This is the same talk that Joe presented at Upgrade! Boston on March 11, 2010. It has been made available by WGBH’s Forum Network. Thanks to the Museum of Modern Art, New York for taping the presentation and allowing us to co-present it.
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.
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.
PLEASE 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]
Since 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.
Land 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.
Susan 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.
Since 2007, Lily & Honglei have launched several virtual environments in Second Life. Last year, they initiated the 
This event is sponsored by 
Susan 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 
