I’ll be speaking on a roundtable in two weeks at the art fair artMRKT in San Francisco on Saturday May 18th from 11:30am-12:30pm. The conversation will focus on new media art and cultural institutions, and is entitled “Beyond Bay Lights: What is the role of cities and cultural institutions in creating visibility for the digital arts?”. Full details below.

Beyond Bay Lights: What is the role of cities and cultural institutions in creating visibility for the digital arts?
Open to All Fair Attendees

Saturday, May 18th | 11:30AM – 12:30PM | Discussion Theater
Artists, curators, gallerists, city officials and collectors will discuss making, collecting, selling, exhibiting, maintaining, and supporting new media in contemporary art. What is the role of the city relative to tech companies and artists working with technology as a medium? What are the unique issues facing artists making work using digital technology? What are the issues facing collectors and exhibiting institutions relative to new and time based media? What role do cultural organizations play in creating visibility for the field? Panelists include artists Anthony Discenza, Laurie Frick and George Legrady; collector Ron Casentini; Catharine Clark of Catharine Clark Gallery; Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer for the Mayor’s Office of the City of San Francisco and Ceci Moss, Assistant Curator at YBCA. The panel will be moderated by Joel Slayton, Executive Director of ZERO1.

My very first project for YBCA opens this Friday, March 1st. I will be presenting the work Lake by New York-based artist Erin Shirreff. Lake will be on view through June 30, 2013 in YBCA’s upstairs video lounge. You can read more about the work below. (Art21 also shot a short documentary on Shirreff’s practice and the process behind Lake, which you can peep here.)

Erin Shirreff: Lake
Mar 1-Jun 30
YBCA Video Lounge

Throughout the video’s long duration, the illumination of the scene mimics the bright light of the sun and moon, drawing the viewer into the semblance of a natural landscape. This experience alternates with an awareness by the viewer of the techniques used to create this illusion, brought on by the play of effects across the surface of the photograph. In Shirreff’s videos, this fluctuation between natural and artificial affect, stillness and motion, flatness and depth, creates an uncanny visual experience that disrupts our familiar relationship with pictures, reminding us that they are textured, temporal things.

I’m giving a talk next week about my first dissertation chapter on expanded internet art from my residency at RTS in Oakland, alongside the incoming RTS resident Carson Fisk-Vittori. A short synopsis of the project can be found here. Pumped!

Photo of my desk at RTS. Poster in the background by David Horvitz.

For December and January, I will be a resident at Real Time & Space in Oakland. I will complete a lecture and a small publication as part of the residency, which is exciting! RTS maintains an active community of artists, curators, academics, and writers involved with the space, and I feel lucky to be part of it. I proposed to work on my dissertation, whose somewhat boring working title at the moment is “The Informational Milieu and Expanded Internet Art.” I hope to write the first chapter of this project at RTS, which will contextualize and elaborate the notion of “expanded internet art.” Here’s a quick synopsis of the chapter, cobbled together from my dissertation proposal and a recent grant application:

In this chapter, I will discuss internet art as the ultimate form of an “expanded” art work, drawing from the definition of expansion as “the state of being spread out or unfolded.” While I plan to review internet art in the 1990s, I will concentrate on contemporary internet art (from the mid-2000′s onward) in an effort to understand this work as it relates to major technological and cultural shifts such as social media, smart phones, and faster bandwidth, etc. I will review the debates and terminology surrounding the decentralized quality of much contemporary internet art, such as critic Gene McHugh’s take on the concept of “post-internet” in his book of the same title, critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Postproduction, and artist Seth Price’s essay and artwork Dispersion. This section will additionally cover the artists and curatorial projects that speak to this sensibility, focusing on the work of Kari Altmann, Artie Vierkant, David Horvitz, Harm van den Dorpel, and Oliver Laric, as well as curatorial platforms, like Club Internet and jstchillin. Drawing from Tiziana Terranova’s idea of an “informational milieu” elaborated in Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age and Gilbert Simondon’s work, my chapter will envision these projects as existing in a continual process of unfolding aided by their state as data on a network. Their expansion is not an outward movement from a fixed essence, but rather a continual becoming.

I’ve been knocking around the skeleton for this chapter for quite awhile now, from my talk at the New Media Caucus panel “Spontaneous Combustion!” at CAA earlier this year to the Seventeen Gallery exhibition Motion. I’m hoping to use my time at RTS to make some headway on my diss, which feels good.

Join us on November 9th at 6PM for “Architecture and Computation” with speakers Keller Easterling (Architecture, Yale) and Erica Robles (MCC, NYU). This will be the first event in this year’s PROGRAM: Media and Literature lecture series.

Architecture and Computation

19 University Place, Great Room
New York, NY 10003
Map: http://goo.gl/maps/f2ad3

http://www.programseries.com

Free and Open to the Public

“PROGRAM” is an interdisciplinary event series organized by graduate students within New York University’s Media, Culture and Communication, English, and Comparative Literature Departments. Intentionally broad in scope, the series will present talks that explore the cultural, historical, aesthetic and political impact of software and programming logic.

This first event in our year-long lecture series explores the intersection of architecture and the logic of computation. How does computation structure our physical world, and in what ways has the function of computational media been applied to the spaces we inhabit?


Keller Easterling (Yale University, Architecture)

Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure and Political Arts
Repeatable formulas and spatial products make most of the space in the world. Now, not only buildings but also entire cities have become spatial products that typically reproduce free zone world cities like Shenzhen or Dubai. Space has become a mobile, monetized, almost infrastructural, technology, where infrastructure is not only the urban substructure, but also the urban structure itself. Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of this matrix space. Massive global infrastructure systems, administered by mixtures of public and private cohorts and driven by profound irrationalities, generate de facto, undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them—a wilder mongrel than any storied Leviathan for which we have studied political response. Infrastructure space is one crucible within which multiple fields of analysis encounter ample complexity, and it tutors special approaches to both form making and political arts.


Keller Easterling is is an architect, urbanist, writer, and Professor of Architecture at Yale University. Her latest project is titled Extrastatecraft.

Erica Robles (New York University, MCC)

Mediated Congregation: The Crystal Cathedral and God’s Place in a Networked WorldThis talk focuses on an often-overlooked institution that has helped produce and legitimate transformations in 20th century social life: the church. Through an analysis of the Crystal Cathedral Robles situates Protestant spatial production within a broader project of cultural re-formation whereby collective life became conducted via increasingly mediated, mobile, and distributed arrangements. For more than half a century, this influential Southern California ministry helped reshape the style and material conditions for worship. At its height, the Crystal Cathedral was perhaps the most visible Protestant church in the world.

Robles will render three distinctive and successive portraits of the church as a drive-in theater (1955-1957), an indoor-outdoor/television church (1962-1970), and then a globally-broadcast, glass and steel cathedral (1980 – 2012). Each site was a re-imagining of the socio-technical conditions for communion. Together, these portraits will trace a trajectory from the post-war to the present whereby the church helped determine technological and architectural meanings. By designing for mediated congregation, ministries like the Crystal Cathedral inscribed the production of broadcast and then networked geographies with spiritual significance. In so doing, they also translated Christian cosmology into a new technological regime.

Erica Robles is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

Upcoming 2012-2013 PROGRAM events

Media Archaeology with Matthew Kirschenbaum and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, March 1st, 2013

Values in Technological Design with Geoffrey Bowker and Sara Hendren, April 12th, 2013

http://www.programseries.com/

The series is sponsored by NYU’s Information Futures, the Humanities Initiative, and the Departments of Media Culture, and Communication, English, and Comparative Literature.

Artist Yoshi Sodeoka directed this music video for Medved’s “Early” which appeared on the Archives I tape. Check it out!

We finally set up a bandcamp page for Medved. All our tracks are free or pay what you want. I’m also selling copies of two limited edition c20 tapes through the site for $6. Tracks from bandcamp below.

Archives I c20 tape

Archives II c20 tape

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My new project with Paul Haney will debut this Friday at La Sala in Brooklyn. Full info below!

Lussuria
Alberich
DeTrop
Medved

Live visuals by Phillip Stearns + DJ’s Casey Block and Sybil Jason

Friday, July 20th, 2012
8:30 p.m.
La Sala
Brooklyn, NY
$7

Lussuria is a mysterious one-man dark ambient project that has recorded numerous releases for Hospital Productions as well as Razors And Medicine and Destructive Industries.

Alberich is the solo recording industrial/power electronics of Kris Lapke (Ash Pool, Northern Cross, Football Rabbit). Numerous Alberich recordings have seen release on Hospital Productions; Lapke is also a prolific in the fields of recording, engineering, and mastering.

DeTrop is a modular noise/ambient trio consisting of Ryan Martin (York Factory Complaint, founder of the Robert & Leopold label and part-owner of Dais Records), Theresa Smith (York Factory Complaint/Bleak Race/Home Blitz), and David Grant (Action Patro/lHeks Orkest/Ideal Forms).

Medved is the industrial/noise duo of Ceci Moss (Cellular Chaos, Mi Or And The Pedestals, host of Radio Heart on East Village Radio) and Paul Haney (Rust Worship, founder of the Obsolete Units label). This show will mark their debut live performance.

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On June 17th, Lazurite did a live set on East Village Radio. Lazurite is the solo project of Megan Moncrief, mostly employing the ukelin (an oddball 36-stringed invention sold door to door during the Great Depression). String drones, feedback, and percussive strikes bleed together with synths, homemade effects, and drum loops, all processed through the ominous digital buzz of a stack of throwaway pedals. The first Lazurite tape, Secular Geometry, was self-released in 2011. A forthcoming self-titled release will come out on Fabrica later this summer.

You can listen to an archive of the show here.

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