Two June Events

UPGRADE! BOSTON: NANCY NISBET AND AMBER FRID-JIMENEZ: WHEN: June 29, 7:00-9:00 p.m. WHERE: Art Interactive, 130 Bishop Allen Drive, at the corner of Prospect Street, Cambridge. [Red Line to Central Square]

Nancy Nisbet is a Vancouver-based artist. From a disturbing paintball gun performance enacting the chaotic fluctuation in the cost of crude oil during the lead up to the US-led War in Iraq/War on Terror to the surgical implantation of ‘identity’ microchips into her hands, much of her work considers the political, the technological and the personal. Of specific consideration in her mixed-media work are issues of power, economics, and surveillance and their cultural influences on entertainment/leisure, identity and community. Exchange 2006 is a large scale project currently underway. Nisbet received her MFA in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts. Nancy Nisbet is Assistant Professor of Visual Art in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts & Theory at the University of British Columbia.
Amber Frid-Jimenez is an artist and researcher working towards a masters in Media Arts and Sciences with Professor John Maeda in Physical Language Workshop at the MIT Media Laboratory. Prior to beginning her degree, she spent a year as a research designer in the Cognitive Machines Group at MIT, where she designed software systems visualizing large bodies of literature. Frid-Jimenez was a visiting artist at the Banff New Media Institute in 2005 and artist-in-residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2003. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Washington D.C., and Boston. She has received grants from MIT Council for the Arts for her collaborative work with Joe Dahmen, Ben Dalton, and Noah Fields. She has won awards from the Art Director’s Club, the American Association of University Presses and the Smithsonian for her book and exhibit designs.

EXCHANGE 2006 [.pdf] [.doc]

Upgrade! Boston and Turbulence.org, in partnership with Art Interactive, proudly present a performance of EXCHANGE 2006 by Nancy Nisbet. Trade your goods for NancyÂ’s! Two Events /1/ WHEN: June 30, 1-4 p.m. WHERE: mobile cart, Massachusetts Avenue, Central Square, Cambridge/2/ WHEN: July 1, 1-4 p.m. WHERE: in the parking lot opposite Art Interactive, corner of Bishop Allen Drive and Prospect Street.

EXCHANGE 2006 replaces the studio with roads, truck stops, border crossings and cities. For 6 to 9 months NisbetÂ’s Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagged and inventoried personal belongings are being hauled in a commercial shipping container to be freely traded throughout Canada, the United States and Mexico. The performance includes the day-to-day travel and activities associated with driving a commercial transport truck and the contact with people and communities along the way.

“At each scheduled stop on the route, the team parks the truck, lowers the ramps, unloads at least half of the crates and invites viewers to peruse the goods. If a person happens to find something that tickles their fancy, they take it to the “mini house,” temporary tech centre that operates on wireless technology, where the customer checks out the item while checking in something of theirs to replace their “purchase.” Each item is tracked using RFID technology and logged into a database. In addition to the object exchange, the customer also relays the story behind their giveaway object to the crew, which is saved as an audio file, and in exchange Nisbet tells them the story behind their newly acquired item, sort of like an anecdotal gift wrap.” (National Post, canada.com)

The trip and exchanges are being extensively documented and published at http://exchangeproject.ca.