Jocelyn Ho in collaboration with Margaret Schedel and Matthew Blessing
Women’s Labor repurposes old domestic objects laden with functionalities traditionally pertaining to women to become new musical instruments using emerging technologies. At its heart, it is a feminist initiative to revalue traditional women’s work. Throughout the project, the public will interact with the domestic-object-turned instruments as installations and in workshops. Female-identifying composers will write new compositions with the instruments, to be feature in concert performance with works by past female composers. Domesticity is recast in a new light through public engagement and performative spectacle. The ironing instrument will be showcased in this preview.
Women’s Labor interrogates the pressing issue of gender inequality by jolting the audience’s perspective of gendered activities. Moreover, in a city such as Los Angeles with a staggering socio-economic divide, domestic activities in affluent households are often exclusively done by female house-workers from poorer families. Women’s Labor democratizes domestic activities where people from all walks of life—not only women or domestic workers—engage hands-on with these domestic-object-turned instruments. While a feminist agenda of breaking the glass ceiling in traditionally male-dominated industries is important, the validation of traditionally “feminine” skillsets and their adoption by men are equally crucial to pay equality.
Artistic director, project creator, composer, performer: Jocelyn Ho
Collaborators: Margaret Schedel (composer, technical consultant) and Matthew Blessing (technical director)
Image Credit: Jean-Baptiste Jules Trayer, "Breton seamstresses in a shop" 1854
“You are a part of everything you consume: food, material goods, and energy. And everything you consume affects the world that you live in. Know how to gather good data, understand what it means, make your choices based on quality information, and take action. You are made of energy and have the power.”
This is the crux of Andrea Polli’s project Hack the Grid, which reveals how photography, digital imagery, and data visualizations can inspire community activism and political action. Polli is an artist working at the intersection of art, science, and technology. For Hack the Grid, she presents past and current projects that reveal how data visualizations create emotional impact and societal change. Polli also engages in conversations with scientists, activists, technologists, and designers in Pittsburgh, a city at the intersection of technological advancements and longstanding ecological concerns.
Hack the Grid is a project of the Hillman Photography Initiative, in which Carnegie Museum of Art invites artists to investigate contemporary social issues through photography’s measurement of light and time. In addressing the relationship between light and environmental sustainability using data visualization, Polli pushes the boundaries of photography and reveals the power of imagery to inspire citizens and change the world for the better.
ECO-CENTRIC ART + SCIENCE: Prophesies and Predictions is an open-mic marathon symposium featuring artist and author in residence Linda Weintraub, nanoscientist James Gimzewski, evolutionary biologist Charles Taylor, environmentalist and author Ursula Heise, curator Sophie Lamparter, nano-toxicologist Olivia Osborne, and media art graduate students David Ertel + Symrin Chawla.
Spring artist-in-residence and author, Linda Weintraub’s forthcoming book: “WHAT’S NEXT? Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art” provides the opportunity for professors and students from multiple academic disciplines to share their predictions of the way ecology will impact the theory, practice, insight, re-evaluation, or revision in their discipline in the coming years.
Come whenever you can. Stay as long as you wish. Share your thoughts, too!
ASSEMBLING SAMIRA: Queering Sexual Humanitarianism Through Experimental Filmmaking
NICOLA MAI: Lecture + Screening
April 1, 2014 // 12pm lunchtime lecture
Karim is an Algerian refugee selling sex as a transvestite (Samira) in Marseille, France. This art-science installation tells his story by assembling on two screens the different ways Karim presents himself in different settings including ethnographic observation, health services and humanitarian interventions. View trailer here.
Typhoon Haiyan, known as Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines, was an exceptionally powerful tropical cyclone that devastated portions of Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, on November 8, 2013. Merely four months after the record-breaking tragedy, the media hype is practically nonexistent, while survivors who lost almost everything are still struggling to get their lives back together. This lack of media attention necessitates a refresher—a reminder that the typhoon victims are still very much in need of our help.
We invite you to join us in honoring and remembering the victims of Typhoon Haiyan through AURORA—a study and exhibit of light as hope, energy, love and renewal.
Presented by
Dawn Faelnar + UCLA Art|Sci Center & The David Bermant Foundation
NATALIE JEREMIJENKO: "Climate Crisis, Food Crisis or Crisis of Agency?" Lecture
05 MAY 2009
EDA, BROAD ART CENTER
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist, inventor, and engineer with the mission to reclaim technology from idealized, abstract concepts and to apply it to the messy complexities of the real world, often with disquieting results.
Co-hosted with the Department of Design|Media Arts, “Climate Crisis, Food Crisis or Crisis of Agency?” discussed the technological opportunities for structuring participation in the contemporary environmental movement.
Organized by Chicano Studies Research Center and Sponsored by the Art + Activism Lecture Series
Location: Broad Art Center, EDA, Room 1250
During his fifty-year career, Raphael Montañez Ortiz has created mixed-media ritual performances and installations for museums and galleries in Europe and Canada and throughout the United States, including MOCA, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum. "Primal Scream" includes two of the artist's signature pieces: a Piano Destruction and a Paper Bag concert. A central figure in the Destructivism movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. Ortiz began experimenting with digital media in the 1980s, and recent works include digital paintings. He is on the faculty of the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Joining the artist is Monique Ortiz-Arndt, an artist and dancer who has been performing with Mr. Ortiz for fifteen years.
Franceschini is an artist and educator. She founded Futurefarmers in 1995 to bring together multidisciplinary practitioners to create new work. She is currently teaching media theory and practice courses at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute.
MICHAEL CENTURY: "Twin Horizons of Interdisciplinary in Art-Science" Lecture
12 MARCH 2009
EDA, UCLA BROAD ART CENTER
Michael Century is Professor of New media and Music in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which he joined in August, 2002. Long associated with The Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, Century founded the Centre’s Media Arts Division in 1988. As a producer in the field of new media art, he initiated The Art and Virtual Environments project (1991-94), one of the first large-scale and sustained investigations of virtual reality technologies as a new medium for artists.
His talk presented two perspectives on the present: one in relation to the Renaissance, seen as a period of turbulence and decompartmentalization similar to our own, and the second, analyzing briefly the sequence of waves of technological revolutions since the industrial age began in the late 18th century, highlighting the rise and fall of density of innovation in each. This led to a discussion about a coming next wave “after” information technology, based in life sciences and putting into question the very idea of art as a distinct field.
