ATC @ UCB: Paul Kaiser, Monday 7:30

ATC@UCB:

Haunted: Digital Embodiment and Memory
Paul Kaiser, Artist, NYC

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Mon, 28 Oct, 7:30-9:30pm: UC Berkeley,
Location: 160 Kroeber Hall
All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public.

Motion-capture technology facilitates both abstraction and:
subtraction. The infrared cameras have eyes only for the reflective
markers worn by the performing bodies, and not for the bodies
themselves. They are blind to all vision of muscle and flesh, and with
that all sense of effort as well, since they cannot see the struggle
and sweat of the performing body. The face also vanishes, and with it
the expressions that signal intention, charisma, and feeling. What
can these cameras convey?

Is there beauty in motion seen all on its own, independent of the body
that created it? Do the virtuoso performers on stage distract us from
a more ineffable beauty that we sense only vaguely when watching them?
Can we force such questions into focus by squinting, as it were:
peering through new technological lenses?

Can we use these lenses to trace our memories, which are filled with
ghostlike movements that we can barely put an appearance to? Or can we
use them to create new improvisations, existing only in digital space
and time, generated not by human but by artificial intelligence? Or
can we multiply individual motions into fluctuating crowds and create
a synthetic urban density that we can re-project into the real spaces
of our cities?

http://www.kaiserworks.com

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Paul Kaiser is a digital artist whose work has appeared at Lincoln
Center, MASS MoCA, the Pompidou Center, the Whitney Museum, the
Barbican Centre, the Kitchen, and many other venues. His solo works
include Flicker-track + Verge (1999-2001), Trace (2002), and Inkblot
Projections (2002). His collaborative work, variously including Merce
Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, Shelley Eshkar, and Marc Downie, has
combined motion-capture with dance: Hand-drawn Spaces (1998),
Ghostcatching (1999), BIPED (1999), You Walk? (2000), Loops (2001),
and Lifelike (2002). Pedestrian (2002), a public art project that he
created with Shelley Eshkar, premiered at four sites in Manhattan and
is now touring Europe.

Kaiser's work has received prominent coverage in the press, with
articles appearing in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
Newsweek, Time, the Village Voice, the Times of London, the San
Francisco Chronicle, Wired, and many other publications. In 1995,
Kaiser was the first digital artist to receive a Guggenheim
Fellowship; he has also received a ComputerWorld/Smithsonian Award (in
1992); a Bessie (in 2000), and an Osher Fellowship at the
Exploratorium (2000). He has taught at Wesleyan University, San
Francisco State, and Harvard University. He lives with his wife and
two children in New York City.

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The ATC Colloquium continues our partnership with the Berkeley Art
Museum and the Walker Art Center to present online video of ATC talks,
available both in QuickTime (highlights) or MP3 audio. For links and
the full 2002-2003 series schedule, please see:

www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/
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