FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 16 2006
Lisa Vestal, Publicist 650-725-3107, lvestal@stanford.edu
DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE

Sliding Scale: Gail Wight

Stanford, CA-The Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University is pleased to present Sliding Scale: Gail Wight, an exhibition that opens November 7, on view through December 10, 2006 at the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery where a reception will take place on November 10 with honored guest, Gail Wight.

When conducting an experiment a scientist should always control as many variables as possible, reducing the object of the investigation to the one aspect she is seeking to understand. This insight has been the great strength of the scientific method; it has allowed enormous increases in our understanding of the world through the summation of millions of tiny investigations. As we have become increasingly aware in the last fifty years, however, conducting research at such a level of abstraction is also science’s most dangerous weakness. In “Sliding Scale,” Gail Wight’s art playfully resists the dematerialization of the objects of scientific investigation. Mice eat through a representation of their genome, butterflies struggle to escape their pins, and beetles tell their stories.

Wight’s art simultaneously takes on the two great flaws of abstract scientific thinking—oversimplification and loss of perspective. In Crossing a live mouse plays with a robotic one, and the viewer is left marveling at the incredible complexity of the living being. Recursive Mutations gives a muse the chance to redesign it own genome through its interaction with the paper it lived on. With humor, “Sliding Scale” asks the viewer what has been lost in abstracting a mouse to its genes or to a mechanical prototype that replicates only some of its functions. As viewers zoom in and out with The Meaning of Miniscule they find ...

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OPENLAB 3
Group Show, 4/11-11/11/2006 1-7pm

Auto-Italia South London Gallery 82-86 Queens Road
SE152QX Peckham, London

Opening Event and Private View, 4/11/2006 4 -12 pm
Closing Event, 11/11/2006 4-12 pm

OpenLab is delighted to present OpenLab3, an group exhibition with an opening and closing event featuring musical performances by more than 20 artists and musicians of the OpenLab collective. OpenLab engages in the aesthetics and politics of Free Open Source Software Culture. Free Software Culture seeks to emphasise transparency of the creative process by making all stages of development available to others, enabling them to learn how the creation works and alter it for their own purposes. When this idea is applied to artistic practices, the boundaries between the artistic usage of software tools and their collaborative development become blurred. The workings of the artist's tools are exposed, and the artists are actively engaged in developing media technologies. They can modify them to suit their goals, rather than creating works by using existing tools that impose "their way of doing things" on the artwork.

This group exhibition brings together interactive installations, sonic interventions, video works and animations which explore the audio-visual code of this network culture: computers start to paint pictures on their own, expose their internal circuits and "commit suicide"; birds will sing and fly around in multiple realities, the skylines of two cosmopolitan cities merge, language, meaning and time burst into fragments and recombine. The range of the combined works points to the strength of Open Source Culture – its increasing versatility as artistic playground essential to contemporary debates and its continued importance not just in the invention of new media realities but also in tackling themes of “real” time and space.

The two music events feature sound and multimedia performances ...

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A 4 Day Cultural Festival

HABITATS: a 4 day Cultural Festival :: Artists, scientists, and cultural commentators are joining together to create a collective vision of a sustainable habitat. The Habitats conference and festival is a 4 day event organized to promote an exchange between art, technology, and environment. With public and private cooperative efforts leading to cleaner water, the Gowanus Canal area has experienced an increase in wildlife and improved prospects for commercial and cultural revitalization. Habitats celebrates this process. Instigated by Eidolon Culture, The Habitats conferences will include speakers such as best-selling author Steven Johnson ('Emergence' and 'Mind Wide Open'); long-standing community organizers such as the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation (GCCDC) ; electronic artists such as Pauline Oliveros (Deep Listening Foundation) ; site specific sound and video recordings, live music performances, site specific installations, collaborative projects, recycled art, workshops and active audience participation.

The placement of the artworks in their site-specific rendition, the sharing of thought provoking ideas of contemporary cultural relevance, and the active role of audience interaction all create a 'Habitat' -- a place defined by the indispensable nature of everyone and everything within it. Habitats is being Presented by Eidolon Culture and Sponsored by the Brooklyn Arts Council, Polytechnic University: Integrated Digital Media Institute (IDMI), CEC Arts Link, New York State Council on the Arts, and Material for the Arts.

Date: November 9th-12th , 2006
Time: Programs begin daily at 12:00pm until 11pm
Location: The Brooklyn Lyceum 227 4th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11215
N Train to Union Street, Corner of President Street
Contact: mwarren[at]eidolon.org
Admission: $5 for environmental + cultural conferences, $15 for live performance program
www.global-habitat.net

ArT. ENVirONMENT. CULTUrE. COMMUNiTY. gOWANUS

CONfirMED CULTUrAL SPEAKErS

Steven Johnson author of 'Emergence, the connected lives of ants, brains and cities'
Douglas Rushkoff author of 'Media Virus ...

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Rhizome is a leading platform for the global new media art community. Our programs and resources, which include exhibitions, journalism, commissioning and collection, all serve to nourish contemporary art that engages new media. This year, Rhizome celebrates its tenth anniversary, and its tenth year of supporting the new media art field. At this pivotal moment, we need our community more than ever! Our annual Community Campaign began on October 17th and will run through December 31st. We are petitioning our community to renew their membership, join for the first time, or make a generous donation. Our Campaign goal is $25,000, an amount that is absolutely essential to Rhizome's survival and growth over the next year. This year, we are planning on enriching our site, developing the ArtBase, and other areas of participation and interaction. In order to make these positive changes, we need support from our community! These are important developments that members have expressed interest in and, we believe, they will foster the broader spirit of exchange and internationalism which has made Rhizome such a unique artistic platform over its first ten years. Meanwhile, there are several ways you can contribute, and donations of $50 or more are recognized with a gift of editioned art works by Lovid, Brody Condon, Kristin Lucas, MTAA, RSG, Rick Silva, and Lee Walton. Thanks for your ongoing support! - Rhizome.org

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Attributing Value (Refractions) is an ongoing video series documenting various artist's works. The works are environmentalized and refracted through the structural data of artist Damon Zucconi himself. Sofar completed are Bruce Nauman: 100 Live, 100 Die; Carsten Nicolai: Syn_Chron; Pierre Huyghe: L'Expedition scintillante; Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipse VI; 0100101110101101.org: jodi.org'%20Transfer'.

Zenith Alignments. Using star tracking software, minor zenith alignments with celestial bodies were found to occur at multiple intervals throughout the course of the day over various locations. These precise locations were located via GPS. 3-point areas were located at sites of the zenith alignments. These areas were highlighted and clearings were made to coincide with the alignments. So at the moment of the alignment Damon Zucconi would be exposing the ground and aligning himself with the line that extends to the star. These specific alignments were unique to these specific locations, occurring once an annual cycle. This could largely be seen as the process of integrating himself with 90 degree angles, in turn, demarcating larger phenomenological alignments and relations 'the body mapped onto the land onto the heavens above';

'At' Asserting its Object Status. Found sculpture.

2d Orthogonal Line Drawing. Drawing with laser and mirrors. All projects by Damon Zucconi.

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Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Visual Media and Gaming

The Arts, Media and Engineering Program (AME) (http://ame.asu.edu) at Arizona State University is announcing an opening for a tenure-track assistant professor in Visual Media and Gaming.

The goal of AME is transdisciplinary research and education in the integrated development of experiential media systems. The program has established its own graduate interdisciplinary curriculum which includes AME concentrations in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Informatics, Dance, Music, Theater and Visual Arts, Design, Psychology, Bioengineering, Education, and a soon to be launched PhD in Media Arts and Sciences. Ten AME faculty and 30 affiliated faculty from the participating departments work collaboratively with graduate students supported by research assistantships for the creation of innovative media systems and applications. AME has state of the art media facilities.

The successful candidate will take a leadership role in the design and development of the visual aspects of multimodal interactive systems and gaming technologies at AME and will also lead student training in this area. The individual hired will spearhead research in cutting-edge areas: interactive graphics and animation, interactive visual narrative, visual displays for everyday systems, gaming systems. The appointee¹s efforts will merge with efforts of other AME faculty for the achievement of significant advancements in interactive media. Teaching assignments are reasonable and will relate to the appointee¹s interests, research and creation.

Required Qualifications: Doctoral degree in Media or Visual Art or closely related field OR master¹s degree in Media or Visual Art and a minimum of four years industry experience in media and/or gaming AND a creative and/or scholarly record with emphasis on visuals for digital media appropriate to rank.

Desired Qualifications: Interdisciplinary experience in research and creation spanning Media, Arts and Engineering; industry experience, development of commercial or widely used ...

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Marisa Olson:

Hello. If you plan to be in New York on Tuesday, October 24, please come celebrate Rhizome's 2005-2006 Commissions. Ten works will be on view, MTAA will have a live, performance installation, and drinks will be served.

For more information on the 05-06 Commissions, and the artists go to: http://rhizome.org/commissions/2005.rhiz

The reception starts at 6:30, at the New Museum store:

New Museum Store (Inside Chelsea Art Museum) 556 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 Tel: (212) 219-1222

We hope to see you there!

Marisa

+ + +
Marisa Olson
Editor & Curator
Rhizome.org at the
New Museum of Contemporary Art

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San Francisco's Exploratorium has long been a model of public institutions supporting artists. Housed in the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the World's Fair in the early 1900s, this museum and learning center is an expansive site for the exhibition of educational installations related to scientific processes. The hands-on projects attract kids, while people of all generations are drawn to the large-scale art installations created by an international panoply of new media artists. Over the years, through residencies, exhibitions, and other public programs, the Exploratorium has acquired a respectable sound archive, ranging from more didactic to more creative pieces. They recently initiated the project, 'Listen: Making Sense of Sound,' which is a collection of sound art works by artists Ali Momeni, Nigel Helyer, and Michelle Nagai. All of the recordings are available online, but visitors to the Exploratorium can also listen to site-specific recordings related to the fifty-five interactive exhibits on view in their 5000-square-foot space. These pieces use sound to explore the nature of sound, including recording techniques, methods of transmission, and the processes through which we hear. Get in line, or online, to have a listen. - Angelo Moreno

http://www.exploratorium.edu/listen

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San Francisco's Exploratorium has long been a model of public institutions supporting artists. Housed in the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the World's Fair in the early 1900s, this museum and learning center is an expansive site for the exhibition of educational installations related to scientific processes. The hands-on projects attract kids, while people of all generations are drawn to the large-scale art installations created by an international panoply of new media artists. Over the years, through residencies, exhibitions, and other public programs, the Exploratorium has acquired a respectable sound archive, ranging from more didactic to more creative pieces. They recently initiated the project, 'Listen: Making Sense of Sound,' which is a collection of sound art works by artists Ali Momeni, Nigel Helyer, and Michelle Nagai. All of the recordings are available online, but visitors to the Exploratorium can also listen to site-specific recordings related to the fifty-five interactive exhibits on view in their 5000-square-foot space. These pieces use sound to explore the nature of sound, including recording techniques, methods of transmission, and the processes through which we hear. Get in line, or online, to have a listen. - Angelo Moreno

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