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.
EDUARDO KAC: "Telepresence and Bio Art" Lecture
24 JANUARY 2006
EDA, UCLA ART|SCI CENTER
Eduardo Kac's work reveals the alternately poetic, political, personal, and philosophical approaches by which the artist examines contemporary life and speculates on our collective future. After an introduction contextualizing his pioneering telepresence work, in progress since the mid-1980s, Kac will give examples and further discuss his current transgenic work. Kac has integrated many disciplines to present an imaginative view of art's relevance to the contemporary world, a view which has firm roots in the artist's background in philosophy and literature. The artist is internationally recognized for his unique artwork which focuses on the relationships among and between humans, animals, machines, and different life forms. The presentation will include a discussion of "GFP Bunny" (Alba, the green rabbit) and "Move 36", Kac's most recent work, shown at Gwangju Biennale, Korea, and Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil.
Following the lecture, the artist will autograph copies of his new book, Telepresence and Bio Art -- Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots, published by The University of Michigan Press. Eduardo Kac is an artist who exhibited in 2005 at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; and Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, among others. In 2005 Kac held a solo show at Galerie Biche de Bere, Paris. He is currently working on a public art commission for the Weisman Art Museum, in Minneapolis, where he will have a solo show in 2006. In March 2006 Kac will have a solo show at Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires. Kac is represented at Arco 2006, Madrid, by Black Box Gallery, Copenhagen.
ORLAN: "Free Flow" Lecture
17 JANUARY 2006
EDA, BROAD ART CENTER
The French Artist Orlan began her highly unconventional career at the age of seventeen, with a series of staged photographs of her own body, which has become her art medium and her primary creative voice. She continued to make her body the center of public and aesthetic debate with works and performances staged in the most prestigious art galleries in France. Orlan’s art has taken a myriad of forms: painting, sculpture, poetry, photography, and video.
She addresses themes of disfiguration and refiguration, virtual and real, beauty and grotesque, as well as sexuality, female identity, and Catholic symbolism. Her current digital photograph work, “Self-Hybridizations” continues to question the social and cultural pressure exerted on the body.
KEN GOLDBERG: "Too Close For Comfort" Lecture
11 JANUARY 2006
EDA, UCLA ART|SCI CENTER
Like oxygen, privacy is an odorless, colorless substance usually taken for granted. It is deeply rooted in both the personal and the social, evoking a range of human responses. Political and technical developments have have altered privacy's ecosystem of expectations, laws and behaviors. To expand the dialogue on visual privacy, we set out to demonstrate - to make visible - concrete examples of privacy in practice.
Commissioned by the Whitney Museum, we installed a state-of-the-art robotic webcamera over UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. For six weeks, the camera was made accessible to anyone on the Internet.
Online participants shared remote control of the robot camera, allowing them to zoom in to frame and photograph activity on the Plaza at any time of day or night. During the six-week course of the installation, over 1100 images were taken, putting public activity in Sproul Plaza under scrutiny and placing online participants in the position of hidden observers. The installation provoked a range of reactions. I'll describe what was observed, the controversies, and illustrate with images taken by users.
Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Walker Art Center, Ars Electronica (Linz Austria), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Pompidou Center (Paris), ICC Biennale (Tokyo), Kwangju Biennale (Seoul), Artists Space, The Kitchen, and the Whitney Biennial. He has also held visiting positions at MIT Media Lab, Art Center College of Design, and the San Francisco Art Institute. www.ken.goldberg.net
EDWARD A. SHANKEN: "Artists In Industry and The Academy" Lecture
09 DECEMBER 2005
EDA, UCLA ART|SCI CENTER
Edward Shanken's talk surveys contemporary artist-engineer-scientist collaborations in industry and the academy and considers a variety of theoretical and practical issues pertaining to them. Given the increasing dedication of cultural resources to engage artists and designers in science and technology research, he argues that more scholarships must analyze case-studies, identify best practices and working methods, and propose models for evaluating both the hybrid products resulting from these endeavors and the contributions of the individuals engaged in them.
He edited a collection of essays by Roy Ascott, entitled Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (University of California Press, 2003). His essay, "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art" received honorable mention in the Leonardo Award for Excellence in 2004. He edited "Artists in Industry and the Academy: Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations" a special series of essays in Leonardo 38:4 and 38:5 (2005). He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Council of Learned Societies. He serves as an advisor to the REFRESH conference, the journal Technoetic Arts, and is vice-chair of the Leonardo Education Forum. Website: http://artexetra.com
"Media + Medicine : Environment + The Mind" Lecture + Symposium
24 OCTOBER 2005
EDA, UCLA ART|SCI CENTER
This dialogue was centered on the collaboration with the Media and Medicine group, led by Ken Wells and Bowen Chung to develop a communication strategy for Hurricane Katrina survivors. Henri Lucas held a special class with this theme as the center activity for the students who contributed and exhibited their design proposals for a better communication system for the New Orleans community. This symposium was organized to help facilitate the launch of the Katrina project described below.
PARTICIPANTS: Bowen Chung (School of Medicine, UCLA) / Henri Lucas and students (Department of Design|Media Arts) / African American Community Leaders (Loretta Jones, Charlene Williams, Ron Wright, Eric Mercier).
JEN HAUSER: "Bio Art - Taxonomy of an Etymological Monster" Lecture
18 OCTOBER 2005
EDA, UCLA ART|SCI CENTER
Jens Hauser is a Paris based art curator, writer, cultural journalist and film maker.
Recently Hauser organized a show on biotechnological art at the National Arts and
Culture Centre Le Lieu Unique Nantes/France, that included eleven artists employing
biotechnology as a means of expression, and published L'Art Biotech' (2003).
His forthcoming exhibitions deal with the paradigm of "skin as a technological
interface". He also directs creative radio pieces, sound environments and documentary
films which have been shown in festivals and as video installations in museums.
"Animals + Genetic Technologies" Lecture + Symposium
14 OCTOBER 2005
EDA, UCLA ART|SCI CENTER
Can artists be trusted to act with integrity in the uncharted waters of their enthusiastic engagement with genetic technologies? Carol Gigliotti presented key ideas from her essay, “Leonardo’s choice: the ethics of artists working with genetic technologies.” The center of her argument grew out of an increasing concern, not only about the risks of genetic technologies, in general, but also with a growing genre of art practice involving genetic technologies and animals. She is joined by artists whose work center on issues dealing with biotechnology and animals, and scientists whose research involves work with animals. This symposium resulted in a special issue in the AI & Society journal, Springer- Verlag, UK. November 14, 2005
PARTICIPANTS: Carol Gigliotti (Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, BC) / Taimie Bryant (UCLA School of Law) / Natalie Jeremijenko (Department of Visual Arts, UCSD) / Eduardo Kac (Department of Art & Technology, AIC) / Charles Taylor (Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, UCLA) / Steve Best (Department of Philosophy & Humanities, University of Texas-El Paso) / Beatriz da Costa (Departments of Studio Art, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, UCI). Moderated by Victoria Vesna.
