[-empyre-] Week 2: the Vasulka Effect

[Renate Ferro]

I am thrilled to introduce our guests for this week: Kat McDermott, Margaretha Haughwort, Margaret Rhee, Judy Walgren, and xtine burrough.  They will be taking off from our discussion last week.  Their biographies are below, but 
I wanted to mention that last night Tim and I watched The Valsulka Effect https://sagafilm.is/film/the-vasulka-effect

The film, a documentary traces the life and work of Steina and Woody Vasulka.  The Vasulka's immigrated to the US during 60's, settling in a loft on 14th and Union Square, in the middle of a burgeoning Soho.  They worked both independently but also collaboratively, recalling how the party culture, the emerging political and social unrest, and their own affinities for materials influenced their making. Through video they documented the first Earth Day, political demonstrations, drug culture, trans culture from the 1960's and so much more.  With that film footage they processed video through audio signals creating a critical platform for interrogating systems of sight and sound.  

In the film Steina mentions the fact that they both approached materials differently.  She was more instinctual perhaps as a trained musician and violinist.  I think that the instincts of intuition, creative impulse, and living life generated a lifetime worth of work for both of them as they moved from New York City, to Buffalo, and later to the western US.  I cannot recommend this film enough for all to see.  

In the spirit of the Vasulka's, we move through our discussion on art, instincts and technology.  Welcome Kat, Margaretha, Margaret, Judy and xtine.  Looking forward to making more connections. 
Renate

Biographies for 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.

Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu