symposium

Biennale: Figures of Interactivity

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At the beginning of the 21st Century those changes which were ushered in by cybernetics half a century ago have started significantly to affect man’s sense of his place on the planet. Space and the distances between entities and our human counterparts have shrunken, without however allowing things and people to become better acquainted nor interrelate through heightened closeness of contact.

Media, data programming, progress in understanding, communicating the here and now and the very place of human presence have undergone major transformations giving direction to the future of society. Today therefore it is relevant to query the “figures” cross-linking and alienating human groups, these historic “figures” in social bonding which are today distorted by development in technologies and in digital technology.

European school of visual arts (ÉESI) fulfills its role as overseer and as a higher education academic institution, in analysis, research, educational method and in that artistic creativity best able to lead the way forward on the path to addressing these basic issues.

Together with the University of Poitiers and the Université du Québec à Montréal, the ÉESI and the Espace Mendès-France have devised the launch of a two yearly international multidisciplinary series of meetings from the Fall of 2008, in the form of a think-tank focusing on the “Figures of Interactivity”.

The title of this second Biennial is Memory(Memories). What happens to memory when, after the book, its place seems to be taken by the computer? Is this really so important, after all, and does not the computer free the memory of its obligations to learn “by heart” and to restore the function it had in Antiquity and the Middle ages, that of being a “matrix of cogitation in which memories are moved and gathered in a scheme with random access, a memorial architecture, a library where man spends his time building with the express intention of using it inventively” (Mary Carruthers, Machina memorialis, Gallimard, 2002).

programme online

HotHouse Symposium: 27-28 July 2010 at the Sydney Opera House

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HotHouse Symposium HotHouse is an initiative of the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), UNSW in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney, a think-tank that brings together leading artists, designers, curators and creative thinkers to develop visions and practical solutions for urban transformation.

HotHouse brings together artists, designers, curators and creative thinkers in a quest to develop models for sustainable environmental change. This “collective experiment” calls upon art and design to offer practical means of transforming spaces, environments, and even cities in ways that are enduring and energising, and that, most importantly, engage all sectors of the community.
The HotHouse think-tank project will be launched by a two-day symposium during which speakers who are experts in their various disciplines will focus on urgent environmental concerns and present cutting edge projects from around the world and generate ideas for sustainable city living.

HotHouse at the Sydney Opera House, 27-28 July 2010, is a “collective experiment” initiated and led by the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) at UNSW in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney.

With Michaela Crimmin, Natalie Jeremijenko, Jill Bennett, Tony Fry, Bruce Mau ++++

http://hothouse.unsw.edu.au/

SFAI Hosts Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Ann Chamberlain Distinguished Fellow in Interdisciplinary Studies

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The San Francisco Art Institute is pleased to welcome New York City–based artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles as the inaugural Ann Chamberlain Distinguished Fellow in Interdisciplinary Studies.

A major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1969 manifesto Maintenance Art: Proposal for an Exhibition argues for the intimate relationship between creative production in the public sphere and domestic labor—a relationship whose intricacies and ramifications she has been unraveling, in one form or another, ever since. Starting in 1977, she became artist-in-residence (unsalaried) at the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enables her to introduce radical public art as public culture into a system serving and owned by the entire population. Recent permanent commissions include Percent-for-Art Freshkills Park Project in New York City (formerly the world’s largest municipal landfill), Danehy Park in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA), and the Maine College of Art in Portland (Maine, USA). Current and recent temporary exhibitions include performances and installations at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga (California), the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Creative Time in New York City, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Tel Aviv (Israel), and the 2007 Sharjah Biennial in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates). She has completed six “work ballets” that involve workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables in cities across the globe. Laderman Ukeles is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of many grants and fellowships from the NEA and the New York State Council on the Arts.

San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
800 345 SFAI / 415 749 4500

Monday, May 3 – Wednesday, May 5, 2010

http://www.sfai.edu/ladermanukeles

Sun Valley Center for the Arts presents I Spy: Surveillance and Security

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I Spy: Surveillance and Security
Feb 26 – Apr 30, 2010

Sun Valley Center for the Arts
191 5th Street East
Ketchum, Idaho
208.726.9491

http://www.sunvalleycenter.org

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I Spy: Surveillance and Security, a multidisciplinary project of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, examines the relationship between surveillance, security and privacy in the early 21st century. A visual art exhibition is on view from February 26 through April 30.

The attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound flight reopened the urgent national conversation about security and surveillance that has been going on since September 11, 2001. Government today has unprecedented access into our lives. At the same time that we are debating how to balance civil rights against our need for security, corporations use hidden cameras and track our internet use to sell us their products. Millions of us willingly (or unwittingly) give up our privacy to participate in social networking sites like Facebook.

How has increased governmental and corporate intrusion into our lives shaped our assumptions about what is private and what is public? How has our definition of civil liberties changed? What effect has the Internet and the boom in social networking sites had on our behavior? Are we safer now than we were before?

The exhibition features work by artists Deborah Aschheim, Hasan Elahi, Trevor Paglen and Paul Shambroom.

Between 2003 and 2005, Deborah Aschheim created six installations she called Neural Architecture (a smart building is a nervous building). “Nervous systems” for architecture, these sculptural projects reflect our tendency to think about buildings in human terms. They also convey our ambivalence toward surveillance; technologies that initially seem invasive or Orwellian eventually become simple conveniences. The sculpture Aschheim presents in this exhibition is a recreation of one neural column from her earlier projects.

Hasan Elahi has made his everyday life part of his artwork. Erroneously targeted as a suspected terrorist and interrogated by the FBI, Elahi decided that his best defense was to open up his life to public and governmental scrutiny. Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is an online database that documents his travels, finances and even the meals he eats on airplanes. For I Spy, Elahi is creating a timely installation that considers security and surveillance in the world of aviation. Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is a project of Creative Capital.

The work of artist, writer and geographer Trevor Paglen explores the relationship between surveillance and security in a post-September 11th world. His long-distance photographs of secret military installations, badges from classified military programs and photos of U.S. spy satellites in orbit expose a world of secret operations and surveillance that sometimes exists in plain sight.

>From 2003 to 2007 Paul Shambroom photographed Homeland Security training environments like “Disaster City” in Texas and “Terror Town” in New Mexico. His images of personnel in their disaster gear, training in simulated settings, get at the difficulty we sometimes have discerning between legitimate security threats and paranoid fear. Shambroom is a 2001 Creative Capital Visual Arts grantee.

Related Programs

Lecture: Living in a Wired World: Can Personal Privacy Survive in the 21st Century?
by Frederick Lane
Attorney, author and technology expert
Wed, Mar 10, 7pm

Lecture: The Role of Surveillance in National Security
by John Lehman
Former Secretary of the Navy and member of the 9/11 Commission
Thu, Apr 1, 7pm

Symposium: The Blue House goes Out of The Blue

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An international symposium on Instant Urbanism, Hospitality and Accelerated History.
August 3rd – 9th 2009

Deadline for registration: Monday, July 20th, 2009

http://www.blauwehuis.org/

Out of The Blue is an international symposium organized by The Blue House (Het Blauwe Huis) focusing on three main navigational strands in understanding experimental communities: Instant Urbanism, Hospitality and Accelerated History. Out of The Blue is as a discursive forum where a number of investigative questions will be articulated via workshops, intense dialogues, in-conversations, study sessions, public deliberation plenaries, performances, and discussions with a number of guests on stage.

The initiator and main organizer is The Blue House, a four-year durational project initiated in IJburg, a new city extension of Amsterdam. IJburg is a major new urban district being developed on a cluster of man-made islands to the east of Amsterdam city centre. The whole development is governed by a highly detailed plan, the implementation of which is strictly regulated.
In 2005, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk arranged for a large villa in housing ‘Block 35’ to be taken off the private market and be re-designated as a space for community research, artistic production and cultural activities. In cooperation with Dennis Kaspori and Hervé Paraponaris The Blue House has acted as a centre for artistic and cultural production and research into what happens when such a radical approach to urban planning and community development is employed.
Out of The Blue will take place in the future ‘Activity Centre’ on the island presently under construction. The still concrete structure will be used as a temporal public faculty, a 50-room motel and an amphitheatre. The design is made by Maartje Dros and Francois Lombarts.
The curator of the symposium is Yane Calovski. It is part of Blue House project ‘Parade of Urbanism’ from Jeanne van Heeswijk and Dennis Kaspori in collaboration with Floris van Heynsbergen.

Symposium program:

Instant Urbanism: All for the love of Instant Urbanism
Organized with Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen (STEALTH.unlimited, Rotterdam / Belgrade).
‘All for the love of Instant Urbanism’ brings together a group of people involved with and troubled by the necessity for a more future oriented instant creation and collectivity in the city. It blends a workshop, performance and discussions with a number of guests on stage, while setting out for the slippery grounds of even newer horizons.
Participants will include: Tor Lindstrand and Mårten Spångberg, International Festival, Stockholm, Emiliano Gandolfi, Cohabitation Strategies, independent curator and architect, Rotterdam, Dubravka Sekulic, Belgrade / Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht / Santiago Cirugeda, Recetas Urbanas, Sevilla.

Hospitality: Hospitality, Privacy, Place
Organized with Dr. Johan Siebers (Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies School of Advanced Study, University of London).
‘Hospitality, Privacy, Place’ is a two-day workshop that will explore the dialectic between these concepts in the context of the question what it means to build and develop a community that can be a mirror of Europe, both mediating and shaping its course.
Participants will include: Peter Thompson, Sheffield University (concrete utopias), Aneta Krzemien, University of Central Lancashire (public dialogue), Volker Schneider, Speedliner Co. and Ernst Bloch Assoziation, Bochum (concrete utopia, urbanization), Maaike Engelen, London (psychoanalysis as cultural critique).

Accelerated History: Is Time Enough? Duration, Location and Accelerated Histories
Organized with Dr. Paul O’Neill (artist – curator and GWR Research Fellow in Commissioning with Situations, University of the West of England, Bristol).
This strand of the symposium takes a speculative look at how duration and the evolutionary process of time is conceived of as part of new cumulative approaches to artistic, organizational and curatorial praxis in response to a specific locations and contexts. Centered around a series of intense dialogues and in-conversations, this strand aims to unpack key issues relating Durational approaches to Participatory Praxis, Collaboration and Play, Communities and Social Engagement, Organizational Models and Networks, Critical Writing and Pedagogy.
Participants will include: Sally Tallant (Head of Programmes, Serpentine, London) and Jonathan Banks (Chief Executive, ixia – the UK national public art think-tank), curator Sophie Hope (co-founder of curatorial duo B+B, London) and Amsterdam based writer-curator Eva Fotiadi, artists Barbara Holub & Paul Rajakovics (Transparadiso, Vienna), Christoph Schaefer (Park Fiction, Hamburg), and Mick Wilson (Dean of GradCam, Dublin), writer and media theorist Ned Rossiter (author of ‘Organized Networks’) and Paul O’Neill with a writing workshop on duration led by Maria Fusco (Writer and Director of Art Writing, Goldsmiths, London).

Out of The Blue has been developed by The Blue House and a number of partner institutions including: Locating the Producers – an on-going collaborative research initiative between Situations at the University of the West of England, Bristol, ProjectBase in Cornwall and Dartington College of Arts / University College Falmouth and led by Dr. Paul O’Neill (www.situations.org.uk/research_ltp.html) and ECREA – European Communication Research and Education Association – Philosophy of Communication.