ATC Monday: Marie Sester, 7:30pm

ATC@UCB

Paradise under Surveillance:
Transparency, Visibility, and Network Access

Marie Sester, Artist, New York

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Mon, 2 February, 7:30-9:30pm: UC Berkeley,
Location: 160 Kroeber Hall
All ATC Lectures are free and open to the public.

Marie Sester's work questions the societal perspective of the West and
the "New World Order". She works with historical, archeological and
artistic documents such as large-scale x-rays, architectural ground
plans, elevations, sections, city maps, and aerial views. She creates
immersive installations using technologies from the entertainment and
surveillance industries. Her work proposes connections between
individuals and broader forces, spatial scales, and histories.

Sester explores ways that societies implement forms, focusing
primarily on ideas of transparency, visibility, and access:
"Transparency, a term used in architecture in the 18th century, has
recently reappeared in political, economic, and media
discourses. Included in its values are those of information and
communication, control and surveillance. The goal of transparency is
visibility, but paradoxically transparency may serve to remove the
visibility of these environments and promote secrecy. Visibility is
also linked to the evolution of Western culture in the 20th century,
from the Hollywood star industry to the explosion of
advertising". Sester's third interest, access, emerges from the fact
that a wired culture increasingly demands regulated forms of entry,
from bank cards to code numbers, from passwords to plug-ins.

Marie Sester is a media artist based in New York. Born in France. She
began her career as an architect, having earned her master's degree
from the Ecole d'Architecture in Strasbourg in 1980. Her interest,
shifted from how to build viable structures to how architecture and
ideology affect our understanding of the world. Marie has received
many grants and residencies, most recently from the Institute of
Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), in Gifu, Japan; Creative
Capital Foundation, New York; and Eyebeam, New York. Sester has
taught in France, Japan, and the United States and has exhibited
internationally. Her installations have been recently shown at
SIGGRAPH 2003 and Ars Electronica 2003, where her project ACCESS
received an Honorary Mention in Interactive Art. She currently has a
one-person show at the Kitchen, New York. http://www.sester.net

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The ATC Colloquium continues our partnership with the Berkeley Art
Museum to present online video of ATC talks, available both in
QuickTime (highlights) or MP3 audio. For links and the full 2003-2004
series schedule, please see:

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