programs including Orientalism and Ephemera, a national touring exhibition, originally presented at Art Metropole, Toronto. and most recently Dar'a/Full Circle for Artcite Inc. Windsor, ON. Her work is represented in numerous public collections in Canada and internationally. Recent exhibitions include, Here: Contemporary Canadian Art, curated by Swapnaa Tamhane, Aga Khan Museum (2017); Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971 -1989, curated by Wanda Nanibush, Art Gallery of Ontario (2016 – 2017); In Order to Join: the Political in a Historical Moment, organized by Museum Abteilberg in Monchengladbach, Germany (2013-14) and Mumbai, India (2015). Receipient of numerous awards, in 2001 she received the Govenor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts and in 2018 an honorary doctorate from OCAD University, Toronto.
She is one of the co-founders with artist Ron Benner of the community-driven, not for profit collective, the Embassy Cultural House (1983-1990) in London, Ontario, Canada, which they relaunched with a team of supporters, as an online program in July 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. embassyculturalhouse.ca
Alex Borkowski is a writer and PhD student in Communication & Culture at York University. She holds a BA in Art History from McGill University and an MA in Aural and Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, London. Her critical and creative writing has appeared in The Queitus, this is tomorrow, The Happy Hypocrite, KAPSULA, Canadian Art, and Prefix Photo. Her research interests include sound studies, performance studies, feminist theory and STS; and her current project seeks to excavate points of resonance between the disembodiment/reembodiment of voices in 19th c. spiritualism and contemporary female-coded vocal interfaces.
Dr. Sally McKay is an artist, curator, art writer and educator based in Hamilton, Ontario. Her art and research deal with cognition, consciousness and social justice at the intersections of art and science. She works in performance, installation and digital media.
Ann Cvetkovich is Director of the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University. She was previously Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and founding Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012). For additional info, see www.anncvetkovich.com.
Celina Jeffery is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Ottawa. Her curatorial work primarily explores the artistic cultures of climate change and oceanic degradation. Relevant publications include Preternatural (Punctum Books, 2011),Ephemeral Coast, S. Wales (Punctum Books, 2015), The Artist as Curator, (Intellect, 2015); ‘Junk Ocean’ (Drain, A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (Jan. 2016); and ‘Blue Humanities’ co-edited with Ian Buchanan in Symploke (2019). She is the founder of Ephemeral Coast www.ephemeralcoast.com, a SSHRC funded curatorial research project (2015-2019) which involved curating several international art exhibitions on the subject of coastal climate change.
Chrysanne Stathacos is a multidisciplinary artist of Greek, American, and Canadian heritage. Her work is heavily influenced by feminism, Greek mythology, the natural environment, eastern spirituality, and Tibetan Buddhism. Stathacos has exhibited for over 40 years in museums, galleries and public spaces internationally. Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions including Gold Rush at Cooper Cole, Toronto (2018) and Pythia, The Breeder, Athens, Greece (2017), as well as the group exhibition AA Bronson’s Garten der Lüste, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2018). Stathacos will participate in the 13th Gwangju Biennale / Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning in 2021. Her website is www.chrysannestathacos.com
Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu
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