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Events

Lily & Honglei (杨熙瑛, 李宏磊) Lecture

March 22, 2010; 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm.
Auditorium Room 222, O'Leary Library, University of Massachusetts Lowell, 71 Wilder Street, Lowell, MA 01854

lilyhongleiPLEASE NOTE: This event is at UMASS Lowell (details above and map)

Lily Xiying Yang and Honglei Li (杨熙瑛, 李宏磊) are new media artists from Beijing, currently based in New York City. Since 2005, they have been working under the collective name Lily & Honglei. They create new artistic expressions by integrating traditional and digital art forms. Utilizing online virtual world applications and digital animation, Lily & Honglei reinterpret Chinese folkloric traditions that metaphorically reflect current global cultures and societies.

Lily & Honglei have exhibited internationally, including: FILE (Brazil), SIGGRAPH, Jamaica Flux (New York), Museum of Art and Design (New York), Microwave New Media Fest (Hong Kong), Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (New York), Terna 02 Prize (Rome), and 404 international festival of electronic art (Argentina). Lily & Honglei both received their BFAs in Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing) in 1997. In 2007, Honglei earned his MFA in painting from UMass Dartmouth, while Lily received her MFA in Digital Media in UMass Dartmouth in 2008.

Merry-go-around by Lily & Honglei [Video of Second Life Performance/ Installation; 3'3" with sound; 2009]

firewallSince 2007, Lily & Honglei have launched several virtual environments in Second Life. Last year, they initiated the DSL Cyber Museum of Contemporary Art / DSL 虚拟当代艺术馆_中文网, based on the DSL Collection and their artwork Land of Illusion in Second Life. Cyber MoCA — built with virtual traditional Chinese architecture — houses a series of virtual installations, multimedia presentations and online performances accomplished through cross-continental artist collaborations (since 2007). Cyber MoCA is a cultural meditation engaging history, philosophy, and the Chinese diaspora. It examines the current economic development of China within the context of globalization, while simultaneously exploring the meaning of virtual online communities in terms of global dialogues as they relate to cultural roots and the “fantasy” of China.

lilyLand of Illusion functions as a net-art platform that aims to fulfill the promise that the Internet is a continuation of Enlightenment thought, namely promoting cultural openness, decentralization, and independent thinking. As Chinese contemporary artists, Lily & Honglei consider these aspects extremely relevant to art-making.

The DSL Collection represents 90 of the leading Chinese avant-garde artists who have a major influence on the development of contemporary art in China today. It was started from a museum approach, which means that Lily & Honglei are collecting a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, installation, video, and photography. They want to share the experience of contemporary culture and to make it more accessible and meaningful for a broader public. DSL Collection participates in conferences, seminars, and talks hosted by institutions or at special events. The DSL Collection has participated in seminars at Tsinghua and Shanghai Universities, ARCO Madrid, and New York University. To visit the museum in Second Life teleport here.

umasslogoThis event is sponsored by UMass Lowell Center for Arts and Ideas and UMass Lowell Art Department. Special Thanks to Jehanne-Marie Gavarini.

Events

Joseph DeLappe

March 11, 2010; 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
ACT - MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, 3rd Floor, Room N51-390, Cambridge, MA.

not-the-forumJoseph 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. His works were recently featured at the Beijing 798 Biennale, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Gallery, New York City and in Mechelin, Belgium as part of the “All that is Solid Melts into Air” exhibition as curated by MuKHA, the Museum for Contemporary Art, Antwerp. In 2006 he began a project “dead-in-iraq”, to type consecutively, all names of America’s military casualties from the war in Iraq into the America’s Army first person shooter online recruiting game.

Gandhi-BelfastIn 2008 he reenacted Mahatma Gandhi’s 240 mile Salt March of 1930 in Second Life using treadmill to guide his avatar, MGandhi Chakrabarti, throughout this expansive online community.

DeLappe directs the online project “iraqimemorial.org”, an online exhibition and database featuring artist’s proposals for memorials to the many thousands of civilians killed in the Iraq war.

He has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, CBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and on The Rachel Maddow Show on Air America Radio. His works have been featured in the New York Times, The Australian Morning Herald, Artweek, Art in American and in the upcoming book from Routledge entitled “Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Game”. He is a native of San Francisco, California.
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Events

Pete Froslie

March 11, 2010; 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
ACT - MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, 3rd Floor, Room N51-390, Cambridge, MA.

soldier_machineHere’s a PDF of Pete’s presentation.

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.

Currently living and working in Boston, Froslie explores diverse tangents ranging from alternative historical fiction and documentary, to electro-mechanical sculpture and prostheses. The work is often created giving attention to playfulness and toys, while considering automated movement between surface and infrastructure in the context of New Media.

Booth_on_vacationWorking with an expanding narrative for nearly five years, Froslie’s ongoing project Booth focuses on research into journey aesthetics. A surface, or skin, is appropriated from John Wilkes Booth, and automated according to a fictional expedition that weaves through historical sites, online networks, and kinetic sculptures. Booth, an assassin from the US Civil War, is summoned back into existence as he moves between physical and virtual spaces. His journey through the work is cataloged and recorded meticulously in an evolving manual with an undetermined point of conclusion.

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News

Upgrade International 2010: Soft Borders

Upgrade International 2010: Soft Borders :: October 18-21, 2010 :: Sao Paulo, Brazil :: Call for Participation — Deadline: April 30, 2010.

We invite proposals of papers, posters and workshops for Soft Borders – the 4th Upgrade! International Conference & Festival on New Media Art, that will take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from Oct 18th to 21st.

All the information about submitting proposals and the event can be also found online at the conference official website.

A brief summary only is required for the selection process. This should be submitted electronically via the online submission system, by 30/April/2010. You will be asked to create an account with the system before uploading your summary. Read On »

Events

Susan Kozel: From “Closer” to “Social Choreographies”

November 17, 2009; 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
Center for Advanced Visual Studies/MIT, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, 3rd Floor, Room N51-390, Cambridge, MA.

whispherSusan Kozel works across dance and philosophy in the context of digital technologies. Working in England, Europe, Scandinavia, and Canada, she collaborates with digital artists, software engineers, architects, and composers to create performances and installations. She is the director of Mesh Performance Practices and is Principal Researcher with the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute at the University of East London (UK). Kozel has a PhD in Continental philosophy specializing in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological writing and is the author of Closer: performance, technologies, philosophy (2007) published by The MIT Press. Her recent performance, The Yellow |Memory was the third in a series of performances exploring Technologies of Inner Spaces (previous performances in this series include ‘immanence’ 2005 and ‘other stories’ 2007).

Kozel is currently working on a new book called Social Choreographies: Corporeal Narratives with Mobile Media. She writes:

In Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology I reflected upon 10 years of artistic research across performance, philosophy and responsive digital systems like motion capture and wearable computing. In Closer I was passionate about the transformative potential of the alchemy between bodies and technologies, and argued that, with careful design, future generations of responsive systems and mobile devices could expand our social, physical, and emotional exchanges.

This Upgrade presentation will concentrate on a new research initiative that stems directly from the premises of Closer and will be the basis of my next book. Social Choreographies examines the use of mobile devices and social networking from the perspective of performance, in particular dance improvisation in public spaces. I will present results from current work with researchers from the Theatre Academy and the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland. Called “IntuiTweet,” dancers in different countries use Twitter to structure movement improvisation experiments that occur in and around daily lives. We also explore the possibility of “VideoTweets”.

Twitter is criticized frequently for being superficial and disembodied. If we combine the suggestion that bodies might be left out with the suggestion that tweets are necessarily shallow we have a niche for proving otherwise. Consistent with much creative work initiated by performers and artists in the area of emerging digital technologies, the researchers on this project ask whether we can we emphasize physicality and depth, movement and intuition, in a cultural phenomenon that is quick to be classified as non-corporeal.

Very little is required for good dance improvisers to initiate movement exploration. With Butoh the starting point might be the word ‘wheat.’ With Release Technique, improvisations may begin with a road map, a drawing of the human skeletal structure, or the suggestion of moving from one’s connective tissue rather than the bones. Spatiality, temporality and narrative are implicit (or one might say ‘tacit’) to the improvisations.

The act of writing tweets from an intuitive corporeal moment, sending them to a social network and then re-integrating them into our bodies only to begin the cycle anew is an example of contextual performative engagement within social computing. Innate to this cycle of transmission and reception is a play across temporality and spatiality. The rhythms of bodies permeate the messages, and they live across modalities and spatial dimensions.

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