Jane Goodall and The Wild Chimpanzees

May 24, 2008 at 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

 

A live performance of “Jane Goodall and The Wild Chimpanzees” will be staged at TELIC Arts Exchange as part of Primate Cinema, an ongoing project by Rachel Mayeri. The 20 minute performance will be preceded by talks by primatologists on the topic of acting in the animal kingdom, and a screening of Mayeri’s video “Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends.” The event is free and open to everyone.

Schedule:
7:00 Lecture
8:00 Screening
8:30 Performance

Jane Goodall and The Wild Chimpanzees
“Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees” is a BBC Nature documentary, produced in 1996, chronicling the lives of the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Perhaps the most studied wild chimpanzees in the world, Fifi, Freud, Frodo, Ferdinand and Faustino are celebrities who have their own website and home movies. In the documentary, British primatologist Jane Goodall describes the family saga, with brothers vying for dominance, as a soap opera. Through Goodall’s eyes, we witness the construction of the contemporary meaning of “our closest relatives.”

The live performance Jane Goodall and The Wild Chimpanzees explores what it means to be animal, and how documentary dramatizes nature. The troop includes: Suzan Averitt, Claire Cronin, Penny Folger, Estela Garcia, Dave Johnson, Diane Lefer, Adam Overton, and Joe Seeley. This performance is one of a series of experiments developed in the 3-week workshop, How to Act Like an Animal (for more information about the workshop, visit http://thepublicschool.org/105/how-to-act-like-an-animal/).

Primatologists Deborah Forster and Rebecca Frank on Acting in the Animal Kingdom
Forster’s talk will be on the how and why of acting and motor mimicry in the animal kingdom, examining videos of “walking” octopuses, painting elephants, and aping orangutans. Frank, who researches female social behavior and cooperation, will analyze the group dynamics of a Reality TV show.

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Gravity Art events

There are three consecutive Saturdays of events in conjunction with the Gravity Art exhibition:

April 12

6pm: Willem de Ridder [ more info ]
then: Here is Always Somewhere Else screening [ more info ]

April 19

3pm: Conceptual Time Based Art symposium at UCLA [ more info ]

April 26

6pm: Erik Wesselo [ more info ]
then: Here is Always Somewhere Else screening [ more info ]

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Time-Based Conceptual Art Symposium

April 19, 2008 at 3:00 pm

TELIC presents a symposium on time-based conceptual art at UCLA with the Department of Design | Media Arts and basjanader.com. This symposium is held in conjunction with our exhibition, Gravity Art. It is free and open to the public.

Two artists from the exhibition will speak: Guido van der Werve and Marco Schuler.

The curator of the exhibition, Rene Daalder, will give a short talk about Gerry Schum’s film Identifications, which will then be screened.

At the end of the evening, Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic will be screened for the first time in Los Angeles.

Here is the schedule:

3:00 - Opening reception
3:30 - Introduction by Rene Daalder
4:00 - Marco Schuler presentation
5:00 - Guido van der Werve presentation
6:15 - Screening of Identifications by Gerry Schum
7:15 - Screening of Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic

Location:

EDA (on the ground floor, next to the elevators)
Broad Art Center, UCLA
[ directions ]

This exhibition is made possible in part with support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and basjanader.com.

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Erik Wesselo

April 26, 2008 at 6:00 pm

Erik Wesselo (1964 ’s-Hertogenbosch Netherlands) makes films that are marked by a clear beginning and end, but in between everything stays the same. Wesselo uses film, the medium of the moving image to bring time to a standstill. For the duration of the film he tries to capture the viewer with this one image. He uses the camera as a parallel to his psychological experience. The tragic moments in the films coalesce with their liberating potential.

The following is the program for Wesselo’s presentation:

Introduction.

Backward (1997 16 mm 5.00 min color sound) is an extremely physical film where the artist is riding on a galloping horse back to front exploring his relation with the environment.

In Luxembourg (1997 16 mm 3.35 min color sound) we see the smartly dressed artist as the bored caretaker of an empty, wealthy home where he walks from room to room. When he leans on the balcony a reverse zoom reveals the outside of the house, then the fact that it is surrounded by a gang of bikers. In a reference to Easy rider and it’s ideal, the freedom of the open road, the bikers come a cross here as a mental projection.

Wesselo’s Düffels Möll (1997 16 mm 5.00 min color mute) begins in medias res Wesselo is bound to the sail of a windmill rotating swiftly counterclockwise. By binding himself to the blade of the windmill, the artist is simultaneously empowered and powerless. Flying through the air at great heights he experiences the rush of being able to survey his surroundings from a new perspective.

Break.

Oil (2000 16 mm 30.00 min) records a performance event in which the artist and a co-worker are engaged in a monotonous and backbreaking task of loading a shipping container with boxes of oil. The film begins with an empty container and ends when the containers is full and the “actors” no longer have a performance space.

Break.

In Battery Park City (2006 two channel video projection 7.00 min color sound) Wesselo himself does not appear unlike the other films where he uses performances to explore structurally his relationship with the environment. In Battery Park City we see the camera exploring and investigating the landscape of lower Manhattan after the event of 9/11.

End.

This exhibition is made possible in part with support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and basjanader.com.

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Willem de Ridder

April 12, 2008 at 6:00 pm

A very special guest, Willem de Ridder, will be speaking at 6pm. His presentation will be followed by our third screening of Here is Always Somewhere Else.

Willem de Ridder has been pioneering his entire life in the arts and the media. In the beginning of the sixties he brought in Holland all the modern young composers together in the MES (Mood Engineering Society), which resulted in the very first art performances and happenings. He became chairman for Northern Europe of Fluxus, started the First European Mail Order Warehouse for Fluxus works and made with Wim T. Schippers a national television program in which Holland heard for the first time about pop art, fluxus, zero, and his own anti-art activities. In 1965 he started a national newspaper in which everybody could publish anything they wanted. It caused a revolution in medialand (like internet now). Together with friends he started Paradiso and Fantasio, two clubs in which everybody could jump on stage and do whatever they wanted. Soon there were 150 of those clubs all over the country.

Together with English media adventurers like Jim Haynes, Germaine Greer, William Levy and Heathcote Williams he started SUCK, the First European Sexpaper, the beginning of the sexual revolution. They organised also the very first sexfilm festivals in Amsterdam, with visitors from all over the world. When he discovered how reading and writing had fatal effects on our society, he stopped with the newspapers and moved to the capital city of the image culture: Hollywood. There he started making weekly radio shows without any scripts for Holland. He developed the very first audio tours, before the walkman was invented. Then he made a radioshow in which the listeners were asked to sit in their car, turn on the radio and follow his instructions. About 30.000 of them started driving in the middle of the night having an adventure they would never forget.

Together with Max Lobckovicz, Shirley and Paul Eberle he made the first magazines in America in which everybody could publish anything they wanted about their sexlife. With Queen Adrena he introduced the first erotic telephone lines. He also made the very first magazine with sound in Hollywood, and so he went on and on.

He is going to tell his entire story in TELIC Arts Exchange.
Among others about his illegal exhibition in the MOMA.

In Holland he is called the Master Story Teller so you will hang on his lips, thumb in your mouth, time vanishes and space will disappear.

Visit Willem’s website and listen to some of his podcasts for Typeradio here.

This exhibition is made possible in part with support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and basjanader.com.

communication, events, lecture, media, pornography, sound, speech | No Comments »

Julie Albright + Terri Senft

October 20, 2007 at 12:00 pm to 9:00 pm

12pm
cosmetic surgery demonstration video by Brooke Kellaway, supplemented with diet and fitness plans
3pm
Performance by Nina Waisman
4pm
Presentation by Julie Albright
6pm
Presentation by Terri Senft

Julie Albright is a noted authority in the media and in academia on sexuality, relationships and technology (including the Internet and plastic surgery). She has been quoted in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, on CNN.com and MSNBC.com, among others, on these issues. She is also a research consultant for eHarmony, one of the nation’s largest online matchmaking sites. She recently completed work as Associate Producer on a documentary film on plastic surgery and makeover in popular culture, and is currently working on several journal articles related to Internet dating and sex-seeking behaviors. She is currently a lecturer in the Dept of Sociology at USC. For her presentation at Telic, Julie will speak on the concept of transformation and ‘makeover’ via technology (whether online or in the flesh). Her presentation will concern themes of self-transformation, invention, presentation, performance — including notions of beauty, what people find attractive (driven by media technology), and how these attractions and appearances are managed.

Theresa M. Senft is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of East London, U.K. Her work considers how new media has changed our conceptions of the private, the public, the pornographic, and the pedagogic in global society. Her books include Camgirls: Web Celebrity and the Personal as Political in the Age of the Global Brand (2007), History of the Internet, 1843-Present (co-author), and a special issue of Women & Performance devoted to sexuality & cyberspace (co-editor). For her presentation at TELIC, Theresa will address what she sees as the rise of ‘empathy fatigue’ among viewers who routinely consume displays of personal psychic trauma through public media such as webcams. To combat empathy fatigue, Theresa urges us to stop treating many-to-many media as television, and instead begin engaging in ‘tele-ethicality’: a commitment to risk social contracts over one’s networks with others who may or may not be true, or even real. To demonstrate, she relates a true story of a watching a camgirl attempt suicide over her webcam while hundreds of ‘friends’ watched and commented, wondering if what they were witnessing an actual event, or a staged publicity stunt, as a woman was dying before their eyes.

Nina Waisman is an MFA candidate at UCSD. She has shown her work in Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco, Long Beach, etc. Her work has been reproduced and written about in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the San Diego Union Tribune, among other publications. (see http://www.ninawaisman.net) She holds a BFA with distinction from Art Center and a BA, magna cum laude, from Harvard University. Waisman also trained seriously as a classical dancer. This study of movement informs her ongoing creation of interactive installations and performances in which simple acts such as walking raise questions about technology’s impact on a body’s creation of identity and processes of meaning-making. Nina describes her performance at TELIC as follows:
“Gesture and sound have long been employed as mediums of social control, mediums through which a body can be made to transduce social and political formulas. What new forms of bodily targeting and splicing will be effected as our tools and environments gain intelligence? Your footsteps might be swapped out for a gait and pace meant to adjust your mood or style. You might walk in the steps of your idol of the moment - coming closer bodily to the one you wish you could be. You might download tracks to help you learn the productive movement rhythms of successful figures in your field. You train… Subtly, your body gives way, disappears, as you puppet the moves deemed more desirable….”

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Susanna Paasonen

October 13, 2007 at 12:00 pm to 9:00 pm

12-5pm
“Lifecasting” channels (justin.tv; ustream.tv)
5pm
Video of performance by Felipe Zuniga
6pm
Presentation by Susanna Paasonen

For her lecture at Telic, Susanna Paasonen will speak on PORNOGRAPHY AND AFFECTIVE SENSATION. Her presentation will consider the affective force of pornography through the theorizations of Sara Ahmed, Vivian Sobchack and Isobel Armstrong. Discussions on porn, both academic and popular, tend to revolve around articulations of affect ranging from arousal to disgust, pleasure, shame and curiosity. Susanna Paasonen is interested in the role and meaning of such sensations in and for studies of online pornography.

Susanna Paasonen, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. Her teaching and research interests include Internet research, feminist theory, pornography and popular culture. She is the author of Figures of Fantasy: Women, Internet and Cyberdiscourse (Peter Lang, 2005) as well as the co-editor of Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency & Identity (Peter Lang, 2002) and Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (Berg, forthcoming in 2007). Her work on pornography has recently appeared in the journals Feminist Theory, The Velvet Light Trap and European Journal of Cultural Studies.

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Scott Bukatman

October 6, 2007 at 12:00 pm to 9:00 pm

not canceled! this is happening as scheduled

12pm
DIY nutritional supplements demo
1-6pm
“On the Shift from the Cult of the Expert to the Cult Of The Amateur” screening program, selected by Scott Bukatman, including clips from French Chef and Young People’s Concerts with Leonard Bernstein; Simple Life and Top Chef. Also: Nobody’s Watching (youtube); Albert Brooks, Real Life
6pm
Presentation by Scott Bukatman

Scott Bukatman is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and is the author of three books: Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, published by Duke University Press, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. His writing highlights the ways in which popular media (film, comics) and genres (science fiction, musicals, superhero narratives) mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His latest project is a book-length study of Winsor McCay, an early innovator in both newspaper comics and animated film.

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“Watch Me Get Watched” and Gary Dauphin

September 29, 2007 at 7:00 pm

3pm
“Watch Me Get Watched” video art screening program, curated by Glenn Phillips and Catherine Taft, with performance by Nao Bustamante.
5pm
Screening of Hotghettomess and videos selected by Gary Dauphin
7pm
Presentation by Gary Dauphin on the “pose” as a marker of identity and social standing

“Watch Me Get Watched”, organized by Glenn Phillips and Catherine Taft, brings together multiple generations of video artists whose work straddles the exhibitionism and voyeurism inherent in videomaking. These works are driven less by their own internal logic, than by the systems of looking, behaving and watching that they construct (often leaving the audience ready to see more). With works by Ben Chase, Bianca D’Amico, Arthur Ginsberg and Video Free America, Micol Hebron, Sterling Ruby and Kirsten Stoltman, Jennifer Sullivan, John Williams, and more.

Gary Dauphin will present a visual archaeology of the web phenomenon “hotghettomess,” through the notions of slideshow, photosharing, and family portrait. He will deal with issues around the database-driven “pose” — role-play and presentation through blogs, profiles, and photosharing sites — and how it serves as a marker of culture and identity, as it circulates through various interfaces and translations. Concerned with the tensions around the public display that could threaten one’s standing in the world (increasingly an issue with instantaneous web 2.0 culture, where one’s reputation or rank is ever more precarious), he will, at the same time, probe into the “counter-visibilities” that emerge, which allow one to play WITH the presumed inappropriateness, rather than working against it. The latter can challenge our assumptions, and perhaps change the rules of the game.

Gary Dauphin is a writer, editor and interactive community builder. His current project is the Goonj Collective, an online community and publishing initiative funded by the Open Society Institute. Goonj (which means “echo” in Urdu) was founded by Dauphin, editor Michael Vazquez, copyright lawyer Achal Prabhala and Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainana to provide literary magazines based in the developing world with content-management, archiving and interactive community tools.

Previous to his work with Goonj, Dauphin held a number of positions at leading ethnic websites, including founding Director and Editor-in-Chief of AOL Black Voices, Editor-in-Chief of Africana.com and Editor-in-Chief and Site Manager of BlackPlanet.com. Over the last decade, he has also penned several hundred articles on media, race, and interactivity for venues such as The Village Voice, Bidoun, Vibe and Lacanian Ink. He also blogs under his own steam at www.ebogjonson.com.

Dauphin was born and raised in New York City to Haitian parents and studied film theory at Yale University. He currently resides in Los Angeles, CA, and his internet name is ebogjonson.

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Mimi Nguyen and John Paul Ricco

September 22, 2007 at 12:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Noon - 4pm
“Showing Shame: Shameless Showing” screening program curated by Robert Summers (see description below)
4pm
JJ Chinois music video and selections by Mimi Nguyen
5pm
Presentation by Mimi Nguyen (see description below)
7pm
Performance by Eleanor Kaufman and John Paul Ricco
Presentation by John Paul Ricco (see description below)

Showing Shame: Shameless Showing
curated by Robert Summers
Artists/Videos:
Lee Adams, Porca Miseria (2007)
Hoang Tan Nguyen, Forever Bottom (1999)
Vaginal Davis & Billy MIller, Tom Cruise Loves Women (2005)
SUPERM (Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny), “TBA” (2007)
(New video by SUPERM will be its US premiere)

The selected videos show various enactments of the artists and/or their friends performing themselves in acts of shame. With regard to “queer” subjectivity and shame, I draw on the work of Eve Sedgwick who argues that shame can be understood in relation to “queer” — as she pointedly states, “queer” is a term that “might usefully be thought of as referring in the first place to [persons who are tied to shame] … those whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame”. But, I argue that even though there is shame there is also the shameless, it is never far behind, which I think is important to examine in relation to “queer/-ness” — which would push Sedgwick’s argument. Indeed, I see no reason to disconnect shame from shameless — after all they are but a suffix apart. All in all, I hope these films show something valuable: I hope they show something shame/less.

MIMI NGUYEN’s presentation will focus on technologies of the self and of
the star (assembling a desirable commodity body), using the work of JJ
Chinois — the transgendered persona of artist Lynne Chan. As an aspirant
to celebrity, JJ Chinois critiques and appropriates the pleasures of pop
stardom in global culture in the early 21st century and does so by sexing
up Bruce Lee’s star image in ways that we haven’t seen before. Overall
Nguyen’s presentation will explore the circuits between star and fan, and
issues of performance, embodiment, and identity.

JOHN PAUL RICCO’s presentation will draw from Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles
Deleuze, Judith Butler, and Leo Bersani, to focus on “the event of
mutually-shared exposure”: the separating-connecting spacing that exists
between, amongst, and around any one or more bodies, in varying degrees of
intimacy or closeness. He will look at the ethical and political
questions this provokes, involving social bonds formulated through a
“non-identitarian narcissism”: a space, cutting transversally across the
circuit of voyeurism and exhibitionism, in which one performs neither
solely for oneself nor for some objectified other, but for any number of
other ones in the virtual-corporeal networks of distance and connection.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is currently completing her first book, Representing Refugees, which examines the historical production and mobilization of refugee affect for varied political and cultural projects (such as commemoration, humanitarianism, consumption and multicultural nationalism).

She continues to situate her work within transnational feminist cultural studies with her next project, focusing on fashion, citizenship and transnationality. She is co-editor with Thuy Linh Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007) and author of multiple essays on Asian American, queer, and punk subcultures, digital technologies, and Vietnamese diasporic culture, published in academic collections, on-line publications and popular magazines.

John Paul Ricco is a theorist, curator and performance artist, and is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art, Media Theory, and Criticism at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and a number of essays on contemporary artists. Currently, he is organizing a three-part exhibition of contemporary queer video, to open at V-Tape in Toronto in January 2008, and working on his next book: The Decision Between Us: aporetic aesthetics and the unbecoming community. For “Showing,” Ricco is premiering a body-based performance installation and artist talk, on narcissism and the space of bare naked exposure.

Eleanor Kaufman is a professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA specializing in twentieth-century French philosophy and literature. She has published on thinkers and writers such as Deleuze, Foucault,
Bataille, Blanchot, Lacan, Derrida and Badiou. She thinks a lot about the relation between poetry, philosophy, and inertia.

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Dr. Simon Pollard - What is it Like to be a Spider?

June 28, 2006 at 6:00 pm

Lecture presented by the Institute for Figuring.

events, insects, lecture, perception | Comments Off

Dr. Jared Leadbetter - The Ecology of a Termite’s Gut

June 1, 2006 at 6:00 pm

Lecture presented by the Institute for Figuring

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Dr. Michael Dickinson - How Flies Fly

May 4, 2006 at 6:00 pm

PRESENTED BY THE INSTITUTE FOR FIGURING

In a two-ton vat of mineral oil a set of robotic wings beat silently. Nearby, in a circular corral of computer controlled LED’s, a fly tethered by a tungsten wire beats its own organic wings hundreds of times a second. As the animal flaps, laser-based sensors measure the force and torque of its miniature movements while a “wing beat analyzer” tracks the shadows of its gossamer foils. Elsewhere in the lab of Dr Michael Dickinson, researchers use stereoscopic video to reconstruct the insects’ flight path and to simulate a “fly’s eye view” of the world. Where the French oceanographer Jean Painleve took us inside the world of the octopus and seahorse, so Dickinson takes us into the realm of the fruit fly. 360 million years before the Wright brothers pitched a glider into the wind, the descendents of shrimp-like crustaceans learned the art of hovering - a skill that humans have yet to finesse. Just as crustaceans swim by furiously beating their legs, so insects fly by furiously beating their wings, a hyperactive expenditure of energy that is at once efficient and amazingly effective. Insects’ aerobatic maneuverings are the envy of engineers and now the subject of intensive scientific research. In this talk Dr Michael Dickinson will discuss the aerodynamics, physiology, and perceptual systems involved in a flies’ flight. The event will include unique high-speed films and animations of how a fly experiences the world.

Dr Michael Dickinson’s laboratory at Caltech is devoted to understanding “the motion of a fly through the air.” Trained as a classical zoologist, Dickinson has also studied the physiology of hummingbird flight and is researching the control mechanisms underlying a wide class of insect gaits. He is the architect of the Grand Unified Fly project that aims “to encode in silicon as much of a fly as we can.”

Text written by Margaret Wertheim

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Timothy Jaeger - VJ: Live Cinema Unraveled

January 14, 2006 at 6:00 pm

Introduction: Jordan Crandall
Presentation (Research into VJ Culture) : Tim Jaeger
Screening and reception afterwards

VJ : Live Cinema Unraveled is one of the first books to offer a fresh perspective of VJing and VJ culture. Probing into topics such as technological mobility, audience, environment, and codes of the medium, it explains the various dimensions of this emerging practice. Part design, speculative theory, reference and practical guide, this book links live cinema with its historical origins, and then describes the various offshoots and branches that are occurring now in the twenty-first century on a global scale.

Timothy Jaeger is a media artist and Visual Art graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. He has performed and presented work at various venues internationally including ISEA 2004, PixelACHE ‘05, and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and his writings on performance and digital media have been published by Routledge. Write-ups on his work have appeared in Neural (www.neural.it), among others.

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Ed Burton - Darwinism on a Desktop

July 29, 2005 at 7:30 pm

They crawl, they hop, they slink and they undulate. Some roll, some fly and others unfold into complex forms from a simple triangle. These “creatures” are the products of an extraordinary evolutionary experiment that now involves more than 100,000 people worldwide. Each of these forms has been created through a program called the sodaconstructor that enables users to build models that increasingly resemble living organisms. Over the past five years a global community has brought forth from this digital mud a Cambrian explosion of species: walkers, stalkers, floaters and flyers; things that tumble and skip; simulations of spiders, crabs and starfish; monopeds, bipeds, tripeds and centipeds; self-propelling squares, and a mobius strip that turns itself inside out. This imaginary Galapagos resides on a server in the Shoreditch area of London’s east end in the office of Soda Creative, an innovative company that specializes in producing software at the boundary of art and education. (www.sodaplay.com)
Continue reading…

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Robert Connelly - Why Things Don’t Fall Down

May 20, 2005 at 7:30 pm

Robert Connelly is a mathematician at Cornell University who specializes in understanding the mathematics of rigid bodies.

In this talk he will discuss the question of what makes buildings, bridges and spiderwebs hold up by exploring the properties of tensegrities. Hands-on activity will allow the audience to build their own tensegrity structures.
This lecture presented by the Institute for Figuring

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DORKBOTSOCAL 5

November 20, 2004 at 6:00 pm

[ O R G A N I Z E D B Y ]

Casey Reas
http://www.groupc.net/

// —————————————————————————–

[ P R E S E N T E R S ]

Annina Ruest
http://www.t-t-trackers.net/

TRACK-THE-TRACKERS is a network installation consisting with mobile components. The project makes use of existing personal technologies in conjunction with GPS infrastructure to provide participants with an audible (not a visual) experience of the proliferation of video surveillance in the urban public sphere. The mobile unit, a bag containing a laptop, GPS-receiver, earphones, and a generic mouse is taken on a walk through the city. The sound in the headphones changes whenever the participant enters the vicinity of a surveillance camera. This effect is not automatic but created by other participants who are adding new locations to the existing database. The technology is documented with the intention of inspiring others to build similar psychogeographic systems.

Annina Ruest is a Swiss media artist currently based in San Diego. Most of her artistic activity so far has taken place within the field of software art. As part of the group LAN she co-authored the project tracenoizer.org - Disinformation on Demand. She is also the author of SuperVillainizer - Conspiracy Client (supervillainizer.ch), TRACK-THE-TRACKERS— (t-t-trackers.net) and most recently BUSH BOT 0.4 (bushbot.ath.cx). She graduated in 2003 from the Department of New Media, Zürich School of Art and Design (www.snm-hgkz.ch) and is now a graduate student at the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego (visarts.ucsd.edu).

// —————————————————————————–

Schoenerwissen/OfCD
http://www.sw.ofcd.com

Schoenerwissen/OfCD presents their approach by outlining principles and methods they used for recent projects - situating the work with respect to other related design strategies. They will focus on their last project txtkit - A Visual Text Mining Tool.

Schoenerwissen/OfCD continues its design research on information architectures, interfaces and visual languages currently at UC Santa Barbara. In developing new digital tools SW/OfCD provides spatial and temporal contexts serving as frameworks for exploration and dynamic decision making. Their project Minitasking - a visual gnutella client has been recognized by an Award of Distinction of the Prix Ars Electronica in 2002 and received the transmediale Software Award in 2003. Their latest project txtkit - visual text mining tool was supported by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMB+F) and Länder Ministries for Education or Science and Culture. In 2004 txtkit has been awarded an Honorary Mention at Net Vision category of Prix Ars Electronica.

// —————————————————————————–

Andreas Schlegel
http://www.sojamo.de/

TEMP is a software based network environment for any software capable of tcp or udp socket communication. TEMP is made for people utilizing computers and similar devices as a tool for their expression. Where most software is developed for specific processes, TEMP interconnects these environments, and enables collaborations between artists, scientists, or researchers from different disciplines without insisting on one particular software environment. Time shouldn’t be spent on solving technical issues but rather on finding communication models to explore the possibilities of interactions and interconnections amongst nature, people, and devices.

Andreas Schlegel is a computational designer interested in collecting data, sensing spaces, exploring communication processes in the fields of networks. He received a diploma in communications design from Merz Akademie Stuttgart, Germany, and an MS in Media Arts and technology from the University of California, Santa Barabra. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

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Daniel Sauter
http://daniel-sauter.com/

LIGHT ATTACK is a media artwork, as well as a social experiment, which takes place the urban sphere of Los Angeles. While driving through the city, an animated virtual character is projected onto the cityscape of L.A. exploring three places “to go” and three places “not to go”, according to the popular Lonely Planet travel guide. Light Attack elaborates the concept of the “moving moving” image in the stereotyped neighborhoods of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Downtown, Watts, and Compton. The virtual character, projected from a moving vehicle onto the city facades, reacts to the architectural context, and interacts with passers-by while “walking” through the city. The character’s actions are condensed in a gallery installation, reflecting projection as an emergent ubiquitous medium. The piece raises questions about property and privacy. How public is public space? How projection, as a medium, changing the environment in which we live?

Daniel Sauter is a media artist exploring interactive installations dealing with time and space relations, cultural implication of technologies and site-specific interventions. Currently Sauter is a lecturer at the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA. His works have been shown internationally including the Ars Electronica Festival 2004, O.K Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; Milia 02 in Cannes, France; International Video Festival in Bochum, Germany; 6. International Videofestival in Novi Sad, Serbia and Montenegro, FILE2002 in Sao Paulo, Brazil; telic gallery, Los Angeles; LACMALab, Los Angeles; westweek, Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles; Europrix Festival in Vienna, Austria; Leipzig Book Fair in Leipzig, Germany; werk, bauen + wohnen in Zagreb, Croatia, Europrix Award, Lisbon, Portugal. Diploma HfG/ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany; MFA Design | Media Arts, UCLA. Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica, Interactive Art, 2004; Winner Europrix Students’ Award, 2001.

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Transparadiso Lecture

September 17, 2004 at 6:00 pm

A presentation of recent projects from their practice, which is based on involving the consumer as active participant and the research of new urbanistic tactics - e.g. the development of tools like the indikatormobil, an urban emergency vehicle.
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