Critical Information: Mapping the Intersection of Art and Technology

KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY NOTED WRITER AND SCHOLAR
McKENZIE WARK

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2011

Conference Panels: 10am - 3:30pm
132 West 21 Street, 6th floor, New York City
All events are free and open to the public
www.criticalinformationsva.com

McKenzie Wark Keynote Address: 4 - 5:30pm
Reception to follow
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, New York City

___________________________________________________

SESSION 1: 10:00 A.M. TO 11:30 A.M.

Art, Technology and Identity
Student Respondent: Margaret Graham and Faculty Respondent: Susan Bee

In an age when the line between the actual and the virtual is rapidly dissolving, how and where do we to locate the self? And how does the collision of art and technology relate to identity politics? Presenters participating in the “Art, Technology, and Identity” panel will approach these questions and others like them through the lenses of gender, sexuality, art practice, and social behavior.

•Jeremy Eichenbaum, Existing in a Dual Consciousness: A Personal Account… (Art Center College of Design, Media Design, MFA)
•Victoria Salinger, Gendering the Machine: Hanne Darboven’s “Higher Knitting” (University of Chicago, Art History, PhD)
•Evelin Stermitz, ArtFem.TV: Art and Feminism ITV [www.artfem.tv] (University of Ljubljana, Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, M.A., M.Phil.)
•Robert Yang, "Handle with Care": A First Person Video Game About Gay Divorce (Parsons the New School for Design, Design and Technology, MFA)

Information Art
Student Respondent: Noah Dillon and Faculty Respondent: Nancy Princenthal

Mimicking conditions of mass media production and display, Information Art developed at the birth of the computer. This panel will discuss how new technology began to invade the space of art as Duchampian readymades in Pop, Benjamin’s theory of the Aura and its relation to the Google Art Project, and Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings as precursors to algorithmic, process-based performance. The panel will also include Matthew Lange’s Plummet Machine, a shamanistic performance of the modern media history.

•Liam Considine, Flowers and Stripes: Warhol and Buren in Paris circa 1965 (New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, PhD)
•Faith Holland, The Pixel Museum: The Crop, Cut, Paste of the Meaning of Paintings in Google Art Project (School of Visual Arts, Photography, Video, & Related Media, MFA)
•Matthew Lange, Assemblage 6: The Plummet Machine as Manifest in Neo-Industrial Media Apparatuses (School of Visual Arts, Photography, Video, & Related Media, MFA)
•Gillian Young, LeWitt and the Machine (Columbia University, Art History & Archaeology, PhD)

___________________________________________________

SESSION 2: 11:45 A.M. TO 1:15 P.M.

Digital Costs
Student Respondent: Collin Sundt and Faculty Respondent: Suzanne Anker

The costs and consequences of the ever-expanding technology our world increasingly views itself through. From new modes of distribution to totalizing views, these are the intimations and operations of the digital landscape.

•Tiffany Funk, The Prosthetic Aesthetic: An Art of Anxious Extensions (University of Illinois at Chicago, MFA (ABD), PhD)
•Chris Handran, Reinventing the Apparatus in the Expanded Field of
Photography (Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Faculty, MA)
•Lee Johnson, ProVide Marketplace, 2011 (Rhode Island School of Design, Ceramics, MFA)
•Austin S. Lee and Yuseung Kim, The Everyday Story of Imaginative Time & Space (Art Center College of Design, Media Design Program, MFA)

Site and Subjectivity
Student Respondent: Lee Ann Norman and Faculty Respondent: Kurt Ralske

Topics in this panel focus on a general interest in the changing relationships between human spaces and the social, economic, and political flows of information. As the mechanical is updated by the digital, what is the impact on real human lives?

•John Ball, Fulfilling the Promise of the Bauhaus: Integrating the Arts and Building-Making Through BIM Technologies (Arizona State University, Environment, Design, and the Arts, PhD)
•Dorrie Brooks, Situated Architecture in the Digital Age: Adapting a Textile Mill in Holyoke, MA (University of Massachusetts, Program in Architecture & Design)
•Matthew Everett Lawson and Elizabeth Anne Watkins, "Wonder" (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Culture and Technology, MS)
•Aurora Tang, Site, Nonsite, Website: Technologies for Perception / “Navigating Nonspace” (University of Southern California, Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere, MA)

___________________________________________________

SESSION 3: 2:00 P.M. TO 3:30 P.M.

Future of Signs
Student Respondent: Kareem Estefan and Faculty Respondent: Ann Lauterbach

This panel will trace the study of signs across disciplines and eras, examining text and image as alternately arbitrary, mimetic, indexical or social to re-think the perception of signs in digital culture.

•Erin Gee, Repetition as Radical Referral: Echo and Narcissus in the Digital Environment (Concordia University, Visual Arts, MFA)
•Winifred E. Newman, Phantasmata Poetica or Images as Objects of Knowledge in Early Theories of Aesthetics (Harvard University, Architecture, PhD)
•Jennifer Pranolo, Tagging the Index: Image and Information (University of California, Berkeley, Rhetoric/Film Studies, PhD)
•Rotem Rozental, Social Engagement, Visual Participation and Perception (SUNY Binghamton University, Art History, PhD)

Visualizing the Invisible: The Art of Sound
Student Respondent: Alex Allenchey and Faculty Respondent: Michael Capio

Topics in this panel seek to explore the relationships between images, sounds, and technologies of contemporary culture.

•Alex Braidwood, Listening Instruments (Art Center College of Design, Media Design, MFA)
•Elizabeth G. Medoff, Sound Monuments: Rethinking Public Memory (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Visual and Critical Studies, MFA)
•Ryan Raffa, RhythmSynthesis (Parsons The New School for Design, Design and Technology, MFA)
•Portia Seddon, The Aesthetics and Politics of Popular Music MP3 Blogs (Hunter College of the City University of New York, Anthropology, MA)

Mediated Memory
Student Respondent: Diana Seo Hyung Lee and Faculty Respondent: Tom Huhn

What is new media’s role in our understanding of death? How does it function in the context of grieving and how does it structure our recollection of the past? This panel will explore the various ways in which the virtual and technological world have transformed our relationship to mortality, memory, and mourning, and how it might usher a means toward healing and reconciliation.

•Erin Bell, “The Ghost in the Machine:” Blogging Beyond Death (Wayne State University, English, PhD)
•Sara Moore, In Absentia (Art Center College of Design, Media Design, MFA)
•Erika Tarte, Design Future History: A Meditation on Mediated Remembering (Rhode Island School of Design, Graphic Design, MFA)


___________________________________________________

KEYNOTE: 4:00 A.M. TO 5:30 A.M.
Followed by Reception

Professor McKenzie Wark
Spectacles of Disintegration

McKenzie Wark is a theorist of media and new media with interests in new media technology, intellectual property, computer games, and new media art and culture. His books include Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events (Indiana University Press, 1994), The Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press, 2007), and The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (Verso, 2011). He is the chair of Culture & Media Studies and Associate Dean at Eugene Lang College.