Conference: “Rising Tide: The Arts & Ecological Ethics”

I’m participating in this conference (April 17 and April 18) held jointly by Stanford University and the California College of the Arts. I’ll be presenting both my work and larger issues around the DIY handmade movement to talk about questions of capitalism and sustainable culture…

www.risingtideconference.org/

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This groundbreaking three-day conference is the first-ever interdisciplinary gathering to look closely at the relationship between aesthetics and the green revolution. Participants include artists, business and nonprofit professionals, activists, community organizers, scholars, faculty, and students. They are coming from the Bay Area and around the world to present new projects, books, and theories about creative work and climate change. Public policy is shaped by cultural habit, and the aim of the conference is to blaze new trails—to help push the green revolution to a tipping point.

Topics of the panels, seminars, and roundtables will include: a macro look at world politics and its relationship to art and design in a changing climate; sustainable, experimental materials that are newly available to artists, designers, and architects; the impact of green capitalism on society; an investigation of the future of culture in an environmentally challenged world; African American youth and urban aesthetics in the green era; remaking and rethinking cities, art objects, transportation, and human behaviors to encourage sustainable development; and an overview of the art and design projects that are most dramatically affected by environmental collapse.

Keynote speakers include the artist David Buckland, who in 2001 founded Cape Farewell, a charitable organization that pioneers the cultural response to climate change by bringing artists, scientists, and communicators together to stimulate the production of art based on scientific research; and Sheila Kennedy, professor of architecture at MIT and a founding principal of KVA MATx, an interdisciplinary design practice that explores relationships among architecture, technology, and emerging public needs.

Tech Tools of the Trade: Contemporary Media Art, opens 4/17

Just spent the day installing a large installation version of my “Grey Market (Everything Must Go)” piece at the de Saisset in Santa Clara. Along with a projected version of my three-channel video work, “Body Double,” it’s an exciting lineup of artists and it’s really wonderful to have a chance to show these works in new and larger ways–!

“Everything Must Go (Grey Market)” 2009, digital images of used electronics for sale on ebay and craigslist, mounted on foamboard and foam. overall 12′ x 12′ x 4′

Tech Tools of the Trade: Contemporary New Media Art
de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California
April 17 – June 28, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, April 17, 6-8pm

http://www.scu.edu/desaisset/exhibits/Tech-Tools-of-the-Trade.cfm

This survey exhibition features work produced by Bay Area-based or Bay Area-rooted artists using new media—defined in the context of this exhibition as electronic, digital, or web-based. Organized into accessible thematic sections, the work in this exhibition explores the ways that technology has shaped our sense of selves, our vision, our bodies, and our world. The exhibition examines our cultural fascination with technology (including our continued faith in its benefits), our myriad uses of the internet, as well as the potentially troubling applications of technology in simulation and surveillance.

While the work in the exhibition features a broad range of conceptual and artistic approaches, all of it is unified by its multidisciplinary content. As a result, the exhibition has been organized around thematic areas that highlight the works’ connections to contemporary cultural and social phenomena: Biomorph, Identity, Web Repurposing, New Light, Hope and Promise, Surveillance, and Simulation.

Throughout history, artists have taken advantage of technological innovations, employing new developments as tools in their artistic production. Examples range from the discovery of photographic processes to the lost-wax casting process for large-scale sculpture. More recently, Ivan Sutherland’s 1963 invention of “Sketchpad,” a computer aided drawing program, is the ancestor of current image making applications such as Flash and Illustrator. The organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was founded in 1966 to match artists and engineers for collaborative projects, which utilized electronic equipment and new materials such as mylar. With the refinement of raster graphics on the computer in the seventies, painting with pixels became another production tool in the artist’s toolbox.

The new media artists in this exhibition adopt current technologies such as online colonies and marketplaces, digital video cameras, and security x-ray machines to achieve their artwork. Some artists in the exhibition comment on technology with low-tech presentations, while others use sophisticated equipment solely to achieve their conceptual goals. As technology becomes more pervasive in our lives, the artists respond in kind – either as users of the technology, or as commentators.

Artists in the exhibition include Jim Campbell, Anthony Discenza, Rodney Ewing, Martha Gorzycki, Lynn Hershman, Sherry Karver, Nina Katchadourian, Scott Kildall, Andrew Kleindolph, Jill Miller, James Morgan, Deborah Oropallo, Trevor Paglen, Alan Rath, Jackie Sumell, Stephanie Syjuco, Gail Wight, and Christine Wong Yap.

This exhibition is co-curated by the de Saisset Museum and SCU Assistant Professor Kathy Aoki. Santa Clara University art history major Lauren Baines played an important role by writing all of the identification and interpretive labels for Tech Tools of the Trade. Guide by Cell interpretive content for the exhibition was developed by students in Aoki’s Art in the Computer Age course. Students in the course include: Jill Blake, Ashley Cook, Peter Dziuba, Katherine Fiedelman, Christina Flores, Whitney Fung, Molly Geisler, Millicent Jenkins, Katrina Liebl, Justine Macauley, Kelsey Maher, Kaitlin McKee, Morgan Michaels, Lila Miyamoto, Carolyn Nickell, Memori Otsuka, Kenneth Solis, and John Wrixton.

This exhibition is funded in part by the de Saisset Museum, a SCU Technology Innovation grant, and a grant from Arts Council Silicon Valley, in partnership with the County of Santa Clara and the National Endowment for the Arts.