Archive for the ‘LECTURES’ Category
ARCO Madrid 2010 – Expanding the field
EXPANDING THE FIELD. Or, 8 good reasons to talk about new media (in an art fair)
Director: Domenico Quaranta
Lecturers: UBERMORGEN.COM, Marius Watz, Trevor Paglen, Oron Catts, Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn, Paul D. Miller / DJ Spooky
ARCO Art Fair, Forum Auditorium 2, Hall 6.
February 18, 2010, from 12.30 to 2.30 p.m. and from 4 to 8 p.m.
Download the complete program.
Acting as Aliens – Ex Post
Below you can find some links (reviews, documentation, etc.) regarding the show Gazira Babeli – Acting as Aliens (Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana) and the related seminar.
About the seminar:
- Images by Frieda Korda, Roxelo Babenco, Helfe Ihnen on Flickr.
- An ongoing discussion on the Odyssey Ning.
- A video by Helfe Ihnen on Youtube.
About the show:
- Gazira Babeli’s archive page
- A video interview on VEST.SI (Italian, sub Slovenian)
- A TV feature on TVSLO.SI (Slovenian, starting from min. 47.06)
- The opening performance on TVSLO.SI (Slovenian, starting from min. 04.45)
- “Gazira Babeli: Acting as Aliens”. A review by Flaminio Gualdoni.
- “Aliena e maga l’artista di oggi“. A review by Agnese Trocchi in Stile.it, 27.10.09.
- “Umetnost v virtualnosti“. A review by Ida Hiršenfelder, published in Dnevnik, 04.11.09.
- Some pics of the performance from the natives’ point of view on the Second Front blog.
- And some raw footage by me on my Youtube account:
Gazira Babeli: ACTING AS ALIENS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Gazira Babeli: ACTING AS ALIENS
Exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta
Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana, Slovenia
November 3 – 15, 2009
Opening and performance: November 3, 9.00 PM (CET)
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art and Kapelica gallery are proud to announce “Gazira Babeli: Acting as Aliens”, the first solo exhibition of the avatar artist Gazira Babeli in Slovenia. Internationally renowned for her activity in the digital reality of Second Life, Gazira Babeli is born there in spring 2006. She is a character in the Matrix, something in between the Oracle and Neo. What she does has been either dubbed as bug, virus, performance or art; what we can say about it is that it subverts the traditional notions of space, time, body, identity and behavior we inherited from our daily experience.
The show borrows its name from the opening performance, in which Gazira and the audience will share the same space and will play through material means, in an unprecedented overlap between digital reality and physical reality. The remains of the performance will be put on show after the event. Read the rest of this entry »
Art & the City: Holy Fire
A talk I had in Brescia (Italy) on April 22, 2009, in the series “Art and the City. Sguardi sul contemporaneo” curated by Enrico de Pascale. Presentation on Google Docs.
Not just a means of Economy. My ISEA 2009 talk
“Not just a means of Economy. Curating New Media Art in the art market field.” Lecture given at the panel “New Media Art, New Economic Realities; Emergent Economic Structures in New Media Art”, convened by Vicente Matallana. Belfast, ISEA 2009, August 26, 2009.
Some weeks ago, I was invited to take part in a workshop organized by the main sponsor of a big new media art festival. The topic under debate was: what should be the future of the festival? Of course, there were many different positions on the table. Some people said that new media art is dead, others that it’s more alive than ever; some said that the festival should avoid any compromise and be radical, others that it should gain the respect of the contemporary art world in order to survive and be successful. I was among them, of course.
At one point, a girl jumped up and said, in a polemic tone, something like this: “Hey guys, do we REALLY want to be taken seriously by the contemporary art world? Do we REALLY want to collaborate with it, to have to obey to the interests of a bunch of galleries and let them decide which artists we can show and which not?” These words were a turning point for the debate. Almost everybody seemed to agree with that girl, and nobody defended the option I humbly proposed: to turn the festival into a specialized event able to attract the same audience that moves restlessly from Documenta to the various Biennales, and not just the community that moves from, let’s say, ISEA to Ars Electronica. At the same time, these words were a revelation for me, because I understood that critics and curators are probably the most conservative part of this community.
