Saturday, April 14th, 2012

Aram Bartholl's work creates an interplay between internet, culture and reality. The versatile communication channels are taken for granted these days, but how do they influence us? According to the paradigm change of media research Bartholl not just asks what man is doing with the media, but what media does with man. The tension between public and private, online and offline, technology infatuation and everyday life creates the core of his producing. In public interventions and public installations Bartholl examines which and how parts of the digital world can reach back into reality.

Beside numerous workshops and performances he exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art NYC, The Pace Gallery, [DAM] Berlin/Cologne, eARTS Shanghai, NIMK Netherlands Media Art Institute, KAdE Amersfoort, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Skulpturenpark Berlin, Total Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul, Eyebeam New York, FACT Liverpool and at Kunstverein Hamburg. Aram Bartholl is member of the artist group 'F.A.T. Lab' ('Free Art and Technology Lab'). He lives and works in Berlin.

Xavier Cha's performance-based work revolves around modes of accessibility, cultural exchange and hierarchies of space. Her performances, installations, and videos tease out phantasmic supports behind elements in contemporary culture and the individual's position within this web of complex subjectivity. A frequent collaborator, Xavier has invited actors, dancers, musicians, cults, and clowns among many others- not only to participate in her projects, but also to become protagonists of the work.

Xavier's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, The Kitchen, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Moscow Biennial, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (UK), the Sculpture Center, Asia Society Museum, and Hammer Museum, among other galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe.

Photographer and media artist LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982 Braddock Pennsylvania) uses the conventions of social documentary to probe and upend traditional narratives of urban growth and the triumph of industry. Exposing the underbelly of corporate practices-rapid de-industrialization and outsourcing, environmental negligence, and inner-city gentrification-Frazier's work examines the socioeconomic crisis and postmodern condition in her hometown Braddock PA. Her gelatin silver prints of a ten-year collaboration with her mother and grandmother, Notion of Family (2002- ongoing) was on view in the 2009 New Museum Triennial Younger Than Jesus. Her new photolithograph series Campaign For Braddock Hospital is currently on view in the Whitney Museum of American Art 2012 Biennial.

Frazier's work has been exhibited internationally at the 2011 Incheon Women Artist's Biennale, Incheon Korea, in Commercial Break, Garage Projects, Venice Italy and at the Michel Rein Gallery in Paris. Currently LaToya is a featured artist in the new Art 21 online documentary series New York Close Up.

She is the Associate Curator for the Mason Gross Galleries in the Department for Visual Arts where she also teaches photography in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ.

Naeem Mohaiemen explores histories of the international left through essays, photography, and film. Since 2006, he has worked on The Young Man Was, a project about 1970s Bangladesh, chapters of which have shown at the New Museum, Finnish Museum of Photography, Sharjah Biennial, Experimenter (Kolkata), MUAC (Mexico City), etc. His publications include Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (editor), "Islamic Roots of Hip-Hop" (Sound Unbound, MIT Press), "Everybody Wants To Be Singapore" (Carlos Motta: The Good Life, Art in General), and "Adman Blues" (Indian Highway, Hans Ulrich Obrist & Julia Peyton-Jones cur., Serpentine Gallery). His work has appeared in Granta, Rethinking Marxism, Modern Painters, Databrowser, Secret identities: Asian Superhero Comics, etc. [shobak.org]

Jon Rafman is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist. Mixing irony, melancholy and humour, his work engages directly with contemporary experience while exploring the impact of technology on our consciousness. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Literature from McGill University and a M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His films and new media work have gained international attention and have been exhibited at Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, and the New Museum in New York City. Rafman's Nine Eyes of Google Street View has been featured in Modern Painter, Frieze, Guardian, Libération, New York Times, and Harper's Magazine.

Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975.

Her recent work, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, will be on exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2012. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen 'chapters' that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.

Her previous work Contraband (2010), is an archive of global desires and perceived threats, presenting 1,075 images of items that were detained or seized from passengers and mail entering the United States from abroad. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), reveals objects, sites, and spaces that are integral to America's foundation, mythology, or daily functioning but remain inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. These unseen subjects range from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation to the art collection of the CIA. The Innocents (2003) documents cases of wrongful conviction in the U.S., calling into question photography's function as a credible witness and arbiter of justice.

Simon's photographs and writing have been the subject of monographic exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern, London (2011); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2008); Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2004); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2003). Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2011 her work was included in the 54th Venice Biennale.

STEPHANIE SYJUCO's work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; presenting a parasitic art counterfeiting event, "COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone" for Frieze Projects, London (2009); and "Shadowshop," an alternative vending outlet embedded at SFMOMA exploring the ways in which artists are navigating the production, consumption, and dissemination of their work (2011).

Born in the Philippines, she received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and included in exhibitions at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, ZKM Center for Art and Media, The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. In 2007 she led counterfeiting workshops in Istanbul and in 2009 contributed proxy sculptures for MOMA/P.S.1's joint exhibition, "1969". She has taught at Stanford University, The California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University. A recipient of a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, she lives and works in San Francisco.

Jeremy Ashkenas works on the Interactive News team at the New York Times, and at DocumentCloud.org, helping news organizations analyze and publish the primary source documents behind the news. He created CoffeeScript, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Docco and Jammit, among other opensource projects.

Blaine is a London-based sociotechnologist, a hacker dissatisfied by simply building software. His long-term obsession is fostering anarchic networks as a counter-point to the centralised systems that have come to dominate the web over the past decade. Through numerous collaborations, he has developed protocols and concepts that are forming the basis for many social internet technologies yet to come. His past work as the founding architect of Twitter has seen broad adoption both culturally and technologically. He is currently working on a new venture to bring simple community-building tools to independent poetry and short story publishers and writers of the world with his partner, author Maureen Evans.

Charles Forman is just one dreamer looking for another. Charles Forman is the co-founder and CEO of Picturelife, a service that allows people to store and organize all their pictures, based in Chicago. Previously, he founded OMGPOP, a social game company, which recently sold to Zynga for 220 million dollars. But whatevs, Charles isn't even about that. Charles is about making stuff people like. He uses the disparity between the way things are and the way they should be to fuel his creativity by designing, engineering, and hand waving his way to creating stuff. Charles holds a Ph.D. from Harvard that he stole from his doctor's office, but will totally deny it if questioned.

Michael Herf enjoys blending technology and design to make software. Michael co-founded Picasa (as CTO), and served as Senior Engineering Manager at Google upon its acquisition by Google. After leaving Google, Michael created f.lux, a display color tool with 3 million users, and he currently advises several startups. His prior experience includes senior engineering roles at Idealab! and MetaCreations. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BS in Mathematics & Computer Science. Currently working on several new stealth projects, he is an amateur musician and photographer, and lives in LA with his wife and daughter.

Aaron Swartz is co-Founder of Demand Progress, a political group with over a million members that led the fight against the Internet censorship bill. He developed the Open Library website, the web.py framework, and co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification.

Khoi Vinh is the co-Founder and CEO of Mixel for iPad, the world's first social collage app, based in New York City. He has a long history as a user experience designer, writer and speaker, and was recently named one of "The 50 Most Influential Designers in America" by Fast Company. Previously he was the design director at NYTimes.com for five years, where he led the in-house design team in user experience innovation for digital products of all kinds. For over a decade, he has published his thoughts on design, technology and culture at the widely-read blog Subtraction.com.

Anthony Volodkin created The Hype Machine nearly seven years ago in his dormroom and has been unable to stop thinking about how people discover music ever since. In that time, a small, passionate team has been assembled around the product and the Hype Machine now reaches over 2 million people each month out of a small office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The project has been called a "juggernaut of global influence" by Billboard, and is frequently credited as helping new artists take off by the likes of Foster the People, Chromeo, Skrillex and many others. Prior to that he spent six years doing IT consulting while constantly carving out evenings to see live music. Anthony was born in Moscow, Russia and has been living in Brooklyn, New York since he was 12.