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Monthly Archives: March 2010

Events

Jane D. Marsching – 7 Stories & a Dance: Feeling Data

April 6, 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.

Digital media artist Jane D. Marsching will weave together an evening of storytelling, dancing, and conversation as part of her talk about recent projects that seek to translate abstract climate data and depressing climate news into sensory experiences.

marsching
Still from All my Vows, 2009; 3 minute video

Jane D. Marsching explores our past, present and future human impact on the environment through interdisciplinary and collaborative practices, including video installations, virtual landscapes, dynamic websites, and data visualizations.

Recent exhibitions include: the ICA Boston; MassMoCA; North Carolina Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Photographic Resource Center, Boston, MA; and Sonoma Museum of Art, CA. She has received grants from Creative Capital, LEF Foundation, Artadia and Artists Resource Trust.

Recent publications include: BiPolar (Cornerhouse 2008), Gothic (Whitechapel Press, London, 2008), and S&F Online: Gender on Ice (Barnard College, 2008.

With Mark Alice Durant in 2005, she curated The Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal, at The Center for Art and Visual Culture, Baltimore, MD; a catalog of the exhibition was published in June 2006 with essays by Marsching, Durant, Marina Warner and Lynne Tillman.

Jane is a cofounder and member of Platform2: Art and Activism, an experimental forum series about creative practices at the intersection of social issues. She is currently Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art in Studio Foundation. She received her MFA in photography from The School of Visual Arts, New York City, in 1995.

Image of the event:
marsching_wind_dance_sm

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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.