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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.

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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:
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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

Nell Breyer

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.

TheDisappearingWomansNell Breyer is a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. She was a digital ARM fellow at Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) in 2003. From 2000-2002, she conducted research on digital video technologies at The Media Laboratory for Arts & Sciences (MIT). She holds an MSc in cognitive neuroscience from Oxford University and an MS in media arts & sciences from MIT. Her work focuses on the intersection of dance, new media, and visual art.

Breyer’s piece Time Translations was commissioned and produced by the World Financial Center Arts & Events in 2005. Her recent work, i:move, was first presented at Boston CyberArts Festival and later shown at Dance Theater Workshop gallery. It was further developed and installed at MIT’s Media Lab and the MIT Museum Inventor’s Spotlight. Breyer’s work has been presented in group shows at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, NURTUREart Gallery, Art Interactive, and Photo NY, and she has choreographed and performed in New York, Canada, the UK, Bangladesh, and Slovenia.

DTWProjection2s

My work explores how we perceive motion. I am interested in the inherent contradiction between how we perceive movements — physically, in an instant — and how we conceive of them — constructing our understanding through the varied forms, modalities and abstract memories of the mind’s eye. For example, an athlete might feel and imagine movement differently from an accountant.

InsulaI am looking at different ways dance enables us to experience movement. I want to draw viewers into the work, using actions, not just images. Ideally, the roles of viewer and mover converge. What you do creates what you see. A passerby physically draws out his or her own movements by moving. My work strips movement down to the essential element of change: the difference between Time1 and Time0. To explore this concept, I wrote simple software that could process images to reveal only changes between frames, not the moving object itself. I used the software to capture and re-envision the movements of a dancer.

New York commuters became the subject of Time Translations, an installation for the World Financial Center (2005). Time Translations examined the bottleneck of human passage along the South Bridge, drawing a kinetic history of the bridge. The image patterns transformed human reactions into a two-dimensional shadow play, so pedestrians became performers.

I have continued this to create this work for theater and public spaces, developing living, unfolding and ephemeral drawings that heightens our kinesthetic sense. My work seeks to bring different modalities together in the representation of human movements.

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Read this overview of her work at From Mirror Neurons to the Mona Lisa: Visual Art and the Brain.

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Events

Joseph Butch Rovan

September 22, 2009; 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
Center for Advanced Visual Studies/MIT, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, 3rd Floor, Room N51-390, Cambridge

rovan_NIME_04065-CROPJoseph Butch Rovan is a composer and performer on the faculty of the Department of Music at Brown University, where he co-directs MEME (Multimedia & Electronic Music Experiments @ Brown) and the Ph.D. program in Computer Music and Multimedia. Prior to joining Brown he directed CEMI, the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia, at the University of North Texas, and was a compositeur en recherche with the Real-Time Systems Team at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. Rovan worked at Opcode Systems before leaving for Paris, serving as Product Manager for MAX, OMS and MIDI hardware.

Butch will discuss is new interactive installation, Let us imagine a straight line, featuring dancer Ami Shulman — which you can visit on October 17, 2009; 1:00 – 4:00 pm at the Digital Humanites Lab (lower floor), Cogut Center for the Humanities, Pembroke Hall, 172 Meeting Street, Providence, RI.rovan_imagine_6inLet us imagine a straight line explores the meaning of movement and the limits of perception through multiple stagings of the body in time and space. Drawing on the work of French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey and philosopher Henri Bergson, the installation presents an interactive environment that allows participants to reveal the substance of interior bodily impulses through image, text, and sound.

Documents of 19th-century science and 20th-century phenomenology combine with the very real and present gestures of a 21st-century dancer, to produce a contrapuntal study that allows one to experience movement in relation to bodies of knowledge — and knowledge of bodies — both past and present.

Rovan has received prizes from the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, first prize in the Berlin Transmediale International Media Arts Festival, and his work has been performed throughout Europe and the U.S. He frequently performs his own work, either with various new instrument designs or with augmented acoustic instruments.

Rovan’s research includes new sensor hardware design and wireless microcontroller systems. His research into gestural control and interactivity has been featured in IRCAM’s journal “Resonance”, “Electronic Musician”, the Computer Music Journal, the Japanese magazine “SoundArts,” the CDROM “Trends in Gestural Control of Music” (IRCAM 2000), and will appear in the upcoming book “Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies,” to be published 2009 by Palgrave Macmillan.

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Events

China Blue: The Sounds of Architecture

September 22, 2009; 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm.
Center for Advanced Visual Studies/MIT, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, 3rd Floor, Room N51-390, Cambridge

CDCoverBack0734China Blue is an internationally exhibiting artist who is interested in how sound shapes space. She searches for the hidden acoustic identity of a structure, and uses those sounds as sculptural material to create immersive environments.

China Blue’s work has been shown in galleries and non-profit spaces world-wide, including Finland, Sweden, France and the US. She was the US representative at OPEN XI, Venice, Italy, an exhibition held in conjunction with the Architecture Biennale. Her work has also been shown at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in Australia and the Armory Fair in New York. Reviews of her work have been published in the New York Times, Art in America, Art Forum, artCritical and NY Arts to name a few. She has been interviewed by France 3 (TV), for the film “Com-mu-nity” produced by the Architecture Institute of America and was the featured artist for the 2006 annual meeting of the Acoustic Society of America. China Blue was the first person to record the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. She has been an adjunct professor and Fellow at Brown University in the United States. Her work is represented by Galerie Barnoud, Dijon, France and Art Currents, New York, NY.

Aqua Alta Installation ACDirect WebHer most recent installation, Aqua Alta, is an ambient sound installation shown concurrently at L’Atheneum in Dijon, France and Art Currents [AC Direct], New York, NY. It was based on the sounds of heart beats, sonar and breathing. Listen here.