Upgrade! Milwaukee: Zach Lieberman — Making the Invisible Visible :: March 10, 2010; 7:00 pm :: Arts Center Lecture Hall (ACL 120), University of Milwaukee, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd., Milwaukee WI.

In this talk Lieberman will present his interactive works and collaborations, focusing on the artistic process as research. He will show works such as Manual Input Sessions, in which an old school overhead projector is transformed into a magical audio visual performance device, and Lights On, a performance of sound and light commissioned for the 2009 opening of the new Ars Electronica center in Linz. He will also talk about openFrameworks, a C++ toolkit for creative coding which is being used by developers worldwide to make compelling interactive installations and performances.

A Light Green Light: Toward Sustainability in Practice by Sabrina Raaf — Curated by Steve Dietz :: April 2 - June 4, 2010 :: Panel Discussion (Sabrina Raaf and Steve Dietz, moderated by Jordan Crandell): April 2; 6:00 - 7:00 pm and Opening Reception 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: gallery@calit2, Atkinson Hall, First Floor, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA.

The gallery@calit2 goes green this spring with an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Sabrina Raaf, whose custom-built robotic sculptures and site specific installations include a series of experiments that address issues of sustainable practice, the construction of social spaces, and prototyping for modular green architecture.

Dietz has selected five of Raaf’s electronic and responsive artworks to be included in this exhibition: Translator II: Grower, Icelandic Rift, Light Green Light, (n)Fold, and Meandering River.

Translator II Grower, a robotic sculpture, measures carbon dioxide levels inside the gallery as they are generated by visitors, and actively draws the measurements in green ink as a field of grass on the gallery walls. Examples of these ink drawings will be on display on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. The Icelandic Rift sculptures are electronically-powered works that include mechanical systems, representing far-future visions of agricultural production and mineral mining in zero-g environments. Prototypes and concept animations for Light Green Light, a lamp that unfolds into a netted tent for sleeping, and (n)Fold, a flat-fold design for dew harvesting and passive solar cooking, are also on view in the gallery. Meandering River is a sculptural installation made up of thermal screen material that has had its surface milled robotically with meandering river designs. Its installation form is derived from self-organizing and meandering river mathematics. This thermal screen installation is also designed to cascade vertically in order to create a climbing surface for vines and thus support the growth of a vertical garden. A cascading instance of the Meandering River sculpture is hung in the six-story window of the Atkinson Hall stairwell, and a second, river-type instance will be viewed in the hall area on the first floor.

Sabrina Raaf works in experimental sculptural media and designs responsive environments and social spaces. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Brandts Art Center (Denmark), Transitio_MX (Mexico City), Sala Parpallo (Spain), MejanLabs (Stockholm), Lawimore Projects (Seattle), the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art (Germany), Stefan Stux Gallery (NYC), Ars Electronica (Linz), Museum Tinguely (Basel), Espace Landowski (Paris), Artbots 2005 (Dublin), Kunsthaus Graz (Austria), ISEA (Helsinki), the San Jose Museum of Art, and Klein Art Works (Chicago). The artist is the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields (2002) and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005 &2001). Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Contemporary, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Leonardo, Washington Post, and New Art Examiner. She received an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999) and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Steve Dietz is Founder, President, and Artistic Director of Northern Lights.mn. He was the Founding Director of the 01SJ Biennial in 2006 and is currently Artistic Director of its producing organization, ZERO1: the Art and Technology Network. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996.

e-flux journal Issue #14? March 2010: Education Actualized, guest-edited by Irit Rogoff :: Lecture: Participation - A User’s Guide by Irit Rogoff :: March 8, 2010; 6:30 pm :: Cooper Union, 41 Cooper Square, NYC.

All around us we see a search for other languages and other modalities of knowledge production, a pursuit of other modes of entering the problematics of “education” that defy, in voice and in practice, the limitations being set up by the forces of bureaucratic pragmatism: a decade of increasing control and regulation, of market values imposed on an essential public right, and of middle-brow positivism privileged over any form of criticality — matched by a decade of unprecedented self-organization, of exceptionally creative modes of dissent, of criticality, and of individual ambitions that are challenging people to experiment with how they inhabit the field, how they inhabit knowledge.

Our notion of “Education Actualized” lies in the tension between these antagonistic spheres. If we think of actualization as the incarnation of an idea of “an education” within one particular educational system, we arrive at the duality we inhabit and work with. This issue is teeming with voices — angry and bewildered, critical and speculative, voices of ideas put to the test, producing fictions of impossible encounters — all efforts to grasp and locate, to actualize and inhabit this ongoing process in which we are all immersed.

You will see that almost every one of the contributions here reflects an unease and a recognition of the dangers and limitations wrought by attempts to regulate and homogenize a vast range of education cultures. The marketing of education, which began in the U.S. and followed in Britain, has now taken hold on the European continent. The dangers inherent in education becoming a market economy geared towards profit and revenue, privileging a reductive notion of “outcomes,” “transferable knowledges,” and “entrepreneurship” are clear to all. But the emerging dominance of cognitive capitalism over European education systems and their inscription into capital economies of debt and credit, of self-support, of precarities for both students and professionals, is only one side of these developments. The other is the politicization of “education” to an extent we have not seen since the late 1960s.

Not only are students — whose access and conditions have worsened considerably — being treated as paying clients with no say or part in determining their own education, they are also increasingly organized in effective and insistent ways. But many other spheres and strata of education have also been galvanized and linked up with the proliferation of self-organized structures that have emerged in the past decade of waning public-sphere culture and increasing privatization.

This issue of e-flux journal aims to bring together and extend a series of projects and interactions taking place between 2006 and the present that involved extensive investigations into “education” as a site of knowledge production, alternative modes of questioning, new vocabularies, analyses of the conditions of contemporary education, and negotiations between institutional and self-organized cultures. The voices that make up this issue have all been involved with related projects: A.C.A.D.E.M.Y was a series of exhibitions and publications (Hamburg, Antwerp, Eindhoven) that saw life over the course of 2006–2007; “Summit – Non Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture” was a large-scale meeting held at the HAU theatres in Berlin in 2007; in other formations and in other conjunctions we met and collaborated through the “Dictionary of War” project, the “Edu-factory,” border academies, nomadic universities, committee meetings, conferences, discussions, and dinners. But, rather than document or build directly upon these activities, we wanted to bring about an “actualization” of these originary events—a constant process by which concepts acquire extensions and qualities.

This does not purport to be a representation of this vast field of thought, action, and agitation — the work collected here is in dialogue with many other exponents of this field, part of a network of shared concerns and open collaborations. This might help to explain what could appear to be a fairly arbitrary conjunction of people who do not belong to any particular organization, institution, or profession. Some of us are academics, some activists, and others are artists, curators, or publishers; everyone seems to be turning their hand to forms of activity and articulation outside their typical sphere of operations. Our contact with “education” as a political platform, a polemic, and the site of much of our work seems to have stretched us in unexpected directions, as can be seen through the actual writing that has been produced for this issue.

The focal point of the issue is the specter that haunts European higher education — the Bologna Accord on education, the so-called reforms of the system across the continent of Europe that aim to standardize it with comparable entry points, degrees, outcomes, credits, funding structures, criteria of excellence, and so forth. This has undoubtedly produced a very “Eurocentric” view of the map of education, but so great is the potential upheaval of “Bologna” that we decided to focus on this part of the world, but also to place it in dialogue with colleagues and collaborators in the U.S. There is equally a decisive “geopolitical” drive to Europe’s education policy that fuses the former East and the former West into one knowledge tradition, thereby erasing decades of other models of knowledge in the East and producing an illusion of cohesion through knowledge economies and bureaucracies.

Our thanks to e-flux journal for giving us the space to elaborate the ideas included in this issue and for founding a platform hospitable to expanded discussions around creative practices. Our thanks to the Siemens Art Fund that initiated the A.C.A.D.E.M.Y project and to the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Germany, that funded the “Summit” project, to Van Abbemuseum and MuHKA, which took part in extensive discussions and collaborated on these projects, and to the many other institutions, forums, and funders who have supported this work as it has progressed.

My thanks to Susanne Lang who took on co-editing this issue, to Ashley Whitfield who took on its production, and to the authors who rose to the challenge and explored the numerous facets of “education” as a vital, critical, and communal space. — Irit Rogoff

Upgrade! Eindhoven: Tetsu Kondo (Japan) :: March 14, 2010; 8:00 -10:30 pm (doors open 7:30) :: Temporary Art Centre, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

The next Upgrade! Eindhoven presents Albert van Abbe and MAD Artist in Residence, Tetsu Kondo discussing Kondo’s work and vision. Kondo is an artist, musician and researcher whose work includes drawing, installations and musical instrument design. He is currently teaching at Tokyo Polytechnic University.

Kondo will also demonstrate his Dendraw, a software instrument he developed, that transforms the beauty of visual programming into live interactive sound performances. The Dendraw generates specific sine waves depending on screen position. The Dendraw concept is inspired by acoustic string instruments such as the guitar and violin. The Dendraw consists of 5-circular strings which generate tones as Kondo slides its points in the screen, sometimes creating harmonies with certain movements.

Test_Lab: Tools for Propaganda — Experience how new media technologies direct, divert, distract and manipulate your gaze on the world :: March 11, 2010; 8:00 -11:00 pm :: V_2, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam + and streamed live.

Featuring: Maurice Benayoun (FR) | Marc Lee (CH) | Damian Stewart (NZ/AT) | Opening: Alessandro Ludovico (IT) | Screening: uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki | www.subvertr.com | streetwithaview.com.

The increased accessibility and affordability of contemporary media technologies has greatly expanded possibilities for the dissemination of independent and grassroots information. At the same time, these developments have also greatly increased the opportunities for (mis)use of media technologies as powerful and effective tools for political and commercial propaganda. Although many theorists, artists, and activists have addressed the latter perspective on contemporary media technologies, critical debates have rarely relied on concrete demonstrations to prove their point. This edition of Test_Lab will therefore investigate the face of propaganda in the digital age by means of live artistic demonstrations, and will allow the audience to test hands-on how new media technologies can be applied as effective tools for propaganda.

How does Google determine which website shows up first and which one on page 2.480.133 of a search? Does a photograph only represent its own reality? How does social tagging affect the meaning of an online image? Why is spam persuasive and profitable? Is Uncyclopedia perhaps the true Wikipedia? What would the world look like if all advertisements were covered with artworks? And can Google’s Street View be a stage for artistic intervention?

Test_Lab: Tools for Propaganda allows you to experience and test for yourself how new media technologies can be (mis)used to direct, divert, distract and manipulate your gaze on the world.

Subvertr.com and streetwithaview.com are screened with kind permission of the artists, Les Liens Invisibles, and Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley, respectively.

Marta Minujín: MINUCODEs — curated by: Gabriela Rangel and José Luis Blondet:: March 2 – April 30, 2010 :: Opening Reception: March 2; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue on 68th Street, New York City.

Marta Minujin is a prominent voice of the Argentinean avant-garde art scene in the 1960s and 70s, with a brilliant international career that helped define the discussion about media, performance, and participation. Minujin is often mentioned as one of the pioneers of happenings.

MINUCODEs revisits an early project developed by the artist in 1968 at the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR), now Americas Society. For the Minucode, Minujin collected social data through a series of cocktail parties attended by readers who responded to questionnaires she posted in the press.

Drawing from strategies akin to the happening, and cinema verite, Minujin staged an immersive electronic environment in the gallery using footage from the parties, and set a series of “light and sound environments” created by selected guests in an adjacent room. The light environments were a collaboration between Minujin and artist Tony Martin.

Through original footage recently recovered and digitalized and archival documents, MINUCODEs illuminates this early work by a fundamental voice of the neo-avant-garde scene in Latin America in the 1960s. Additional documentation on Circuit (1967) and Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad (1966), collaboration with Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostel, will also be on display.

UPCOMING PUBLIC PROGRAMS

March 2. 6:00 pm :: Exhibition walk-through with the artist Marta Minujín and curators Gabriela Rangel and José Luis Blondet. Marta Minujín will provide a background and context for Minucode in this exclusive exhibition tour. The program will be introduced by Gabriela Rangel and Jose Luis Blondet who will discuss their curatorial vision and other relevant issues with the artist. This program will be followed by the exhibition opening reception.

March 22, 6:00 pm :: VIS-À-VIS SERIES: Javier Tellez and Doris Salcedo; Dialogues between artists, curators and critics from the Western Hemisphere: Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogota, Colombia; where she continues to live and work. Salcedo is one of the most internationally reputed contemporary artists, her work has been seen in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including: Tate Gallery, London (2007); Museu Serralves, Porto (2006); 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003); Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999) and the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (1998) amongst many others. Salcedo received a grant from the Penny McCall Foundation in 1993, and a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 1995.

Javier Téllez was born in Valencia, Venezuela, in 1969, and currently lives and works in New York. A key and respected figure in the contemporary art world, Téllez’s work has been shown at solo and group exhibitions including: Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); Baltic Art Centre, Visby, Sweden (2007); Aspen Art Museum (2006); The Power Plant Gallery, Toronto (2005); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2005); Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima, Peru (2002); and the 49th Venice Biennale (2001).

March 30. 6:00 pm :: Media a la Minujin: some notes; Lecture by Judi Rodenbeck (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sarah Lawrence College) and José Luis Blondet (Co-curator): The restaging of Marta Minujin’s Minucode provides the occasion to reconsider some of the ways in which media art and mediation have been thought through since the 1960s. Deeply engaged with thinking about exchange, whether through the light social tinkle of cocktail chatter or through the flutter and tweet of the satellite signal, the radical presentness of MINUCODEs in its contemporary relevance shows the artist also to have been something of a temporal medium, too.

April 13. 6:00 pm :: The World is so Boring: Panel Discussion with Alexander Alberro (Virginia Bloedel Wright Associate Professor of Art History, Barnard College, Columbia University), Carolee Schneemann (artist), Jenni Sorkin (Faculty and Graduate Committee, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College). Moderated by Gabriela Rangel (Co-curator)

Upgrade! Boston: Joseph DeLappe + Pete Froslie :: March 11, 2010; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Massachusetts Institute for Technology N51-390, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, 3rd Floor, Cambridge, MA (Entrance to the right of the MIT Museum).

Joseph DeLappe is an Associate Professor of the Department of Art at the University of Nevada where he directs the Digital Media program. Working with electronic and new media since 1983, his work in online gaming performance and electromechanical installation have been shown throughout the United States and abroad - including exhibitions and performances in Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Peru, China and the Netherlands. He was a 2008 Commissioned Resident Artist at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City. In his 2006 dead-in-iraq project, he began typing, consecutively, all of the names of America’s military casualties from the war in Iraq into the “America’s Army” first person shooter online recruiting game. More here.

Pete Froslie received his MFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art in 2008. He moved to Boston in 2005 from Reno, Nevada, where he earned his BFA in Digital Media. He returns to Reno periodically to teach courses at the University of Nevada, Reno, and to remain an active part of the community. In 2008 he was recognized as one of the top five graduating visual artists by the Boston Globe. His work has been discussed and highlighted online and in print, including MAKE, Gizmodo, the Boston Globe, RN&R, and the Reno Gazette. Froslie explores diverse tangents ranging from alternative historical fiction and documentary, to electro-mechanical sculpture and prostheses. More here.

Upgrade! Boston is curated by Jo-Anne Green for Turbulence.org. Founded in Januray 2005, is one of 32 nodes currently active in Upgrade! International, an emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. If you would like to present your work or get involved, please email jo at turbulence dot org.

The Studio: 19 Years + The Power Tool by Jon Brunberg :: February 25 - March 21, 2010 :: Opening and Conversation (Jon Brunberg & Catrin Lundqvist @ 6:15): February 25; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Moderna Museet, Box 16382, 10327 Stockholm, Sweden.

The Power Tool is an internet-based art work that offers you the possibility to measure your individual power. The piece is process-based and in continuous progress. Jon Brunberg has sharpened the tool for this exhibition, for its visitors, and their decisions regarding their own power. What is power? How powerful are you? With the power tool you can measure and analyse your power and compare your ranking with other users. Issues of individual power are a relatively new phenomenon, connected to ideas about individuality versus collectivity that are representative of our time. Who decides who has power? Can power be quantified? Metaphysical issues emerge as you start to answer the tool’s questionnaire.

Jon Brunberg’s art revolves around individual, collective and political power. He uses digital media to produce video sequences and internet-based systems and images.

19 years shows collective manifestations from 1989 to 2007, as dots on a world map, in 30 seconds. The starting point of the art work coincides with the year when the Berlin Wall fell. Early that year, the Muslim world was shaken by Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which caused widespread protests in many countries, including India and Pakistan, and in the early summer the Tiananmen Square in Beijing was the centre of the world’s attention. At a fast pace, 19 years presents one-day events in which thousands of people have participated in protest actions that were intended to be peaceful, although some of them escalated into riots or even led to coups d’état.

The Gothenburg Riots of 2001 are, of course, featured, along with the enormous demonstrations that took place on February 15, 2003, when the West was preparing to invade Iraq. The whole world protested on an unprecedented scale against the war plans, but to no avail. It may seem as though some of the events have gone unnoticed, although they were significant on a local level, for example when China put the lid on after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Although peaceful manifestations resumed after some time, few details reached the world and were rarely reported in the press, which has been Jon Brunberg’s main source. If you wish to learn more about his research methods and definitions, visit www.jonbrunberg.com/19y/.

RHA Presents Critique of Archival Reason featuring Herman Asselberghs, Jeremiah Day, Cecilia Gronberg (in collaboration with Jonas (J) Magnusson), Shoji Kato, Irene Kopelman, and Sean Snyder :: Curated by Henk Slager :: February 19 - March 13, 2010 :: Opening: February 18, 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: GradCAM, Royal HIbernian Academy, 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2, Ireland.

The concept of archive naturally seems to evoke an image of control and survey. For example, in The Order of Things, Foucault has described the archive as a system introducing order, meaning, boundaries, coherence and reason into what is disparate, confused, and contingent. The archive is a product of the will to represent, the desire for surveyability and transparency while emerging in modernity as a rigid scopic regime where multiformity and diversity have been reduced to levels of equivalence.

Starting with Duchamp, visual artists have engaged in the epistemology of the archival order. Artists appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured and interrogated archival structures and archival materials aiming at deconstructing them as compulsive, taxonomic knowledge systems. Para-archives were developed as a demonstration of the impossibility of categorizing the contingent for the sake of representation and to demand attention for a non-hierarchic heterogeneity and an anomic form of knowledge production. Hal Foster argues that by focusing on unacknowledged and repressed qualities, artistic archives show the essence of the archive as ‘found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’.

This fold-like nature also appears characteristic for the manner in which currently, topical, research-based art practice relates to the concept of archive. In line with Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, one could speak of transforming a noun into a verb, i.e. of a processual pleasure of archiving. Such an archiving is a rhizomatic activity and a ‘becoming archive’ where ultimately the will to connect what cannot be connected is decisive. New forms of display will emerge in connective mutations of entirely diverse registers. No longer is an archiving consciousness placed in the supportive narrative of a contextualizing infolab developed parallel to the exhibition. Rather a research-based practice knows how to present both constitutive segments in a fluent and integral manner. Such integral practices are the departure points for the exhibition Critique of Archival Reason.This is also a critique in the Kantian sense of an activity not determining apriori its criteria, but apostiori in a form of experimental and immanent research into decisive and separate faculties.

Exhibiting a book - inherently connotative of organization and order - appears to be one of the possible forms of presenting a critique of archival reason. A book functions as a montage table of imagination, and as a thinking machine, Cecilia Gronberg claims. Her telephone directory type work (in collaboration with Jonas (J) Magnusson) Reconnections: Transcription, Lists, Documents, Archives investigates the archive of the first Swedish telephone factory and interconnects conceptual art, Perec, archival aesthetics, French Maoism, record photography and Midsommarkransen’s local history. Irene Kopelman’s work Drawing Archive adopts a sculptural approach. The work shows that drawing - guaranteeing categorical, scientific knowledge in 19th-century archives - functions as an important method for artistic thinking in an artistic archive through a process of drawing differences. Installation work could engineer an exchange between the semiotic structure of the traditional archive and the imaginary connotation of the artistic archive, says Shoji Kato. Kato deploys literally the arthistorical opposition horizontal versus vertical. On the floor there is a scale-model-type representation of the economic infrastructure of a city; on the wall there is its painted, cartographic representation called Tie: Place and Symbols. Kato describes the emerging artistic process of thought fluctuating between the two pieces as an ‘embodied potentiality of plurality’.

A critical focus on mass media’s archival reason is demonstrated in various works. Mass media develop authentic forms of narrativity and fiction sometimes even based on an absolutely empty archive as Jeremiah Day’s work Fred Hampton’s Apartment shows. The singularity of the artist is absent in much documentary work. Therefore, in the form of narrative performances, Day pushes the artist back into the center. How should an artist relate to the role that ubiquitous digitization plays in producing a documentary practice? Sean Snyder’s work Index addresses that question through various formats of storage-media-images from his physical archive. The images have been destroyed and digitized, thus outlining a selective topology of the materials of artistic research. Herman Asselberghs delves into the question of what would happen with archiving the first decade of the 21st century if the mass media would omit 9/11 as icon for that period. His i-pod presentation Black Box shows 2/15 - the day when 30 million people demonstrated against starting a preventive war in Iraq - as an iconomic reassessment of 9/11.

This exhibition accompanies the conference Arts Research: Publics and Purposes. GradCAM-Dublin, 15.2-19.2. Keynote Speakers: Anton Vidokle (17/2/10) and Ute Meta Bauer (19/2/10). More information: www.gradcam.ie

This project is co-organised by the European Arts Research Network and GradCAM-Dublin with Centrifugal. This project is in part funded by the EC-EACEA Culture 2000–2007: ‘Artist as Citizen’ project. The project has been generously supported by the Mondriaan Foundation.

Spring 2010 Lecture Series: The Theatrical. The Performative. The Transformative. :: Mondays at 7:00 pm :: MIT’s Bartos Theater (Wiesner Bldg, E15), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA.

The Theatrical. The Performative. The Transformative. is a lecture series introducing key figures whose artistic practice is situated at the intersection of performance art, avant garde dance, and activist theater. Focusing on time-based and ephemeral formats that navigate between art, film, theater and dance, the series juxtaposes speakers of different generations and backgrounds who share an interest in feminist discourses and politics.

Production and Reception of the Visual :: February 22 :: Speaker: Xavier Le Roy :: Moderator: Nell Breyer: In this lecture, French choreographer Xavier Le Roy explores the relationships between the production and reception of the visual. What do spectators see? Watching a choreography, they see not only a form or a content, but processes at work during the production of the movements in rehearsals as well as during execution of the movements in performance. How and when are these relationships constructed?

Xavier Le Roy studied biochemistry at the University of Montpellier before beginning his dance career in 1988. He performed for various companies before founding his current company, in situ productions with Petra Roggel in 1999. From 2000 and on, Le Roy collaborated with world-renowned artists such as Jerome Bel and Yvonne Rainer and presented his work in various settings. He recently choreographed and performed Rites of Spring at Performa 07 in New York City; and another new work at the Montpellier Danse Festival 2008. Xavier Le Roy is in residence at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) this spring.

Moderator: Nell Breyer, a research affiliate at ACT, situates her work at the intersection of dance, new media, and visual art.

Xavier Le Roy will also perform at the Boston ICA on April 2 and 3 at 7:30 PM, and will present his work in progress from his residency at MIT on April 24, 7 PM, at the MIT Media Lab.

Dance on Top of Everyday Throwaways: Extreme Simultaneity :: March 1 :: Speaker: Constanza Macras :: Moderator: Jay Scheib: Constanza Macras, an Argentine choreographer based in Berlin, was recipient of the 2009-2010 Abramowitz Award. Macras and her company, DORKYPARK, create works that mix video, dance, text and music with a diverse cast of performers. Her work is based on everyday situations that interrupt themselves and accumulate, creating a form of hyper-narrative. Macras is at MIT through the Student & Artist-in-Residence Programs of the Office of the Arts and the William L. Abramowitz residency. Moderator Jay Scheib is Associate Professor for Music and Theater Arts at MIT and is a writer, director and designer.

The Bread and Puppet Theater :: March 8 :: Speaker: Peter Schumann :: Moderator: John Bell: Peter Schumann, legendary founder of The Bread and Puppet Theater will present a short ‘fiddle lecture’ illustrated with cantastoria banners. Moderator John Bell, long-time collaborator of Bread and Puppet Theater, will discuss with Schumann the theater’s use of public space, technology, the concept of progress, and the relations between puppet theater and modernism. The evening will end with a drum and fiddle performance. John Bell, a fellow at MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, is a puppeteer, scholar, and teacher.

It’s Real to Me :: March 15 :: Speaker: Magda Fernandez :: Moderator: Amber Frid-Jimenez: Magda Fernandez, a Boston-based artist, creates synthetic video worlds that question our real lives in contemporary times. Fernandez’s videos rely liberally on composite technology and special effects to make sense out of the nonsensical. Fernandez will screen four of her videos and discuss their subjects and means of production. Amber Frid-Jimenez is a lecturer in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

Stylistic Economies, Reenactments, and Choreographic Regimes :: April 5, 2010 :: Speaker: Catherine Sullivan :: Moderator: Jane Farver: Catherine Sullivan’s works engage a variety of media-theater, film, video, photography, writing and sculpture. Sullivan will discuss the numerous layers of collaboration and reference apparent in her work, and the anxious and unresolved political and social sensibility that it gives rise to. Catherine Sullivan is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. Jane Farver is a curator and the director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Where’s the Passion :: April 12 :: Speaker: Yvonne Rainer :: Moderator: Joan Jonas: Yvonne Rainer made a transition to filmmaking following a fifteen-year career as a choreographer/dancer. Where’s the Passion is a lecture in which notions of self-expression, impersonation, and the politics of looking and being looked at are examined, accompanied by documentations of two of her recent performances. Rainer is a professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine. Joan Jonas is a pioneer in video and performance art and a professor in the MIT Program of Art, Culture and Technology.

Text: Free and Indirect. A Future :: April 26 :: Speaker: Eva Meyer :: Moderator: Ute Meta Bauer: Eva Meyer, a writer and filmmaker based in Berlin, will screen and discuss Sie k?nnte zu Ihnen geh?ren/She Might Belong to you, a 37-minute film Meyer created with artist Eran Schaerf in 2007 for Skulptur Projekte Münster. Meyer describes the film: ‘With the passing of time she has become clairvoyant….She could go beyond the perceptive and sensitive states of experience and entrust sensations surpassing them to a future perception.’ Ute Meta Bauer is a curator and director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

ABOUT THE SERIES

The Lecture Series is dedicated to Joan Jonas, a pioneer in video and performance art and a professor in the MIT Program of Art, Culture and Technology. Jonas is the 2010 recipient of the Gyorgy Kepes Fellowship Prize presented by the Council for the Arts at MIT on April 15, 2010. The series is directed by Associate Professor Ute Meta Bauer, Director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) in collaboration with ACT Professor Joan Jonas, and ACT Lecturer Amber Frid-Jimenez. The lecture series was made possible in part by the Grants Program of the Council for the Arts at MIT. Thanks also for support from the MIT Artist-in-Residence (AiR) Program.

ABOUT US

The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) is a merger of the Visual Arts Program (VAP) and The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). The program emphasizes the development of artistic practices focusing on artistic research and transdisciplinary studies. ACT offers a two-year Masters of Science in Visual Studies (SMVisS).

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HOLD THE DATE
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March 13, 2010 - Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art Parody, Politics, and Performativity, Saturday, March 13, 3PM, Stata Center, presented by the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

April 15, 2010 - The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) is celebrating its official inauguration with an Open House and day of activities in Buildings E14 and E15 presenting various projects by our current SMVisS graduate students, ACT fellows and affiliates, the launch of new ACT website and the release of Engaged a DVD celebrating 20 years of the MIT Visual Arts Program in collaboration with Aspect: the Chronicle of New Media Art featuring works by VAP faculty and alumni. More details TBA.

rAndom International, Wayne McGregor, et al @ EMPAC: Dr. Philip Barnard: Cognition, Emotion and Action (TALK) :: February 17; 7:00 pm :: Dr. Philip Barnard, Scott deLahunta, Wayne McGregor on R-Research (panel discussion) :: February 23; 6:00 pm :: rAndom International: Real-Time Reactive Systems in Art and Design (TALK) :: February 24; 7:00 pm :: Wayne McGregor | Random Dance: ENTITY (PERFORMANCE) :: February 26 - 27, 2010, 8:00 pm :: EMPAC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY.

For two weeks, the London-based dance company Wayne McGregor | Random Dance is pursuing a creative residency at EMPAC, investigating tools, ideas, and visual design concepts for their current work-in-progress. Their work involves collaborations in research on the cognition of choreography and the development of new directions in scenography. To open up the process to our audience, talks and a panel discussion by collaborators, research partners, and Artistic Director Wayne McGregor are happening throughout the residency period. At the end of their stay, the company will perform ENTITY, a magnificent work of dance, sound and video projection.

Working at the fringes of innovation in science, art and design, rAndom International have developed a series of projects and installations that aim to re-interpret the ‘cold’ nature of digital-based work by providing the viewer with the opportunity for a more hands-on experience with technology. Their work emphasizes the ephemeral quality of information, harbors an intense curiosity toward experimental processes, and includes a body of diverse installations, commissioned works, and performance projects. More recently, rAndom International has investigated the potential of endowing usually inanimate objects and environments with behavioral qualities. As part of their evolving relationship with Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, they are designing the scenography for the company’s current work in progress to be premiered in 2010.

The 2010 Comparative Literature Symposium: Longing in the Age of New Media :: February 19, 2010; 10:00 am - 4:00 pm :: University of Southern California, Social Sciences Building, B40, Los Angeles, CA.

In the current age of new media, various fields of study are experiencing a literal vanishing of the very materials that have traditionally defined them. With this disappearance of the physical material, how has our perception and interaction with the new medium altered? Does the end of the age of mechanical reproduction lead to a resurgence of the aura in older media? Is this the result of nostalgia for the tactile or other sensory experiences that no longer act together in the same way? How does the designation of spectral / material change across different media?

Join us for the 2010 Comparative Literature Symposium, a dynamic discussion of these and other questions related to the theme of longing in the age of new media. In the morning keynote speaker Timothy Murray, Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University and author of Digital Baroque: New Media and Art and Cinematic Folds, will lead a roundtable discussion of papers by graduate students Fiorella Cotrina, (Wo(man) Writing Self and Corporeal Other in Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela), Phillip Lobo (Play It Again: Variance and Repetition in Interactive Media), Zach Blas (Queer Technologies? Topology and Viral Aesthetics) and Feng-Mei Heberer (Bodies in digital context). These papers can be accessed on the USC Comparative Literature website. In the afternoon Professor Murray will give a lecture related to the themes of the symposium, followed by a question and answer session. Lunch will be provided.

Please spread the word to students, faculty, and colleagues. We look forward to seeing you at the symposium.

Arrested Time by Nathaniel Stern with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger — An exhibition of works combining contemporary technologies with traditional drawing and printmaking methods curated by Jo-Anne Green :: February 26 - April 3, 2010 :: Opening Reception: February 26; 5:30 - 8:30 pm :: Greylock Arts, 93 Summer Street, Adams MA.

Nathaniel Stern’s Given Time simultaneously activates and performs two permanently logged-in Second Life avatars, each forever and only seen by and through the other. They hover in mid-air, almost completely still, gazing into one another’s interface. Viewers encounter this networked partnership as a diptych of large-scale (8 feet tall) and facing video projections in a real world gallery, both exhibiting a live view of one avatar, as perceived by the other. To create a visceral aesthetic, these custom-designed and life-sized “bodies” are hand-drawn in subtly animated graphite and charcoal. The audience is invited to physically walk between them; they’re able to hear and see them breathing, witness their hair blowing in the wind, pick up faint sounds such as rushing water or birds crying out from the surrounding simulated environment. Here, an intimate exchange between dual, virtual bodies is transformed into a public meditation on human relationships, bodily mortality, and time’s inevitable flow.

In Distill Life, Stern and Meuninck-Ganger approach both old and new media as form. They permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving images on paper. They incorporate technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking - including woodblock, silk screen, etching, lithography, photogravure etc - with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, to explore images as multidimensional. Their juxtaposition of anachronistic and disparate methods, materials and content - print and video, paper and electronics, real and virtual - enables novel approaches to understanding each. The artists work with subject matter ranging from historical portraiture to current events, from artificial landscapes to socially awkward moments.

With Arrested Time, Green curates an exhibition of Stern’s solo and collaborative work that explores the juxtaposition of old and new media, and illuminates the possibilities and limitations of both. The works hover between stasis and motion, texture and light, line and pixel, past and present, paper and screen, surface and depth, one artist and another.

http://nathanielstern.com
http://jessicameuninck.com

Thursday Club: Igor Štromajer & Ballettikka Internettikka [Internet Ballet] :: February 18, 2010; 6:30 - 8:30 pm :: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, South East London.

Ballettikka Internettikka (Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman) is the umbrella name for a series of tactical art projects which began in 2001 with the exploration of Internet ballet. It explores wireless Internet ballet performances combined with guerrilla tactics and mobile live Internet broadcasting strategies. Igor will discuss some of these projects as outlined below.

“We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight them on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.” (W. Churchill)

From 2001 to 2009 twenty different Ballettikka Internettikka actions have been performed:

• Net Ballet – Internet, 2001
• Ballet Net – The Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, Russia, 2002
• M-III Robot Ballet – Bergen International Theatre, Bergen, Norway, 2003
• BRVI – Ballettikka RealVideo Internettikka – Television Slovenia - Cultural Program, U3, 2003
• Autto Mobillikka – Ljubljana Motorway Ring, Slovenia, 2003
• Illegallikka Robottikka – Teatro alla Scala, Milan, Italy, 2004
• BEO Guerrillikka – National Theatre, Belgrade, Serbia, 2005
• VolksNetBallet – Volksbühne, Berlin, Germany, 2006
• Commerciallikka – Internet / Heineken Draughtkeg, 2007/2008
• Portraits – Internet, 2007
• Aeronauttikka – Internet, 2007
• RenminNetBallet – Hong Kong City Hall, 2007
• Stattikka – CYNETart, Trans-Media-Akademie Hellerau, Dresden, Germany, 2007
• Olymppikka – Internet, Fire Polygon, 2008
• Religgikka – Internet, 2008
• SubAquattikka – Internet, 2008
• Hydraullikka – Plaza del Rey, Madrid, Spain, 2008
• Intermenttikka – Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea, 2008
• Norddikka – Svalbard, Norway, Arctic Ocean, 2008/2009
• Nipponnikka – Minami Torishima, Japan, Pacific Ocean, 2009

Ballettikka Internettikka uses impossible connections to develop the possible strategies of resistance and disobedience. The project participates in the already existing protocols of communication, yet without being servile to these protocols, it opens up links between emotionality and technology, production and ethics, desire and organization, imagination and institution. The distribution of politics and intimacy without any reason and purpose, with the use of limited, defined, and controlled protocols is a dystopia and an unsubmissive revolt to the world of capital, which can be disarmed only by the use of its own tactics.

Ballettikka Internettikka is a co-production of Intima Virtual Base and Cona 2001–2009 and Aksioma 2003.
Theoretical Adviser: Bojana Kunst
Spatial Adviser: Irena Pivka

In the years 2001–2009 the project was financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Ministry of Culture of the Kingdom of Spain, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, Norsk Kulturfond, Arts Council Korea, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong Cultural Service Department, the Municipality of Madrid, the Municipality of Dresden, the Municipality of Belgrade, the Municipality of Ljubljana, Epson.

The work of Ballettikka Internettikka is also featured in and essay by Bojana Kunst published in the volume Interfaces of Performance now available from Ashgate Publishing (edited by Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X] (University of Hull), Janis Jefferies (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Rachel Zerihan (Queen Mary, University of London)).

d-CLIC Danse + Danse numérique + Performance audiovisuelle :: Vendredi 19 février 2010 à 21h :: Théâtre de Verdure & Salle de cinéma, Institut français Léopold Sédar Senghor, 89 rue Joseph T. Gomis, Dakar, Sénégal.

Danse numérique: Une pièce chorégraphique dirigée par Andréya Ouamba, avec 15 danseurs africains et 3 artistes du collectif RYBN (Paris), issue d’un atelier de création basé sur l’exploration, l’expérimentation et l’appropriation des technologies numériques (captation, interaction, temps-réel, vidéo, son, lumière). Cet atelier est organisé en février 2010 à Dakar par Trias Culture et l’Association 1er Temps.

“RGBa” est une performance audiovisuelle du collectif RYBN, qui explore simultanément les spectres des couleurs et des sons et propose aux spectateurs une expérience multi-sensorielle inédite.

Coordination générale: Maria Luisa Angulo & Karen Dermineur (Trias Culture)
Direction artistique: Andréya Ouamba (Association 1er Temps)
Partenaires: Institut français Léopold Sédar Senghor (Dakar), Association 1er Temps (Dakar), Incident (Art et Technologies, Paris)
Merci à: Matthieu Cupillard (vidéo), Elise Fitte-Duval (photo)
Projet “d-CLIC”: des outils pour le secteur culturel et la création numérique en Afrique; une initiative mise en place par Trias Culture à Dakar
Danseurs: Maria Luisa Angulo, Fatou Cissé, Alioune Diagne, Bamba Diagne, Sadou Diallo, Alioune B. Diop, Ibou Diop, Nicole Gomis, Codou Gueye, Moussa Issiaka, Bouba Mané, Momar K. Ndiaye, Fatou Samb, Nabou Seck & Ndiankou Wade

Office for the Arts at Harvard presents The Art-Science Nexus: Two Talks: February 23, 2010; 4:00 pm: Meaning, Matter, and Measurement: A Choreography of Science and Art by Liz Lerman ::February 24, 2010; 4:00 pm: Hypermusic Prolouge: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes by Hèctor Parra and Lisa Randall :: New College Theatre, 10-12 Holyoke Street, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

Liz Lerman, “Meaning, Matter, and Measurement: A Choreography of Science and Art.” Lerman, founder of the Maryland-based Dance Exchange, will reflect on her collaborations with scientists and dancers to explore such topics as genomics, particle physics, and the nature of discovery. Moderated by dance critic and journalist Debra Cash.

Hèctor Parra and Lisa Randall, “Hypermusic Prolouge: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes.” Composer Parra and librettist Randall, the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science in Harvard’s Department of Physics, will discuss their multimedia music-theater piece. Moderated by arts journalist Alicia Anstead.

Admission free (tickets or RSVPs not required)
Information: 617.495.8676 or ofa.fas.harvard.edu/lfp/

Center for Contemporary & Digital Performance Research Seminar Series: The Rise of the Bio-Virtual: Non-place, Disappearance, Indistinction (Life in the Digital Kamp) by Matthew Causey :: February 17, 2010; 2:00 pm (GMT) :: Drama Studio Gaskell Bld. 048, School of Arts, Brunel University, Uxbridge/West London, Cleveland Road + The one hour talks and 30-minute discussions are webcast live on dance tech net TV (then archived).

Within the super-saturation of virtuality and technological reproductions in contemporary digital culture are established zones and terrains of indistinction and disappearance (digital kamps). These electronic environments I would nominate as examples of the bio-virtual (perhaps a post-virtual) and model the fields as a space of bio-politics par excellence. For the virtual is not simply virtual anymore as its affect within us is haptic and somatic and leads us to identify the phenomena as a taking place (within the non-place) of the (bio)virtual. The (bio)virtual or post-virtual is no longer a problem of the desert of the real, of representational illusions, but an entrance of a new biopolitics of techno-performativity of doubles and debris veiled through indistinction, confusion, excess. The subject’s role in these digital kamps is one of disappearance: a public denial and a private deferment. My research considers the aftermath of the digital revolution and the resulting bio-political zones of indistinction constructed of bio-virtual doubles, avatars and digital debris.

Dr. Causey is Director of Trinity College Dublin’s Arts Technology Research Laboratory (ATRL). ATRL is an interdisciplinary, postgraduate research centre designed to explore emergent art forms of that are networked, interactive, multimedia, hybrid, virtual, immersive and ubiquitous. He is the author of Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture: from simulation to embeddedness (Routledge, 2006, 2009). Dr. Causey is currently in production on Abstract Machines: Staging the Televisual Beckett, which translates Beckett’s late television plays to technologized performance works.

The Center broadcasts selected Performance Research Seminars live from the Drama Studio - making them available to anyone in the world interested in the subject.

This co-production is part of a partnership between our Center and dance-techTV, and an experiment in collaborative live -streaming (the channel is dedicated to interdisciplinary explorations of the performance of movement. The channel allows worldwide 24/7 linear broadcasting of selected programs, LIVE streaming and Video On-demand.

Purple Blurb Spring 2010 Series: Roderick Coover & Nitin Sawhney, Stephanie Strickland, Jeremy Freese & Emily Short, John Cayley & Daniel C. Howe :: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 14E-310, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA.

Roderick Coover & Nitin Sawhney * VIDEO :: March 1; 5:30 - 7:00 pm ** Stephanie Strickland * POETRY :: March 8; 5:30 - 7:00 pm ** Jeremy Freese & Emily Short * INTERACTIVE FICTION :: March 29; 5:30 - 7:00 pm ** John Cayley & Daniel C. Howe * POETRY :: April 28; 7:30 - 9:00 pm.

Open Up — an advanced project development workshop for the digital facade of Medialab-Prado :: February 9-23, 2010 :: Lecture by Jennifer Steimkamp: February 16; 7:00 pm (streamed live) :: Medialab Prado, Plaza de las Letras, C/ Alameda, 15 Madrid.

Open Up is a project production workshop for the digital facade of Medialab-Prado, that aims to explore the relationship with the urban space by opening production processes through different citizen participation strategies. Tutors: Jordi Claramonte, Chandler McWilliams, Casey Reas and Víctor Viña. Directed by Nerea Calvillo. Technical assistants: Massimo Avvisati and Chris Sugrue.

Film, Video & New Media and the Upgrade! Chicago present: Danielle Wilde: Swing that Thing, a presentation on body-worn devices for performance and play :: February 9, 2010; 6:00 pm :: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MacLean building, Room 1307, 13th floor, 112 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago.

Australian artist and scholar Danielle Wilde will elaborate an emergent definition of poetic body-worn devices for performance and play, that encourage people to move in unusual ways; and a series of non-augmented devices that explore how we might conceive of and develop technologies that we can’t yet imagine. By extending the body, mechanically, gesturally and sensorially we can encourage people to move in extra-normal ways, so view and experience their bodies from perhaps hitherto unknown perspectives. This affords insight into how our bodies can move and what this feels like, and the idiosyncratic nature of personal, corporeal expressiveness… extends the body with soft prosthetics to remind us of an inner state and encourage magical thinking!

Danielle Wilde has an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in London, and is completing a practice-based PhD at Monash University, Melbourne; at the CSIRO, Belmont; and from March 2010, at Tokyo University, Japan. Her investigation is concerned with how extending the body with technology might extend our poetic and expressive potential, and what this might mean. Outcomes include cultural artefacts, as well as tools for supporting an integration of the poetic in Rehabilitation and Disability – engaging the body through the imagination and the imagination through the body to form an emergent, embodied, creative feedback loop that can impact experiences in everyday life. Underlying these concerns is a pragmatic examination of the impact of different choices relevant to the development of physically engaging body-worn technologies, including interface; interaction; and where the attention of observer and participant might lie at any time.