Over the past year in San Diego I have met many artists using technology in thoughtful, unexpected ways, artists exploring questions about the nature of experience and materiality and proposing new ideas for an expanded field of art in the digital age. The resulting exhibition reflects an exceptional depth, breadth and variety of artistic inquiry.
The original premise of the Ephemeral Objects project was inspired by an offhand comment made several years ago by Jenny Schlenzka, then an Associate Curator at MoMA PS1, at a panel discussion on Why Dance in the Art World? Ms. Schlenzka offered that she was fascinated by dance because it compelled her to “re-think the exhibition in the post-object world.” I found this statement problematic for several reasons, not least of which is that we are not, by any means, in a post-object world. I immediately thought of Object Oriented Programming, the concept of the “social object” and of the “performance object” – all using the idea of “object” in very specific contexts not predicated on material culture or collecting. The real question she seemed to be asking was “How do we re-think the exhibition in a post-material, world?”
This is one of the questions we are asking with the Ephemeral Objects exhibition at San Diego Art Institute. What happens when we expand the definition of an “object” beyond materiality and fully embrace the idea of museum, or gallery, as site of experience? What happens when we consider the gallery as a liminal space not defined by walls, but as a transitory locus of meaning, a data hub, a dynamic environment where ideas, information and people come together to be transformed through shared experience then move back out into the everyday?
In a digital, networked world, the idea of art object as nexus of ideas and information is especially resonant, thus many of the artists in Ephemeral Objects use data and code as material. Max Nanis’ Humans as Objects:Instrumentation interrogates sexual objectification behaviors online, proposing human object ephemerality. Nanis has written a C algorithm that surfs the web based on crowd-sourced datasets drawn from anonymously surveyed individuals that were asked, “What institution, news outlet, media provider, or entertainment company objectifies either gender for personal gain?” Linking offline objectification with online behavior, Nanis proposes that human beings are both objects of ephemeral interest and consumers of cultural objectification. The autonomous computer uses the generated list of URLs to emulate a person browsing the Internet, offering a voyeuristic glimpse into online behavior. A companion piece, 2.0, can be considered a proposal on software object ephemerality, a durational “performance of fragility” in which the computer runs a script that compiles and runs several of the multiple software programs on which the Internet is built until it experiences compilation failure and stops. The programs were written using OOP (or as close to OOP design patterns as possible), so, as Max has explained, “not only is the software an object of fragility – it was originally conceived as a more literal interpretation of software objects (in a OOP sense) as the ephemeral object.”
Sosolimited’s Non-visible Data Area uses code to strip extra data from an analog television signal and render it as type on a screen, deconstructing mass media before our very eyes. Cooper Baker’s Spectral Teletype is an interactive audio-visual piece that turns text messages into melodies, created with custom software written in the Pure Data, HTML, PHP, and C programming languages. Sheldon Brown’s Assembly is an emergent behavior platform in which collections of entities evolve over time in relationship to their environment and each other, with guidance provided by viewers. Sean Noyce’s Heat explores the ecological impact of human intervention on the planet over millennia by compressing time through interactive audio and video powered by the Processing programming language and a Kinect 3D camera.
Francisco Eme’s City Run uses a GPS tracker and Google Earth data to trace the walking paths of six pedestrians in Mexico City, asking questions about how we journey, where we journey and why. Celeste Oram’s Work & The Work is an HTML essay accompanied by an electronic self-monitoring tool called Soft Sonic Surveillance that records the noises of a composer at work at a computer, condensing and recombining them into a soundscape where hours are distilled to mere minutes. Vijay Hingorani’s The Debate consists of a Twitter livestream responding to the data unwittingly supplied by thousands of individuals as they interact around topics in the current political discourse in the United States.
Rich Jones’ Nigella (named for Nigella Lawson, famed cookbook author and ex-wife of Charles Saatchi) is a Marcel Duchamp readymade reimagined for the 21st Century. An unassuming USB drive holds Nigella, a privilege-escalating, polymorphic superworm targeting OSX. After its initial USB infection, Nigella uses a variety of techniques to burrow itself deep into a machine and to raise its own access privilege. Once released, Nigella has a single mission – to expose the intimate secrets of the powerful and corrupt. [Editor’s Note: I wrote a love letter to Nigella for Heeb Magazine in 2006. Download PDF here.]
If one strand of the exhibition’s investigation is about art that uses programming, data, information and the Internet to interrogate our assumptions of the perceived world, another strand is about de-prioritizing visual experience.
A number of the works in Ephemeral Objects use sound as material: the exhibition is alternately melodious and cacophonous. Bonnie Lander, Brendan Nguyen and Adam Tinkle have collaborated on a series of originally composed “sonic meditations” to create Sonic Meditation Station. Xareni Lizarraga’s The Pure Act of Listening invites the spectator to put their head in a box and really practice listening. One can imagine Suzanne Thorpe’s Constituting States and Sharokh Yadegari’s No Flowers, No Incense, Only Sound as sonic sculptures composed of variable textures of tone, pitch and duration, using found and generated sound to shape our experience of space and time. In Chris Warren’s Elasticized, DuroReverberant Air the sound you hear is actually transformed by your interaction with the air around you.
Othe works explore the interrelationship of sound, video and material. sosolimited’s Ascenders & Descenders generates sound and video from motion-captured dance data and code where the aural and visual representations of the data are intrinsically linked. Jake Harper/Banrei’s AMNMA Altars combines computer chips, reclaimed glass, a turntable, vinyl disk and stereo audio file to create an abstract interactive sculpture that invites us to engage sonically, visually and with meditative intention. Lana Z. Caplan’s Play and Repeat combines incredibly detailed high-resolution video with equally precise sound as equal components of a unified work. Kathryn Zazenski’s Good Vibrations and Shannon Willis’ Realtime use ephemeral materials – Kathryn’s collage of paint-sample cards made with tape and cardboard; Shannon’s gauzy, hanging fabrics – to reinforce the temporality implicit in video and sound.
Revisiting the idea of re-thinking the exhibition for the networked world, we can place various works in juxtaposition to make connections and create new meanings.
If Max Nanis’s 2.0 is on some level about decay, failure and ephemerality in the realm of software, Andrea Chung’s Sweet Agony uses material decay to comment on social decay. Small sculptures of pure cane sugar depict exoticized, eroticized, Other-ized human beings; the sugar will melt over time as sure as the people will be worn down by oppression. Whitney Lynn’s Proposal for Controlled Pressure (White Version) is a balloon sculpture that serves as ephemeral evidence of a performance by Balloon Artist Tobi McJunkin. At first Margaret Noble’s Scaled Discords presents as a simple collection of repurposed found objects, but the expanded work of art is the durational participatory performance of visitors activating the spinning tops and their decay over time. The objects serve as loci for attention and activity; they are the structural support for a social sculpture.
Questions of attention and intention form another line of inquiry. Renae Barnard’s She’s Real is deceptively simple, a single phrase repeated infinitely. Yet through the intimate act of listening on headphones, over time, we may begin to construct our own narrative: Why and to whom is she speaking? What is the story?
Yelena Gluzman’s two connected works continue this strand of investigation in a different way. In your position, created with poet Jen Hofer, two strangers face each other wearing headphones listening to a conversation for 8 minutes. their position, created with cognitive scientist Eric Leonardis, invites users to observe pairs of strangers experiencing your position on video and make choices based on visual cues.
Performance is the most ephemeral of art forms. The opening of the exhibition will feature Trevor Amery’s How to power nap during an exhibition, Larry Caveney will perform Boosting Morale with Compliments as a series of intimate one-on-one encounters. Later in the month Nick Lesley will present Aggrobatics, a performance with video and live-score.
Throughout the show you may notice that the methods of production are visible in certain works – laptops out, wires exposed – and that in some works questions of cultural production are foregrounded. Richard Gleaves’ The Bobbitt Song places a video in a small, red birdhouse correlating the construction of the art object with the collective cultural production of the John and Lorena Bobbitt media spectacle. Tara Knight’s Mikumentary Episode 2: Ephemeral / Hologram / Weird is Episode 2 in a series of short films exploring Hatsune Miku, the singing, dancing hologram who is collaboratively constructed by hundreds of thousands of people.
Ginger invited me to curate the exhibition in mid-May, we started installation the last week of August. We can consider this accelerated timeline in the context of “lean” or “agile” software development, and the exhibition, in a way, as a prototype or beta version awaiting further iteration. Some of the work included in the show is consistent with this idea. Marinta and André Skupin’s You on Music is a large scale print generated using GIS software to map a million tagged Last FM items. In this iteration the interactivity is tactile with spectators using pushpins to locate themselves on the map, future iterations may well be fully digital; Micah Silver’s One in a series of many possible temporary diagrams of everything consists of printed posters that are both aesthetically pleasing unto themselves and speculative diagrams of infinite possible futures.
Each of the artworks in this exhibit has its own meaning and resonance, when placed in juxtaposition they become a conversation that we encourage you to join and continue for a long time to come.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Trevor Amery received his BFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005, attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013, and is currently a M.F.A candidate at UC San Diego. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to Hungary and most recently a Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award. He has participated in residencies at the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, Arteles Creative Center in Finland, and the Contemporary Artist Center at Woodside in New York. Mr. Amery has represented the U.S. at the 2012 Kathmandu International Art Festival and exhibited at such venues as the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, the Skanzen Museum and MAMU Galerie in Hungary, City Without Walls in New Jersey, The Creative Alliance in Baltimore, Grizzly Grizzly and Moore College in Philadelphia, and Galerie Birthe Laursen in Copenhagen, Denmark. This year he has exhibited at dc3 Gallery in Alberta, Canada, the Des Lee Gallery at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, and at Summercamp Project Project in Los Angeles.
Cooper Baker is a sound artist from San Diego, California. His artwork and performances have been exhibited in galleries, publications, and concert halls throughout the United States and abroad. Cooper holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music from UCSD where he studied with Miller Puckette, Tom Erbe, and F. Richard Moore. He received an MFA in Experimental Composition and a BFA in Music Technology from CalArts, where he worked with Morton Subotnick, Mark Trayle, and Barry Schrader. Cooper’s creative work combines custom software and electronics to interactively explore sound through aural, visual, and sculptural elements.
Renae Barnard is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Los Angeles. Barnard’s work has been shown at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Harriet & Charles Luckman Gallery, Annenberg Community Beach House Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, SOMArts Gallery, Pete & Susan Barrett Gallery, Grace Albrecht Gallery, Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Peggy Phelps Gallery as well as screened at U.S. and international film festivals. Barnard has been the recipient of many awards including but not limited to Outstanding Experimental Film, Sue Arlen Walker and Harvey M. Parker Memorial Fellowship, Armory Center for the Arts Teaching Artist Fellowship, Ahmanson Annual Fellowship, Christopher Street West Art & Culture Grant, Lincoln Fellowship Award and the Pasadena Arts Council Fiscal Sponsorship. Barnard has spoken about her work at the Open Engagement Conference at the Queens Museum, NY, The Long Beach LGTBQ Film Festival, Shoshana Wayne Gallery and Los Angeles Municipal Gallery.
Sheldon Brown combines computer science research with vanguard cultural production. He is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair of Digital Media and Learning at UCSD, and is the Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination where he is a Professor of Visual Arts and a co-founder of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies (Calit2). He is the former Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) and he is also the UCSD Site Director of the NSF supported Industry-University Collaborative Research Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR). He has shown his work at: The Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, The Exploratorium in San Francisco, Ars Electronica in Linz Austria, The Kitchen in NYC, Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw, Centro Nacional in Mexico City, Oi Futuro in Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and others. He has also been featured at leading edge techno-culture conferences such as Supercomputing, SIGGRAPH, TedX GDC and other conferences of leading edge techno-culture. He has been commissioned for public artworks in Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego and Mexico City, and has received grants from the NSF, AT&T New Experiments in Art and Technology, the NEA, IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, SEGA SAMMY, Sony, Vicon and others.
Lana Z Caplan is a photographer, film/video maker and video installation artist. She has exhibited and screened her work in galleries, festivals, museums, basements and backyards all over the world. She has been a member of the faculty of several colleges and is presently teaching media in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California San Diego.
Larry Caveney is an artist living and working in San Diego. Formerly working in painting, printmaking and chainsaw sculpting, Larry shifted the direction of his practice while working in a factory and started collaborating on performances, interventions and social sculptures with school children, fellow factory workers and the general public. He uses social interaction as a means of re-contextualizing familiar societal ideologies and symbols to identify and remediate social isolation.
Andrea Chung explores themes of labor and materials and their relationships with post- colonial countries. Chung is interested in the imbued histories that materials, such as sugar, carry and how they also carry with them the stories of human transmission and the long lasting effects of colonialism on tropical ‘post-colonial’ societies such as the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. She received a BFA at Parsons School of Design in New York and a MFA at the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. Her cut outs/collages, installations, videos and sculptures have appeared at Syracuse University, McColl Center for Visual Arts, National Gallery of Jamaica, Arthouse, Art Museum of the Americas, Medulla Gallery in Trinidad, Arlington Arts Center, apexart, Deutsche Bank, MoCADA, UNC Chapel Hill and the Harvey B. Gantt Center. Chung was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, an Art Matters Grant and a Joan Mitchell Award and has lectured at MICA, Tulane, University of Delaware, Claremont Colleges. Her work has been published in ARC, Small Axe, Harvard’s Transitions and Representations and the Huffington Post. Andrea lives and works in San Diego, CA.
Born in Mexico City and now based in the Tijuana – San Diego region, Francisco Eme works as a composer and sound and multimedia artist. His work has developed in the areas of sound art and electroacoustic music, performing pure electronic, instrumental and mixed compositions, sound acts, sound installations and video. He has also done works for dance, theater and media. His works have been presented in México,United States, Spain, Italy, Czech Republic, Canada, Argentina and El Salvador. His formation is primarily self taught but Francisco has also undergone studies in the Mexican Centre for Music and Sound Arts CMMAS and the Laboratory of Musical Informatics and Electroacoustic music at the UNAM. As a teacher he has taught several courses in different art schools in México, teaching electronic musical composition, video making, sound engineering and music production.
Richard Gleaves is a writer and artist based in San Diego.
Yelena Gluzman, Jen Hofer and Eric Leonardis
Yelena Gluzman has a long history of making collaborative performances as Science Projects. She is a founding editor at Ugly Duckling Presse, and edits both Emergency Index, and the Emergency Playscripts series. In 2013, she co-convened Theorems, Proofs, Rebuttals, Propositions: A Conference of Theoretical Theater with Esther Neff, and is currently co-developing a collaborative reading practice called Feminist Theory Theater. She uses performance approaches to consider scientific work on social cognition for her PhD work in Communication, Science Studies, and Cognitive Science at UCSD.
Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena and the local collective Antena Los Ángeles She publishes poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, belladonna, Counterpath Press, Kenning Editions, Insert Press, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press, LRL Textile Editions, NewLights Press, Palm Press, Subpress, Ugly Duckling Presse, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations.
Eric Leonardis uses methods from computational neuroscience, psychology, and cultural studies to explore social interaction, technology, and the body. He is currently working on projects in human-robot interaction and virtual reality. Eric Leonardis is a PhD student in Cognitive Science at UCSD.
Jake Harper was born in Washington DC in 1988. Based in Los Angeles and Tokyo. Formerly of New York and Berlin-based Soundwalk Collective, where he has performed and exhibited work at venues around the world including New Museum, the Centre Pompidou, Lille Fantastice, MuCEM, and the National Gallery of China. Since 2013 he has been releasing work under the name Banrei (www.banrei.com).
Vijay Hingorani studied chemistry at Northwestern University and biochemistry and medicine at the University of Illinois. He then trained in neurology at the University of Arizona. Following a general neurology and chronic pain practice he has spent the last several years in drug development helping to translate scientific discoveries in the laboratory to medicines that benefit patients.His current interests are primarily sculpting in steel, incorporating digital design and fabrication into his workflow, and exploring new media.
Rich Jones is a hacker based in Berkeley, California, whose art concentrates on corruption, surveillance, and power. His work has been profiled in Forbes, Wired, The New Yorker, on the BBC, as well as in the book This Machine Kills Secrets: How Wikileaks, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information, and recently appeared as a “Deep Web” security expert on the Al-Jazeera America program, A̷͂͑͂͂͂͢m̶͂̃͂͂ͩ͂e̞͂̉͂͂r͂ͮ͂i̼͂͂̓͂c̭͂͂͏͂a̡̘͂͂͂ ͂ͬ͂T̶̻͂͂͂͗͂o̗͂ͮ͂͂n̫̰͂͂͐͂͂i̙͂͂g͂̌͂h̝͂͂t͍͂ͬ͂͋͂͂.͉̭͂͂͂ ͂ͤ͂͂̕H̫͂ͣ͂͂e̸͇͂͂͂̎͂ ̺̩͂͂͂i͂͋͂s̛̲͂͂͂ ͙͂͂ͤ͂a͙͂̑͂͂͂͞n͂͂͂̍͂ ̯͂͂̅͂A̯̠͂͂͂҈͂m͂̿͂͏̻͂͂e̝͂͂̊͂̑͂r͂̀͂̒͂i̭͂͂c͂ͪ͂ͨ͂a̤̯͂̊͂͂͂n͎͂͂͊͂-͂͂ͅs͂̍͂͒͂ǫ͂͂u͂ͦ͂͂̌͂ͅn̪̹͔͂͂͂͂d͖͚̿̋ͫ͟͟͟͟͟͟҈̧͟͟͟͝į̷̯̘̬̎͟͟͟͟͟͟͟ṅ̙̑̈͌͟͟͟͟͟͟g̒̋̏͟͟͟͟͏̢̗̟͒̾͗ͬ͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟ ̺̫́̈́ͬ́͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͠B̗͟͟r̢̰̞̽͌͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͠͡ͅi̦͇͟͟͟ț̸̸̼͍̎͟͟͟͢͟͟͟͟͟i̩̯̟̒͑̎̌̈́͒̂͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͠s̴ͥ̈́̒̃͟͟͟͟͟͟h̶̶̟̣̏̏̇͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͢͟͡ ̧̡̥̱ͩͩ̐̔̌͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟n̄͟͟a͎̻̤̔͐ͨ͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͝ẗ̵̬͖̙́ͨ͗ͧ͘͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟i͔͟͟҉͕̌͟͟͟͏̵̈͟͟͟ô̪̘̭̞ͣ͟͟͟͟͟͟͟n͍͆̓͒̄̋̕͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟aͮͯ͟͟͟l̶̨͎̭̲̐͗ͧ̊͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͡͠,̴̺̓̌͟͟͟͟͟ ̟̭̀̇̕͟͟͜͟͟͟͟͟͟͟a̞̤̦͟͟͟͟n͑̈́ͯ͟͢͟͟͟͟͟͞d̼̼͟͟͟ ̡͉̼̹̹̈́̀͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͏͟ẖ͉́̈̾̓͒̍͟͟͟͜͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͡e̜̤̮̯͒̓̾͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͝͠ ͟͟ͅh̪͟͟à͟͟҈̗̼͟͟͟s̴̗͙̀͒͟͟͟͟͟͟ ̤͟͟v̡̭͟͢͟͟͟҉̡͟͟i͓̓͟͟͟ş̡̺̤̈͐̽ͤ̑͋̚͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟ǐ͇̱̙̆͟͟͟͟͟͟t̨̠̬͓̤̐̈́͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟ê̬̞͎̝̝ͧ͂̕͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟d̞͖ͮͧ͟͟͟͟͟ ̠̽̓ͯ͟͟͟͟͟͟͟a͉͟͟n̙͎̺͖̆̿͑͘͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟d̟͙͛͟͟͟͟҉̜̥̞̂͟͟͟͟͟ ͟͟͠w̲͟͟o͟҉͉͚̬̬͊̕͟͟͟͟͟͟͟r̸͖̞̦̽͗͟͟͟͟͟͟͟k̸̖̦̤ͣ̈́̂ͩͨͨ̚͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟ę̫̙̐̅̂͟͟͟͟͟͟͟҈̴̩̄͟͟͟͟͟͡d͕̺͙ͥ̔͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͡҉̰̱͟͟͟ ̩̄̽ͫ͟͟͟͟͟i̳̽͟͟͢͟͟͏̪̕͟͟͟͟͠͏̀͟͟҈͉͟͟n̴̯̗̑̄̕͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͠ ̣̻̦̞̝͈̫̟̋ͪ͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͞m͔͟͟a̰͟͟n̮͟͟y͖̘̹͕̭̬͆͊͒̎̾͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟ ̤̝̰̪̠̍͐͟͟͟͟͟͟͟͟c̄ͫ̚͟͟͟o̡̩̹̩̩̩͕̩̐ư̡̩̩̤̩̩̩̪̩̬̩̩̩̩̩̩͎̩̟̩ͤ͋̑͘͟͡n̵̩̱̩̩͎̩̩̹̩̩̩̩ͣ̉̑͟t̩̩͍̩̩̩̩̩̩͇̩̙̩̩̩̩̦̩̩̟̩́ͥ̓̿͑ͣ͘͘̚̕ŗ̵̷̶̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̎ͬͤ̓͌̒í̛̩̩̩̙̩̩̩̣̩͓̩̩ͪ̆̚ę̩̩̩̮̩̩̩̣̩ͯ̚ͅ҉̩̩̜̩̤̩̩̩̩̩̩̜̩ͨ̔̌͢s̩̩̩̈͟ ̸̶̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̋̾̔͒͂a̛̩̩̩̼̩̩̖̩͚̩̩̖̩̩͊͑͗̕r̢̡̩̩̩̤̩̩̩̩̩̓ͫ̆͘ò̸̩̭̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̤̩̐͆͋ͥu̩̖̩̩̚͏̶̩̩̪̩̟̩̤̩̗̩̙̩̩̩̩̩̤̩̩̩̋ͬ̄̽̐̚n̩҈̧̩̩̩͓̩̩̩͐̋͒d̩̩̩̥̩̺̩͑͠ ̴̩̩̩͕̩̯̩͈̩̩̩̩̋̄̓̃҉̩̩͂t̩̞̩̩̩̩̗̩̰̩̩̻̩̩͇̩́̉͂̾̚h̩̩̟̩̩̩̙̩̀̇͜ē̩̩̩̟̩̼̩̩̰̩̩̩ͥ̋̍̎ ̩̩̩̻̩̩̩ͭͤͅͅw̩̩̩̩̺̩͒̇̚o̶̩̩r̩̝̩̯̩͖̩͏̩l̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̐̿̋̆̐͋̽ͭd̵̩̩͓̩̩͍̩̩̪̩̩͍̩̫̩̩̼̩̩͌̅ͤ̾̑,̩̩̋҈̩͎̩̩̬̩̩̩̩̐ͪ̎̓ ̩̩̾i̶̩̯̩̩̩̩̩̹̩͚̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̿͑̓̾ͣ͐̕͜͠n̷̩̰̩̩̼̩̩̩͓̩̩̩̩̩̩͖̩̩̩̩̓̉ͥ̈́̒̇́̑͘͜c̩̠̩̝̩l̶̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̝̩͐̓ͣ̋̈́̂̇̀ủ̷̩̩̩̩͔̩̩̩̣̩̳̩̩͈̩̩̩̓͌̓͗͘̚d̛̩̩͖̩̩͙̩̥̩̩̝̩̙̩̩̩͉̩͓̩̩̒͑̑͒͞͏̩ĭ̩̱̩̞̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̆ͩ̿͗̕ͅn̩̩̩̩̜̩̩̆ͦ̾͞g̩̩̩̩̩̩̙̩̭̩̩̽̃̚͢͡ͅ ̩̩̩̉̓C̩̩̩̠̩̔ͧh̩̩̩̩̩̼̩̩̩̠̩͙̩ͣ͆̓̏͞͝i̩̩̩̩̩̯̩̩̩̩̖̩͆̇ͬͤ̔̎͜n̩̖̩̩̻̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̯̩̩̩ͪ͌ͨ͆ͩ͛̄̀ͅa̴̩̩̩͕̩̩̮̩͉̩̩̮̩̪̩̩̩̦̩͛͒͐̀̚,̡̩̬̩̩̩̩̩̹̩̩̩̘̩̩͉̩̽ͮ͊̈́̉ͅ ̩̩̩̩͎̩ͤ̌͟M̩̩̩̘̩̝̩ͥ͞ó̩̩̩̩̩̩̖̩̩̩̥̩͔̩̩̱̩̩̩̄͐̓̒̑̀͐͠͞r̩̩̩͓̩̩̩̩̩̩͈̩̩ͥ̑́̓ͥ͒ͧ̕ơ̩̩̪̩̩͔̩̩͓̩̣̩̩̩̍͒ͮ͢c̴̩̩ç̶̢̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̳̩̫̩̲̩̩̪̩̩̩̩̩̩̇͂̔̔͆̚͡ơ̩̩̩̠̩̩͔̩̪̩̩̩̩̜̩̰̩̜̩̩̩̄̓̀̽͞͞͞,̵̷̩̩̩̫̩̤̩̩̩̤̩ͤ͂ ̧̩̘̩͕̩͓̩̩̪̩̝̩̩̥̩̩̙̩̋̕G̩̗̩̩̦̩̩͈̩̩̼̩ͥ̓͘e̩̩̩̲̩̩̊̾̌r̩̩̰̩̩͉̩̩̩̩̀͗́ͭ͆m̩̩͛a̩̳̩̮̩̩̩̩̓̽ͫ҈̩̩̩̩̗̩̩̓̐͊͘n̩̩̭̩͠ẙ̩̩͏̩̩̩͒͞,̩̩̩̩̩̩ͤͭͣ͊̊ ̩̩̻̩̩̩͚̩̩̩̩̩̩͆̒́̎͂ͫ͢͡҈̩̘̩҉̩M̴̩͉̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̯̩̩̩̩̖̩̈ͮͯͣͧͣ̍ͬͭͭ͟͠e̸̩̜̩̩̩̱̩̩̩̞̩̩ͪ̔̐̉x̵̩̩̩͖̩̳̩̩̦̩̩͈̩͚̩̩̩̩́͛ͮ̔ͫ̚i̩̩̺̩͖̩ͣ͏̩̩̗̩̦̩̾c̷̩̩̻̩̩͙̩͉̩͉̩̱̩̩̲̩̩̩͈̩̩̩̩ͨͪ̔͛̿͘̕o̩̭̩ ̩̩̟̩̩̩̜̩̖̩͑͋͝å̛̩̩͎̩̠̩̩̩͒҈̩̩̪̩̩ͧ̂n̸̩̻̩̫̩̝̩̩̩͉̩̩̩͎̩̝̩̩̩̞̩ͫ͒̈́͆͑d̩̩̩̩̩̺̩̑̀ͦͧ ̶̩̩̯̩̩̩̩̩̩̤̩̍̓̃ͬ̐N̷̡̩̰̩̩̩̩̞̩̩͓̩̠̩̜̩̩̩̬̩̿͛͒̽ō̶̵̩̩̩̘̩̞̩̩̩̩̩̩̩̑ͮ̃͒̕ŕ̩̩̩͔̩͞t̸̩̩̩̉h̩̦̩̩͚̩̩̣̩̫̩͋̂ ̶̡̩̩͔̩̩̩̩̩̪̩̩̩̩̀́̎̋̓͂K̴̩̩̩̩̩͎̩̪̩̝̩͈̩̩̩̩̩̫̩ͧ̑̾̒̚͢͠ȍ̧̩̜̩͚̩̩̩͓̩̝̩̤̩̖̩̺̩̲̩̩̩̩̩̜̩̞̩ͮͤ̍̕r̩͈̩̩͎̩͙̩̠̩̘̩̗̩̮̩̩̩̂̃͠è̩̩̰̩a̡̩̩̩̩̩̺̩̣̩͚̩̩͆͐̂̂҉̩̫̩̩̩͉̩̩̼̩̩ͣ̊͟͝.̩̩ͯ҉̩ͬ h̴̨͔̳̤̖̟̥̺́́͌́̋́́͆́́́́̑́́́́́́̆́́á̫́͏̢̤̙́́ͪ́́́́́́̕҉́͐́ḭ̢̢͈̮́́́́́̑́ͫ́́́ͪ́́҉̡̯̼̼̣́́́́́́́̾́̔́͡ĺ̸̗̲̤̟̞̫͕͍̉́́́́́̐́̔́́́́͐́́̋́́́͞ ̡͔͕͈̟́͂́́̈́́́́́̓́́ͫ́̄́ͅś͚̱̝̲͉́́̇́́̋́̊́̀́ͧ́̔́̏́̅́̋́́̏́͌́́́͞á͓̬̼̺̉́́̀́̄́́̏́́ͨ́́́̈́́́̚̚͝t̡̛̻́́͊́ͬ́ͣ́́̽́́̅́̾́á̸̡̧̫̘͍̣̝́́́́́ͭ́́̇́ͫ́́́ͩ́́͛́́͜ͅ҈̼̯͖̼́̓́́́́́́͐́̍́́́͡ń̸̨͎͚̤̞̳͓̜́́́́́́̏́́́ͫ́̄́́ͫ́ͭ́̾́́́́ͫ́͜͢
Tara Knight is a filmmaker, animator, and video designer for live performance. Her films have been exhibited internationally, including underground and dance film festivals in Europe and South America, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, SXSW Interactive Festival, and on the Discovery Channel among others. Work shown in San Diego includes video projection design for the premiere of Arthur Kopit’s A Dram of Drummhicit directed by Christopher Ashley at La Jolla Playhouse and designing and co-conceiving the Emmy Award-winning The Floating World with Malashock Dance. Knight currently teaches at UC San Diego and is the Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for the Division of Arts and Humanities.
Bonnie Lander, Brendan Nguyen and Adam Tinkle
Bonnie Lander is a singer and violin player who specializes in unorthodox music. Her relationship with experimental music is defined through collaboration with composers, performers (music and dance), improvisers, lighting designers, sound engineers, computer musicians, students, and friends. Bonnie has performed throughout the United States and Europe in a variety of concert settings oscillating between theaters, concert halls, galleries, vans, and bridges. She is currently a DMA candidate at UC San Diego.
Brendan Nguyen displays uncommon versatility as a performer, artist, and thinker. His bold programming style, infusion of technology, and extravagantly produced concert concepts aim to explore new musical territory while casting a contemporary eye on the established canon. His enthusiasm for contemporary music has led to a number of premieres and commissions with well-known internationally renown musicians and composers. Brendan is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and UC San Diego.
Adam creates, teaches and writes about music, sound, digital multimedia and performance. In addition to playing in bands, improvising, and composing concert music, he creates long duration, site-specific events in deserts, museums, aquariums, and trains. Recent collaborations include a sound installation with Marina Abramović and a podcast/radio play with sci-fi novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. Documentary phonography and feedback systems often appear in his works, alongside a generally welcoming attitude towards co-creation with musical novices, children, strangers, animals, and organic resonances. He holds a PhD from UCSD and teaches at Skidmore College (NY).
Nick Lesley is a musician and media artist who has committed his professional career to facing the challenges of preserving and distributing media art. As a musician, he primarily plays improvised music on drums and interactive electronics, combining percussion with analog and digital signal processing. Nick has composed music for dance, movie soundtracks, and recently a computer animation by pioneering computer artist Lillian Schwartz. He’s recorded with David Grubbs, performed in Rhys Chatham’s “A Crimson Grail”, and the Boredoms “88 Boa Drum”. He’s worked closely on audio/video work with Charlemagne Palestine, Kalup Linzy, and Pam Payne. In 2012, he curated an exhibition of video art for Lothringer13, in Munich, and he regularly advises on the installation of video and media artwork, including the exhibition “Circa 1971” at Dia Beacon (2011-2012).
Xareni Lizarraga is a sound operator and soundscape artist who recently moved to San Diego from Mexico City where she developed her audio production experience and exposure to soundscape, experimenting with different environments and its sonic characteristics. In recent years she has been collaborating on documentaries where nature sounds and indigenous rituals play significant roles. She also works as a teacher in an art studio for children, creating listening exercises and visual experiments to enable them to discover new forms of communication. She’s currently working on a local documentary in southern Baja California as a sound operator, while producing her first album of soundscapes called “Presence in Space.”
Whitney Lynn implements a wide range of media to question ideas of boundaries and containment, history and restaging, context and form. Her sculptures, videos, performances and photographs have been exhibited in numerous museums, commercial galleries and nonprofit art centers including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Torrance Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Steven Wolf Fine Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others. Born on Williams Air Force Base, Lynn attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, received her BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently a Lecturer at Stanford University, leading the Interdisciplinary Honors in the Arts program.
Max Nanis is a conceptual artist, programmer, and computational biologist. He studied biology, chemistry and sculpture at Bennington College. Max logged onto the Internet when he was three years old and has never signed off. He’s the founder of GRL, a chemically oriented creative software studio. He’s been profiled by The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times and has work featured by The Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute for the Future, M.I.T. and others. At The Scripps Research Institute, Max works to improve the academic publishing model, visualize genetic information, perform novel therapeutic discovery through crowdsourcing efforts, and ensure biological knowledge is easily accessible.
His artwork uses algorithmic approaches to narrate messages of persistence, fragility, and industry, often through the revelation of biological data. His pragmatic mediums are executed by robotically aided production processes. His work is exhibited in numerous public and private collections including The Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, Intrexon Corporation, and The American Chemical Society.
Born in Texas and raised in California, Margaret Noble’s experimental artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her interdisciplinary work resides at the intersection of sound, sculpture, installation and performance. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego and an MFA in Sound Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her artistic interests include memory, history, science fiction, identity and semiotics.
Born in Salt Lake City, Sean Noyce studied painting/drawing at the University of Utah. After relocating to Brooklyn, Noyce’s career began to blossom with his “Cloud Watching” series, and has exhibited at venues around the country, including Scope Art Show (Art Basel Miami and New York Armory Show), Texas Contemporary, (e)merge Art Fair, San Diego Art Institute, Brooklyn Museum open studios, among others. Noyce’s current work is a hybrid of traditional painting/drawing and digital media. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where he is co-director of Noysky Projects, an exhibition space and studio.
Celeste Oram is a New Zealand composer whose work investigates new media for score-making, and new strategies for musical notation. Her works have been performed, recorded, and broadcast by ensembles including the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, the Song Company (Sydney), the Melbourne Metropolitan Sinfonietta, wasteLAnd (Los Angeles), and the Karlheinz Company (Auckland). She was the Auckland Philharmonia’s young composer-in-residence for 2013-14; her commissioned orchestral work ‘macropsia’ was selected as a finalist in the 2014 SOUNZ Contemporary Award for excellence in New Zealand contemporary composition. Celeste is presently pursuing a PhD in music composition at the University of California San Diego.
Micah Silver’s work has been produced by Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Mass MoCA, OK Centrum (Austria) the Jersey City Museum, Issue Project Room (NYC), Artspace New Haven, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, The James Joyce Centre (Dublin), Museum of Sex (NYC), The Place (St. Petersburg), and the MATA Festival (NYC), ArteEast, among others in the USA and abroad. He studied at Wesleyan and MIT. In addition to his work as an artist he worked as a curator and producer at Diapason Gallery and EMPAC. Recently his writing has found publication, most comprehensively with the book Figures in Air – Essays Towards a Philosophy of Audio, available this fall.
André Skupin is a Professor of Geography at San Diego State University. He is a classically trained cartographer with long-standing interest in data visualization, data mining, and space-time modeling. Skupin has applied these in diverse domains ranging from biomedical knowledge management to demography, crime analysis, environmental monitoring, and the digital humanities. In the area of knowledge visualization – reflected in this exhibit – his focus has been on how the abstract spaces of human knowledge can be made accessible by leveraging geographic metaphors in conjunction with cartographic techniques and intense computation.
Marinta Skupin is an artist and museum professional. Her work has been exhibited in New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and an MA in Arts Administration from the University of New Orleans, and is currently Curator of Education at Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach.
Sosolimited applies the language of data visualization and information design as an artistic medium, focusing on the live transformation of popular media. The studio was founded by Justin Manor, John Rothenberg, and Eric Gunther. The three met at MIT where they collectively studied physics, computer science, architecture, arts and music. Today, they have locations in Boston and San Diego, and continue to operate at the boundary of art, design, experience and information. Sosolimited has exhibited artwork internationally at festivals and museums including Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Walker Art Center, Cooper Hewitt, Shanghai Biennial, and the ICA Boston.
Suzanne Thorpe is a musician/composer who performs in a spectrum of modalities, fixed and improvised, installed and recorded. Her work has been shown and performed internationally, including All Tomorrow’s Parties (UK and U.S.), Roskilde (DK), The New Museum (NYC), Issue Project Room’s Floating Points Festival (NYC), Activating the Medium Festival (San Francisco), No Idea Festival (Austin), High Zero Festival (Baltimore), and exhibited at Caramoor Center for the Arts (Katonah, NY), River to River Festival (NYC), San Diego Art Institute (San Diego, CA), Klieo Gallery (NYC), Exit Art (NYC), Mills College (Oakland), California College of the Arts (Oakland) and more.
She has released over 20 recordings on labels such as Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings, and Tape Drift, and was a founding member of critically acclaimed Mercury Rev, with whom she performed, recorded and toured from 1989 – 2001, earning a gold record for 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. She can more recently be heard on J Mascis’ solo record Several Shades of Why (Sub Pop) and Pauline Oliveros’ Primordial Lift (Lovely Records). Thorpe has been the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Harvestworks Digital Media Foundation, Meet the Composer, NYFA and was awarded the Frog Peak Collective Award for innovative research in the electronic music field. Currently, she is Co-Director of TECHNE, an arts education organization that introduces technology to young women through electronic and is pursuing a PhD in Music/Integrative Studies at UCSD.
Chris Warren is a sound artist, signal processing researcher, and educator. He is the lead inventor at SuperHoax, where he develops unique music software. His research in acoustic measurement produced the EchoThief Impulse Response Library. These sonic snapshots of distinctive spaces throughout North America provide one of the most rich and varied collections of reverbs available. He is a resident artist at Space4Art in San Diego and performs with the group A Hundred Ghosts. He teaches music composition at San Diego State University. His scoring work can be heard in the new KPBS radio series Incoming.
Shannon Willis is an interdisciplinary artist who creates mixed media immersive environments exploring the exchange between philosophy, quantum physics, spirituality, and emotions. She works with tactile sculptural objects, projection and viewer interaction as tangible expressions of those converging ideas. Utilizing both objects and script, the art work becomes an event, a space for viewers to become engaged, entertained, and entangled in the phenomena of being alive. Shannon received her from MFA, University of California Santa Barbara and BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon.
Shahrokh Yadegari is a composer, director, and sound designer who has collaborated with such artists as Peter Sellars, Robert Woodruff, Ann Hamilton, Christine Brewer, Gabor Tompa, Maya Beiser, Steven Schick, David Schweizer, Lucie Tiberghien, Hossein Omoumi, and Siamak Shajarian. He has performed and his productions, compositions, and designs have been presented internationally in such venues as Carnegie Hall, Festival of Arts and Ideas, OFF-D’Avignon Festival, International Theatre Festival in Cluj, Romania, Ravinia Festival, Ruhr-Triennale, Vienna Festival, Holland Festival, Forum Barcelona, Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Japan America Theatre, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the Institut fur Neue Musik und Musikerziehung (Darmstadt), Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, and Contemporary Museum of Art, San Diego. Yadegari is on the faculty of the department of Theatre and Dance at University of California, San Diego, where he has founded a progressive program in sound design and composition. He is also the director of the Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (IDEAS) at the Qualcomm Institute.
Kathryn Zazenski uses every-day objects and materials to elicit feelings of awe and wonder typically associated with phenomenological experience. She often employs tactics such as fracturing, layering, and looping to obscure information, with the work physically taking the form of video installation, sound, and still image. She has participated in international artist residencies such as Red Gate Gallery in Beijing and Arteles Creative Center Haukijarvi, Finland, as well as nationally at the Vermont Studio Center, The Fountainhead in Miami, and The Museum of New Art in Detroit, MI. Her work has been shown in museums, galleries, and as part of experimental projects such as HotWood Arts Center, Carol Jazzar Contemporary, Icebox Project Space, Mercedes Benz Americas Headquarters, and The Fringe Arts Festival in Bath, UK. Zazenski is currently a 2015/16 US Fulbright recipient to Poland. Kathryn received her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art.