I’m speaking on the New Media Caucus-sponsored panel “Spontaneous Combustion!” organized by Preston Poe for the upcoming College Art Association conference next week in Los Angeles. The panel will take place on February 25th at 10am at The Velaslavay Theatre. Full details below:
Spontaneous Combustion!
“Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.”
-Marshall McLuhan
This panel will explore the dynamics of social networking sites and open source software as it is being utilized in postmodern digital art practice. Currently, artists are collaborating, networking, performing and creating interventions in social, political and conceptual art utilizing frameworks created under a variety of contexts.
Preston Poe, Panel Chair
Preston Poe is an artist working with a wide range of media, often creating site-based performance and installation, as well as New Media Professor, and Director of The Electronic Gallery at Salisbury University.
He will share his experiences as artist, programmer, collaborator and facilitator in the context of the broad range of performance-based social sculpture and site-specific New Media.
Lee Montgomery, “My Greatest Successes: Improvisation, Documentation and Failure”
By presenting several examples of works from his own career, Lee will reveal the failures that most defined some of his more successful works, and how those failures were redeemed or diminished by subsequent documentation.
Lee Montgomery is the founder of Neighborhood Public Radio (an ongoing, eight year long, transmission based collaborative project with social practice overtones) and is Assistant Professor of Electronic Art in the Department of Art
and Art History at the University of New Mexico. Lee’s work with his collaborators in NPR has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, The DeYoung Museum, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Ceci Moss, “Internet Aware, Post Internet, Expanded Internet: Recent Developments in Internet-Based Art Practice”
Ceci Moss is a PhD candidate and an Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice, digital technology and perception, the materiality of media, postmodernism and digital art preservation.
Within the last 5 years or so, two terms have cropped up in discussion of contemporary internet-based art – “internet aware art” and “post internet art.” These works are not intended to be viewed and experienced exclusively online, but are seen as always having the potential to go offline, in many cases becoming physical objects. The dispersed nature of many of these works also allows multiple forms of engagement, across a number of different contexts. This paper will review these concepts of “post-internet” or “internet aware” art while also providing examples of recent internet-based art practice that seems
to pertain to these ideas by artists such as David Horvitz, Artie Vierkant, Kari Altmann, Travess Smalley, Mark Leckey, Seth Price, Samara Golden, Anne de Vries and others. Why, within the past 5 years, have internet artists been so attentive to the materiality of their projects, often working both on and offline? How does this relate to a digitally-informed experience of being in public? Is this a response to shifting conditions within the space of the internet itself, brought on by social media, expanded bandwidth (allowing the faster transmission of video, images, sound, animation, etc.), and a limitless landscape of data? Are we seeing the emergence of expanded internet-based art, perhaps akin to expanded cinema?
Joseph Delappe, HEAD SHOT! Performative Interventions in Online Gaming.
Joseph DeLappe is a 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, China, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada.
Delappe’s work as a performance artist operating in online gaming contexts is uniquely situated as an ontological explorer through the promulgation of political agency, critical mischief, and hacktivist positioning. He’ll direct his focus towards two of his most recent projects engaging in durational performative actions online. dead-in-iraq (2006 – 2011) was an in-game protest/memorial taking place in America’s Army, the popular Defense Department funded recruiting first person shooter, wherein the names of fallen United States military are typed by the author into the game’s text messaging system. He has also engaged in the creative reenactment of aspects from the life of Mahatma Gandhi in the online community. These include, The Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi’s March to Dandi in Second Life, (2008) involved the creative reenactment of Gandhi’s famous 240 mile, 1930 protest march in what was a mixed reality durational performance work involving a specially converted treadmill.
Robert Lawrence, “Performance, Space and Time: Site Specific Activities”
Robert Lawrence will share with the panel and attendees several open source tools and strategies developed for simultaneous web streaming of live video from international dispersed mobile devices. These will be presented in the context of their application in his own Tango Intervention series that has been produced in 33 international cities, most recently as part of Exchange Radical Moments, a live art festival in 11 cities in Europe on 11-11-11.
Interdisciplinary artist Robert Lawrence has engaged the unique conceptual opportunities of the Internet to examine issues of location, of ‘site’, of physical and cultural ‘position’. He approaches electronic art as social sculpture and
he is very interested in the ways that digital technologies are reformulating the formerly restrictive rolls of media producer and media consumer. All his work is developed in three complimentary – and often contradictory – streams: one in
the physical world, one in the virtual world, and one in the media world. Through this hybrid practice he directly engages the way contemporary life is lived, and identity is continually reconstructed, through our engagements with real, mediated and virtual influences.
Ei Jane Janet Lin, “Humanity at its Best”
Ei Jane Janet Lin is a Chicago-based performance/video artist with a fiber and material studies background from Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Maryland Institute College
of Art. Her work deals with the many complex, contentious and multi-layered relationships existing between the East and the West, reality and fantasy, and convention and transgression through performances of sexuality and power exchange in art and pornography.
In my collaborative performance video works with artist Miao Jiaxin, I document humanity through sharp juxtapositions between contrasting virtual and analog worlds. With my collaborator, I interacted online with the community of cam4 in
explicitly Performance Art oriented interventions. The website cam4 describes itself accurately as ‚”Free Live Sex Webcams – Free Live Cams Sex Chat‚”. My performances play with the expectations and limits of the cam4 community, flowing in and out of variously experimental erotic, comedic and theatrical moments.
