Ceci Moss
Since 2005
Works in Oakland, California United States of America

BIO
Ceci Moss is the Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She launched YBCA’s exhibition series “Control: Technology in Culture” which showcases work by emerging and mid-career artists who engage the social, cultural, and experiential implications of technology on the museum’s second floor. In its first year, the series includes solo exhibitions by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, Lucy Raven, Nate Boyce and Shana Moulton. Taking its title from Gilles Deleuze’s 1992 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” the series seeks to prompt timely questions about the profound and far-reaching influence of a control society in the 21st century by focusing on artists whose work spans a multitude of disciplines and relates to a diverse set of issues, including architecture, acoustics, psychology, labor, consumerism, the environment, and the military. Beyond the “Control” series, she curated a large scale public art installation by Kota Ezawa in YBCA’s sculpture court, the solo exhibition Brenna Murphy: Liquid Vehicle Transmitter, the video installation Erin Shirreff: Lake, and co-curated with Betti-Sue Hertz the exhibition portion of YBCA’s signature triennial Bay Area Now 7. She also co-curated with Astria Suparak the touring group exhibition Alien She that examines the lasting influence of the punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl on contemporary artists, and originated at the Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University.

Currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University, her academic research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice and network culture. Her PhD dissertation “The Informational Milieu and Expanded Internet Art” examines the expansion of internet art beyond the screen in the 2000’s, especially towards sculpture and installation, as a product of what theorist Tiziana Terranova called an “informational milieu.” Combining art history and media theory through the analysis of case studies that range from internet art and social media in the 2000’s to Jean-François Lyotard’s groundbreaking new media exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1985 Les Immatériaux, her dissertation asks how the widespread technological capture of information affects cultural production, specifically contemporary art, and the kind of critical response it necessitates.

Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, Performa Magazine, and various art catalogs. Prior to her position at YBCA, she was the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organization Rhizome, and an Adjunct Instructor at New York University in the Department of Comparative Literature. From 2000-2014, she programmed a radio show dedicated to experimental music, Radio Heart, on the independent radio stations KALX, East Village Radio and Radio Valencia.

iRiS (Immediate Remote Interaction System)



By combining a recently developed mobile software application with the multimedia facade of the ARS Electronica building we intend to lower participation barriers for end users when interacting with such facades. We developed two prototypes: in the first application, users can paint interactively on the building using touch input on the mobile device. In a second application, users are able to solve a jigsaw puzzle displayed on the facade. iRiS (Immediate Remote Interaction System) is a joint research project from the University of Saarbrücken, Germany and University of Munich, Germany.


-- FROM THE PROJECT SITE


Originally via Mediaarchitecture

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Krzysztof Wodiczko: Designer Adam Whiton on Art21



In this short clip, from a segment on artist Krzysztof Wodiczko from the Art21 episode Power, designer Adam Whiton of MIT's Interrogative Design Group talks about developing technologies for Wodiczko's complex interactive installations.

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Collections Department


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Alan Vega, Untitled, 1981-2010
(from Circuit Lausanne's collection on Collectionof)

Collectionof went live today, a new online platform that allows artists and art spaces to exhibit special objects that speak to their creative production. Perusing Collectionof, many of these "special objects" are not keepsakes or personal items, which one might assume from the site's title, but artworks and editions, like Alan Vega's crosses or an infinity room designed by Tauba Auerbach and Hannes Hetta. (Both very cool items, I might add.) There are a few exceptions, like Scott Ponik's section which includes some of his idiosyncratic book finds such as The Making of Kubrick's 2001 and Vicious Circles and Infinity: An Anthology of Paradoxes. Judging from the stellar list of participants so far, which range from Istanbul-based independent art space Marquise Dance Hall to Miami's Bas Fisher International to artist Cory Arcangel and musician C. Spencer Yeh, it will interesting to see how Collectionof develops.

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Pruitt-Igoe Falls (2009) - Cyprien Gaillard



The video 'Pruitt-Igoe Falls' takes its title from Pruitt-Igoe, a large urban housing project built in the 1950s in Saint Louis, United States; quickly facing decay, its demolition by implosion started in 1972, 18 years only after construction, and was the first of this kind on such a scale. Designed by American architect Minoru YAMASKI, also responsible for the World Trade Center twin towers, Pruitt-Igoe has become an emblematic icon often evoked by all sides in public housing policy debate, and its destruction was claimed by Postmodern architectural theorician Charles JENCKS to mark 'the day Modern architecture died'.

Under these auspices, Cyprien GAILLARD's video consists of two static and silent shots, linked through a subtle crossfade plan. The first part captures the demolition, at night, of a building in Sighthill housing estate in Glasgow. A city favoured by the artist, the capital of Scotland has the highest number of high-rise housing projects in the United Kingdom, some built in the middle of ancient cemeteries and many now bound to be demolished as part of a large urban rehabilitation plan. The video starts with the striking and fraught with meaning vision of a concrete monolith rising from tombstones, under a powerful lighting that makes the whole scene look like a cinema set. When the grey block implodes and collapses, a thick cloud of dust rises slowly to the foreground and eventually covers the audience and the lights, plunging the image in the dark, out of which only emerge shadows of tombs and vegetation.

A faint light appears in the center of this nocturnal romantic vision, before intensifying and outshining what remained of the first scene: the second shot is a sight of Niagara Falls when they 'light up' at night, illuminated by spotlights that transform them into a dreamy show ...

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Model Swapping w/ Nicolas Sassoon from Bad at Sports


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Over the past year or so, Nicholas O'Brien has been contributing a series of very original interviews with new media artists to the Chicago-based contemporary art blog Bad at Sports. (I've posted a few of them already to Rhizome, here and here.) For each one, the interviews take place within the medium which the artists works (such as Second Life, video, or tumblr). O'Brien posted another interview this week with Nicolas Sassoon, in which they trade 3D models in between a discussion about architecture, copying/pasting, and site-specificity.

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