PHILIP BEESLEY: "Hylozoic Soil" Lecture
18 FEBRUARY 2008
EDA, UCLA BROAD ART CENTER
Philip Beesley practices digital media art and experimental architecture in Toronto. His work in the last two decades has focused on field oriented distributed sculpture and landscape installations. In parallel with his sculpture practice he teaches architecture at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in Cambridge, Ontario and is co-director of Waterloo’s Integrated Centre for Manufacturing, Visualization and Design, a facility combining high-performance computing, advanced visualization and digital fabrication.
Under Surveillance: Transparency, Visibility, war and fame
By Marie Sester
Location: EDA, Broad Art Center, room 1250
Marie Sester is a media artist currently based in Los Angeles. Born in France, she began her career as an architect. Her interest, however, shifted from how to build structures to how place, cultural values, and political ideas are intertwined and affect our understanding of the world. Her work particularly questions the societal perspective of the West.
In her work she intends to reveal the ambiguity of the cultural representation dedicated to the new technologies/entertainment/information/consumables/politics, and the values and cultural codes that underlie them.
The work is concerned with issues of surveillance and subjection, but it's not making a statement about surveillance and subjection or manipulation, it intentionally stays on the edges between playful and scary to reveal the underlying perversion.
Her installation work has exhibited internationally. She had recently residencies at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), Japan; Eyebeam, New York, and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and has received grants including from the Creative Capital Foundation, New York); New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA), LEF Foundation), and Franklin Furnace Fund. Her work is mentioned in several academic books and more to come in 2008.
*All lectures are free and take place in the EDA, room 1250 Broad Art Center.
Light refreshments will be provided.
If you cannot join us in person, connect via live video streaming at http://eda.ucla.edu/
Parking is $8 all day, and is available in structure 3, adjacent to the building. Enter the campus at Hilgard Avenue and Wyton Drive and drive north on Charles E. Young drive to enter the parking structure. For more information, call 310.825.9007.
PETER SELLARS: Guest Lecture
23 JANUARY 2007
CALIFORNIA NANOSYSTEMS INSTITUTE
Location: California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI) auditorium
In collaboration with UCLA Summer Sessions
"Return to the Public Sphere! Three or Four Things to Do With a Major Research University" Cutting across disciplines, going outside the University, completes the total picture of what University life could and should be.
Peter Sellars is one of the leading theatre, opera, and television directors in the world today, having directed more than one hundred productions, large and small, across America and abroad. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and was awarded the Erasmus Prize at the Dutch Royal Palace for contributions to European culture. A graduate of Harvard University (where during his senior year he directed Gogol's The Inspector General and Handel's opera Orlando at the A.R.T.), he studied in Japan, China, and India before becoming Artistic Director of the Boston Shakespeare Company. His contemporary visions of Mozart's operas Cosi Fan Tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, and Don Giovanni, created in collaboration with Emmanuel Music and its Artistic Director Craig Smith, were hailed in Boston and in Europe and were televised by National Public Television. At tenty-six he was made Director of the American National Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
He was Artistic Director of the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals, and is currently a Professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. Mr. Sellars has collaborated with The Wooster Group and was featured in Jean-Luc Godard's film of King Lear. He has also appeared on Bill Moyers' A World of Ideas, Miami Vice, and The Equalizer, directed a rock video for Herbie Hancock, and produced a series of radio episodes for The Museum of Contemporary Art's The Territory of Art series. His first feature film, The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez, is silent in color (starring Joan Cusack, Peter Gallagher, Ron Vawter, and Mikhail Baryshnikov).
RICHARD CLAR: Guest Lecture
14 NOVEMBER 2007
EDA, UCLA BROAD ART CENTER
Art, Science and Technology class, DESMA 9
Location: EDA, Broad Art center
Richard Clar is a Southern California Interdisciplinary Artist who now resides in Paris. Clar, who studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now Cal-Arts), is an early pioneer of art-in-space and began work in this field in 1982 with a NASA approved concept for an art-payload for the U.S. Space Shuttle. Philosophical in nature, themes for Richard Clar's art-in-space projects include: space environment issues, such as orbital debris; war and peace; the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and water management on Earth. The work of Richard Clar has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and universities in the United States, Europe, and Japan. His work may be found in corporate collections such as JBL Sound and the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.
In 2001, and again in 2002, Clar coordinated the Leonardo/OLATS/IAA Space Art Workshops in Paris. Richard Clar is the Director of Art Technologies, Paris; a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA); a Board of Directors Member, Cosmica Network; Artist in Residence, Companhia Espacial Portuguesa Lda.; a Member of the SETI Permanent Study Group, and a member of the Leonardo Space Art Working Group. Clar was the Secretary of the former Art and Literature Subcommittee of the International Academy of Astronautics, and a past Member of the Executive Board, Graphic Arts Council, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
REBECA MENDEZ + ADAM EEUWENS: "Design as a Social Force" Lecture
19 APRIL 2007
EDA, UCLA ART|SCI CENTER
Rebeca Méndez is both a designer and a fine artist. Her work in both arenas has been praised and admired for the past two decades, particularly for its visceral, challenging, and sensual appeal.
Méndez designs primarily for non-profit organizations or cultural institutions. As an artist, she crosses all boundaries, traveling to extreme places such as Iceland, Patagonia, Svalbard, and the Sahara, where she is awakened to a heightened level of perception. She considers the journey as a medium in itself, and “migration” as an essential part of her work.
The profound social ignorance in this country on the topics of immigration, magnified by irresponsible and special interest media platforms that are dominating the conversation, have made her feel unwelcome and thus have heightened the sense of activism in her work and lectures.
STEVE KURTZ: "Art and Discipline" Lecture
05 APRIL 2007
EDA, UCLA BROAD ART CENTER
This lecture was built upon the following premises: first, any action within the cultural landscape performed from a minoritarian position will be perceived by authority as contestational act; and second, once challenged any or all of a variety of disciplinary agents will be sent to restabilize the discourses of the status quo through the managing or silencing of resistant cultural production.
Steve Kurtz is a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). CAE is a collective of tactical media practitioners of various specializations, including computer graphics and web design, wetware, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. Formed in 1987, CAE’s focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The collective has performed and produced a wide variety of projects for an international audience at diverse venues ranging from the street, to the museum, to the Internet. Critical Art Ensemble has also written five books, and has just released its sixth work Marching Plague: Germ Warfare and Global Public Health. Kurtz is an Associate Professor of Art at SUNY, Buffalo.
RICARDO DOMINGUEZ: "Border Disturbance Art" Lecture
07 MARCH 2007
EDA, UCLA BROAD ART CENTER
Ricardo Dominguez is co-founder of Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group that developed virtual sit-in technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. From 2000 to 2004, he was co-director of “The Thing,” an Internet service provider for artists and activists, and is currently a former member of the Critical Art Ensemble. He is an assistant professor in the visual arts department at the University of California, San Diego, and is a principal investigator at the new-edge technology institute Calit2, where he will be researching and developing a performance project on nanotechnology entitled *b.a.n.g lab*.
This lecture was co-presented with the UCLA Center for Performance Studies.
GUERRILLA GIRLS: ART + ACTIVISM > "Why the World Must Change" Performance Lecture
02 March 2007
EDA, UCLA BROAD ART CENTER
The Guerrilla Girls are a band of anonymous females who take the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms and appear in public wearing gorilla masks. They have produced posters, stickers, books, printed projects, and actions that expose sexism and racism in politics, the art world, film, and the culture at large. They use humor to convey information, provoke discussion, and show that feminists can be funny.
They wear gorilla masks to focus on the issues rather than our personalities. Dubbing themselves the conscience of culture, they declare themselves feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. Their work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Bitch and Bust; on TV and radio, including NPR, the BBC, and CBC; and in countless art and feminist texts. The mystery surrounding their identities has attracted attention. They could be anyone; they are everywhere.
ANURUPA ROY: "Activist Puppetry" Lecture
30 JANUARY 2007
GLORYA KAUFMAN HALL
Anurupa Roy, based in New Delhi, India, believes that puppetry is one of the most powerful tools available for initiating social change. She holds diplomas in puppet theater from the department of puppetry at the Dramatiska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and from the Scuola Della Guaratelle in Naples, Italy. In Delhi, she runs Kat-Katha, a puppet troupe that addresses issues such as gender, conflict resolution and AIDS awareness. Her lecture will feature a performance by members of her” Activist Puppetry Against AIDS” World Arts and Cultures course module.
LINDA WEINTRAUB: "Cycle-Logical Art" Lecture
01 MARCH 2006
EDA, UCLA ART|SCI CENTER
The term 'cycle-logical' creates a linguistic link between recycling and psychology. Cycle-logic means using cyclic logic that expands thinking beyond current uses and end-point goals. It envisions pre-production and post-use scenarios, existing as stations along an ongoing itinerary of material use. Cycle-logic integrates recycling into artistic decisions about which materials are mined, how they are fabricated, what uses they serve, when they are discarded, and how they are reused. It simultaneously seeks methods of reuse that assure the ability of eco systems to cope with stress, withstand adversity, recover from disturbance, create vitality, and invent their own recycling strategies. In this manner, cycling the earth's limited materials becomes equated with art creativity.
Linda Weintraub is the author of Avant-Guardians: Texlets in Ecology and Art (2006 - ongoing) and the founder of Artnow Publications. She wrote In The Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists (2003) and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society (1995). From 1982 - 1993, Weintraub served as the first director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute located on the Bard College campus where she originated 50 exhibitions and published over 20 catalogues.
She is curator and co-author of Lo and Behold: Visionary Art in the Post-Modern Era, Process and Product: The Making of Eight Contemporary Masterworks, Landmarks: New Site Proposals by Twenty Pioneers of Environmental Art, Art What Thou Eat: Images of Food in American Art, and The Maximal Implications of the Minimal Line. Since leaving Bard College, Weintraub curated a nationally touring exhibition, "IS IT ART?," and she co-curated the internationally touring exhibition, Animal. Anima. Animus.(1999) with Marketta Sepalla. Before her appointment at Bard College, Weintraub was the director of the Philip Johnson Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College. She has taught both contemporary art history and studio art. Weintraub served as Henry R. Luce Professor of Emerging Arts at Oberlin College from 2000-2003. She holds a master of fine arts degree from Rutgers University. Weintraub is currently a contributor to the international art journal Tema Celeste. She lectures frequently on contemporary art and its intersection with ecology.
Related project/installation by Marie Sester: 
