September 21 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

Julia Scher is an artist whose work focuses on the subjects of surveillance, insecurity and the cyber-sphere. Aiming at the exposure of dangers and ideologies of monitoring systems, Scher creates

temporary and transitory web/installation/performance works that explore issues of power, control and seduction. The work is a considered response to surveillance and security strategies employed

by the self, by the family, by institutions and by the public at large i.e. advertising. She has lectured at Harvard University, MIT, Princeton University and Rutgers University.

“I am an artist concerned with issues of social control. My work intersects the practice of social historian, poet, set-designer and costume maker. My work has been a long-term study and reflection on systems that track, watch, record, identify, and select individuals in urban space. To this end, I have

been using electronic security and closed circuit surveillance systems to make art for the last nineteen years. My by-word has been “use surveillance to help undo-surveillance.” The goal has been

to engage viewers in questions of control, responsibility and the environment. To this end I have installed security equipment and I have ripped-out security equipment. I have worked with computer programs that falsely identify passerby’s with negative, inappropriate and questioning remarks. I have

created a series of artworks (The Security By Julia series) promising safety and security but offer none in reality. The installations offer a perspective and commentary on feigned control, cosmetics,

psychological seduction, and architectural impassability. The look of gate keeping in this century will take on many forms. Our culture has become more and more accustomed to using language

of technological control and voyeurism to describe daily life and our movement through it. I have appropriated this language and electronic mix to construct artworks such as the audio “live feeds” and “control lady voice.” Many of my works are on-line, and, intended as ominous portents of what

Gary Marx has characterized as our “Maximum Security Society.”

Interview: http://www.rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2772

Education & Interpretation presents at the Tate Modern http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting.htm

September 21

October 5 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

Graham HarwoodHarwood is best known for his collaborative work ‘Rehearsal of Memory’ (1995) produced with

maximum security mental patients (permanent Collection Centre Pompidou et du Musée National d’Art Moderne) and as a core part of the Mongrel group which has won numerous

awards including the Imaginaria award and the Clarks Digital Bursary ( ICA London). Mongrel, best known for National Heritage and Natural Selection which explored racialisation and

the new eugenics. It is closely associated with the formation of social software and software art through its development of Linker and HeritageGold, BlackLash. Harwood received the first

online commission from Tate Gallery London’s ‘Uncomfortable Proximity’ (for which he won the Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation in New Media). Harwood spent the last few

years working in the Nederland’s with the Waag Society and Imagine IC constructing Nine(9) a collaborative engine for celebrating the lives of those locked out of the cultural mainstream.

He now lives and works in Southend-on-sea with Matsuko (founder member of Mongrel) and their son Lani where they continue their investigations.

Mervin JarmanMervin is a Community Art Activist, an Interactive Multimedia Designer, Human Computer

Interface expert and a core member of the Mongrel Collective. He is a particular kindof mongrel, a new breed of street art-hactivist emerging in new media and technology. mervin’s

theory on art is that ‘art is life’ hence his life is his only claim to being an artist, as his artis a total expression of his life. His engagement with technology as a tool for empowerment

and intervention stems from his various experiences both in Jamaica and in London. In Jamaica, mervin’s place of origin, he is said to have been frustrated by the lack of opportunities that

existed for a young man in the street. His struggles to broaden his experiential prompted him to migrate to London where he got his first taste of computers and new media. His timely

collision with Harwood and Richard Pierre-Davis cemented the Mongrel Collective, who is now the avant-garde of digitally engaging street culture worldwide.

“My involvement with mongrel has helped to foster a new design on media arts and community initiative ‘mongrel street’, out of this has risen the Container Project. This has enabled a kind of

social interaction that is not common to the community of Palmers Cross; there is a motion for the project to go to Sierra Leone and South Africa. The mongrel revolution has already begun...

www.container-project.net”. Simply mervin

Francesca da RiminiFrancesca da Rimini makes video, internet projects and texts. Her practice is usually

collaborative and widely distributed. In 1991 she co-founded the artist collective VNS Matrix. Beginning with A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century in 1991, the group made

installations, computer games, CorpusFantasticaMOO, a virtual theme park and cinema ads. During the 1990s Francesca investigated email relationships, MOO communities and web

architectures, reverse engineering her experiences into multiple projects and personae. Her research generated the novel FleshMeat, a bottomless pond of dead girls in dollspace, a counter

spectre to Big Daddy Mainframe in Los Días y Las Noches de los Muertos, and the subatomic decoherence of Soft Accidents. More recently Francesca has been exploring quantum physics,

indigenous knowledge systems and creation/destruction cycles. Liberation Range, a catalogue of weaponised body adornments and seven beauties and the warroom, an internet data harvesting

engine | poetry generator, are current research collaborations.

http://gashgirl.sysx.orghttp://www.mongrelx.org/

Presented in conjunction with Brown University

October 15 – RISD Auditorium – Lecture – 7pm

“Rhythm Science”

Rhythm Science will be a “live” multi-media presentation of the history of digital art and media from the viewpoint of an artist who uses “found objects” like a dj - i.e. it’s a subjective

selection where old video material will be remixed and combined with new... history itself will be the material for the mix, and the lecture presentation will focus on how dj culture has

evolved out of the same technologies that are used for digital media and art. Paul D. Miller is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician working in NYC. A writer

for numerous publications, Miller is Co-Publisher of the respected, multi-cultural magazine “A Gathering of the Tribes”, and was the first Editor-At-Large of the cutting edge digital media

magazine “Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture.” His artwork has appeared in a wide variety of contexts including the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture (year

2000); the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and a host of other museums and galleries.

But even with all of this, Miller is most well known under the moniker of his “constructed persona” as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. Under that guise, Miller has performed extensively

throughout the US, Europe and Australasia. He has recorded a huge volume of music and has collaborated with a wide variety of pre-eminent musicians and composers such as Iannis

Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, Killa Priest from Wu-Tang Clan, Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. Miller has remixed records

by artists ranging from Metallica to Steve Reich. His own records include Riddim Warfare (Outpost/Geffen); Songs of a Dead Dreamer, The Viral Sonata, and Synthetic Fury (all

on Asphodel); and Necropolis (Knitting Factory Works), His latest releases are “Optometry” (Thirsty Ear Records), a collaborative CD, featuring jazz pianist Matthew Shipp and his band; and “Dubtometry”, a remix of the same, with collaborators Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor.

In 2004, Miller will perform “DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation”, commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, The Vienna Festival and the Festival D’Automne in Paris.

October 17 – Veterans Memorial Auditorium - Performance - 8pm

DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation

A multi-media spectacle with visions scattered across three screens and a pulsating live audio mix as spin master Paul Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky) turns Griffith’s controversial film on its head.

The New England premiere of a MULTIMEDIA theater-performance work by DJ Spooky, DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation is a strikingly original and provocative work that addresses issues

of race, technology and the media in society, and should be one of the most discussed eventsof The Providence Biennial First Wave. DJ Spooky’s re-mix combines footage from D.W.

Griffith’s landmark, controversial 1915 film, visual effects and new images, and a “musicscape” that features a live audio track of jungle and hip-hop samples, mixed with an original

violin composition. It will be shown on three large screens at Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium.TICKETS: www.tickets.com (RISD students - purchase Student Life Tickets)Presented in conjunction with the new Providence Biennial (401) 421-4278

www.firstworksri.org

October 19 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. Before joining the faculty at the University

of California, Santa Cruz in the Film & Digital Media Department, Warren was an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, a research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory, and a research

collaborator in the Interrogative Design Group at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory.

He has recently been working with artist and designer Sawad Brooks on the Translation Map, a network art-research project that interrogates “translation,” funded in part by the Arts

Technology Center, University of New Mexico, with grants from the Rockefeller Foundationand the NEA. The Translation Map was awarded an Emerging Artists/Emerging Medium

grant from the Walker Art Center and the Jerome Foundation and was shown in the Walker Art Center exhibition /How Latitudes Become Forms/Translocations/ and can be seen online here:

translationmap.walkerart.org.

http://people.ucsc.edu/~wsack/Presented in conjunction with Brown University

October 27 – CIT Building - 169 Weybosset St. – 5pm

Urtica:Mouse says: click! And human says: eek!

Social behavior and communication in virtual social environments. Urtica, an art and media research group (Serbia and Montenegro) www.urtica.org Working together as the collective Urtica, Eduard Balaz and Violeta Vojvodic develop multidisciplinary projects that merge art, science and social engagement. Work ranges from web-based projects, media actions, and short videos broadcast to the general public on television. Exhibited internationally: Ars Electronica (Austria), FILE (Brazil), VIPER (Switzerland), Ogaki Biennale (Japan). 2003 UNESCO Digital Arts Award at IAMAS, Japan. ArtsLink – Digital Media Artist in Residence Program

November 2 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

Michelle Fornabai is a designer developing architectural prototypes at various scales between body, building and city, which have increasingly involved collaborations with fashion, furniture, and industry. She received her Masters of Architecture from Princeton University, and has taught at Tulane University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and currently teaches jointly at The Rhode Island School of Design and Columbia University. She co-founded Studio Matrixx, a collaborative practice established in 1998, and has established her own practice, ambo.infra design, in 2001. Her design research investigates the innovative use of materials and technologies to explore issues of the body and environs. Her work has been exhibited at numerous sites including the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. She has lectured at the Whitney Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Art Institute and has been published in Surface and Praxis. Michelle Fornabai’s current research into Soft Structures, in preparation for the Soft Structures: Pattern-Book explores patterning in relation to traditional techniques and emergent technologies of manufacture. In 2003, she received a research grant from the Graham Foundation for the Study of Fine Arts and a visual arts grant from the LEF Foundation for the patterning and prototyping of the Soft Structures and has been working in collaboration with the Textile and Apparel Design departments at RISD on the manufacture of inflatable and pneumatic prototypes. In the manufacture of ‘ready to wear’ Soft Structures and the publication of Soft Structures : Pattern-Book, the medium of mass production is used to negotiate architectural scale in a new way, to interrogate the boundary between research and practice, and like the architectural pattern-book, extend the base of architectural praxis to diverse audiences.

“Presently, ‘pattern’ and ‘patterning,’ find themselves located uneasily in the vernacular between the digital and material, technical logic and traditional technique. Pattern refers as much to nonlinear dynamical fluid mechanics and metaphoric networks, as it does to methods of making, shaping or molding material in knitting, weaving, sewing and casting solid forms. The notion of ‘pattern’ and its references to the fluid conditions of bodies and the environs (from clothing to weather) will be reconsidered more generally and critically in the context of architecture, and used to refashion the classical architectural constructions of model, figure and order. The architectural pattern-book, a genre of technical treatise popular in the 19th century, that codified and outlined the principles and mathematical formulas of Classical architecture, will act as a model for the publication of this research. The Soft Structures: Pattern-Book will investigate the boundary between research and practice, and like the architectural pattern-book, extend the base of architectural praxis to diverse audiences. As the purpose of the Soft Structures: Pattern-Book is both instructive and iterative, the book will also disseminate a series of patterning strategies and patterns for the literal production of inhabitable spaces. The patterns may serve as templates for informed practice and as an instrument for experimentation in formation with its users.” —m.fornabai, Soft Structures http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/32235

November 10 – Location TBA

Japanese Mobile Phone as Culture

In Japan, mobile phone (”ketai”) has become the platform for almost any application one can imagine with digital technologies, from camera to karaoke, radio, TV, game, credit card, restaurant coupon, to name a few. Ketai is changing Japanese way of life, as well as way of seeing the world, being a part of our daily audiovisual experiences and popular culture. Artists and designers are involved in the process as well. Why ketai became such an important medium in a short time? The lecture will try to answer the question while visually introducing the current ketai culture.

Machiko Kusahara is a researcher in media art and theory, who has been publishing and curating in the interdisciplinary field connecting art, science, technology, culture, sociology and history. She has a PhD in engineering from University of Tokyo for her theoretical research in this field. Her recent researches are on correlation between digital media and traditional culture. She published sixteen laserdiscs on computer graphics and coauthored Art@Science (Springer), The Robot in the Garden (MIT Press) among others.

Her writings have been published in over ten languages. Kusahara has been curating and writing in the field of digital art since 1985. She was involved in founding Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and NTT/ICC, and is a co-founder of Digital Image, Japan’s largest organization of artists and designers using digital media. Besides for ICC she curated many exhibitions internationally. In 2001 she curated a large-scale media art /technology exhibition Fushigi Jungle for the City of Kobe. She has been a jury member for international competitions including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, LIFE, and the Japan Media Arts Festival, besides being involved in numerous academic conferences and organizations such as the Japan Art Council and Science Foundation among many others.

Before joining Waseda University she taught at UCLA for one year as a visiting professor. Previously she taught at Kobe University Graduate School of Science and Technology. http://www.f.waseda.jp/kusahara/http://www.f.waseda.jp/kusahara/media

November 9 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

Ghosts in the Keyhole - Archaeologies of Visual Media

Erkki Huhtamo is a Finnish media researcher, writer and curator. He is Associate Professor of media history and theory at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Department of Design | Media Art. He has published extensively on media archeology and media art, curated exhibitions of media art, and directed television programmes about media culture. He is currently working on two books, one dealing with the moving panorama as a mass medium of the nineteenth century, and the other with an archeology of interactive media.

For more than a decade, Erkki Huhtamo has been developing (together with other researchers like Siegfried Zielinski) the theory and practice of “media archeology”. Media archeology combats the notion that only the “newest of the new” matters, identifying this as a biased position supported by conservative thinking and corporate rhetoric. Excavating the forgotten media of the past reveals not only that media culture is a much more complex and layered construct than it may seem at first; it also shows that contemporary media culture is a mixture of true innovations, and discourses and features that have already emerged in earlier cultural contexts. Media archeology reveals the hidden and suppressed dimensions of media history, but it also helps us understand the present media culture and the often invisible forces that are shaping it. The lecture discusses the media archeological approach and demonstrates the possibilities it offers by a number of case studies.

http://dma.ucla.edu/people/faculty

December 7 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

Abstract Communication in Interactive Systems

Golan Levin’s art combines equal measures of the sublime, the provocative, and the whimsical in a dizzying array of digital artifacts, performances and environments. Working simultaneously as artist and engineer, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity. Identified by Technology Review as one of the top 100 innovators under age 35, and dubbed by El Pais as “one of the most brilliant figures in contemporary audiovisual art,” Levin has exhibited widely in Europe, America and Asia. Golan Levin is an artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of non-verbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, often created with a variety of collaborators, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity.

Levin’s work spans a variety of online, installation and performance media. He is known for the conception and creation of Dialtones [2001], a concert whose sounds are wholly performed through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones, and for The Secret Lives of Numbers [2002], an interactive online data visualization featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Previously, Levin was granted an Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica for his Audiovisual Environment Suite [2000] interactive software and its accompanying audiovisual performance, Scribble [2000]. Most recently, Levin and collaborator Zachary Lieberman premiered Re:mark [2002], an interactive installation, and Messa di Voce [2003], a new-media performance. These projects use augmented-reality technologies to create multi-person, real-time visualizations of their participants’ speech and song. Levin is now in the preliminary research phase of a new body of work, which will lead to audiovisual performances conducted on highly miniaturized, interactive robotic systems. Levin received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he studied with John Maeda in the Aesthetics and Computation Group. Between degrees, he worked for four years as an interaction designer and research scientist at Interval Research Corporation. Presently Levin is Assistant Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie-Mellon University; his work is represented by the bitforms gallery, New York City.

Statement:In one dystopia, we project ourselves into the art supply store of the near future. The wind howls through the room, whose shelves are empty but for three small cartons: Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator. For today’s digital artists – many of whom have eagerly adopted the narrow horizons dictated by this small handful of commercial products – this vision is, I claim, already a reality. And the unquestioned hegemony of these tools has launched an unprecedented proliferation of homogenous and disposable electronic designs. To state that computers can offer an unimaginably greater world of possible forms than these products is not techno-optimism; as computers are provably capable of simulating any other machine, it is mathematical fact. My own work is simply one artist’s attempt to reclaim computation itself as a personal medium of expression. In my practice, I focus the radical plasticity of the computational medium on an examination of non-verbal communications protocols. http://www.flong.com

Julia Scher

October 5Graham Harwood, Mervin Jarman

Francesca da Rimini

October 15Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky)

October 19Warren Sack

October 27Eduard Balazc, Violeta Vojvodic

November 2Michelle Fornabai

November 10Machiko Kusahara

November 9Erkki Huhtamo

December 7Golan Levin

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October 17Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky)