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18 April 2009 by nathaniel

Milwaukee first Upgrade! Sunday APril 19th

Upgrade! Milwaukee presents Patrick Lichty and Christopher Burns!
Sunday April 19, 7 – 9 PM
MOCT, 240 E Pittsburgh Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53204

Please come to our first-ever Upgrade! Milwaukee, featuring Chicago-based Patrick Lichty and Milwaukee’s own Christopher Burns!

patrick lichty

patrick lichty

Patrick Lichty (b.1962)  is a technologically-based conceptual artist, writer, independent curator, animator for the activist group, The Yes Men, and Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine. He began showing technological media art in 1989, and deals with works and writing that explore the social relations between us and media. Venues in which Lichty has been involved with solo and collaborative works include the Whitney & Turin Biennials, Maribor & Yokohama Triennials, Performa Performance Biennial, Ars Electronica, and the International Symposium on the Electronic Arts (ISEA). He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow, a Smithsonian New Century/New Media Award recipient, and a multiple nominee for the Rockefeller New Media Fellowship.

He also works extensively with virtual worlds, including Second Life, and his work, both solo and with his performance art group, Second Front, has been featured in Flash Art, Eikon Milan, and ArtNews.  His latest work, a collaborative work with Gazira Babeli, entitled 7UP, will have a solo exhibition at SKUC gallery in Slovenia this Fall.

visualizations by Christopher Burns

visualizations by Christopher Burns

Christopher Burns is a laptop improviser and a composer of instrumental chamber music.  His works explore simultaneity and multiplicity: textures and materials are layered one on top of another, creating a dense and energetic polyphony.  Both electronic and acoustic music are influenced by Christopher’s work as a computer music researcher.  The gritty, rough-hewn sonic materials of his laptop instruments are produced through custom software designs, and the idiosyncratic pitch and rhythmic structures of his chamber music are typically created and transformed through algorithmic procedures.  His most recent projects emphasize multimedia and motion capture, integrating performance, sound, and animation into a unified experience.

A committed educator, Christopher teaches music composition and technology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  Previously, he served as the Technical Director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, after completing a doctorate in composition there in 2003.  He has studied composition with Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, Jonathan Berger, Michael Tenzer, and Jan Radzynski.

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Announcing the launch of Upgrade! Milwaukee.

Upgrade!

Upgrade! Milwaukee is a regular gathering of digital creatives – artists, musicians, performers, writers, curators and the public – that fosters dialogue and creates opportunities for collaboration within the local new media community. It features 1-3 guest speakers at each event, held at a rotating venue: informal, free, and open to all. We welcome suggestions for speakers, panels or gatherings. Upgrade! Milwaukee will continue to grow as a local node within the global Upgrade! International (UI) network.

Upgrade! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralized, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! (i) operates according to local interests and their available resources; and (ii) reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. While individual nodes present new media projects, engage in informal critique, and foster dialogue and collaboration between individual artists, Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year. There are currently over 30 nodes in UI, across North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Second Life.

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19 February 2009 by nathaniel

Dennis Balk: Early work 1890-2090

Denis Balk

February 6-March 13, 2009
Inova/Kenilworth (Milwaukee)
2155 North Prospect Avenue
Artist reception: February 6, 6-9 pm

Really fascinating show – his first retrospective – at the INOVA gallery in Milwaukee. Very theatrical, lovely installations, precursors to relational art, some funny prints and drawings and time lines and maps. Definitely worth a visit. From the INOVA site:

“This exhibition surveys Balk’s work from the 1990s ‘napkin’ drawings project (historical timelines drawn in marker on cloth dining napkins) to his current “Planck State” particle interaction images and beyond. Through a complex, winding style of narrative exposition, built with photographs of Middle Eastern street life, fanciful subatomic depictions, and scraps of text, Balk investigates the constituent material of reality as it shapes and forms cultures that reshape and reform the world.”

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18 February 2009 by nathaniel

What is important

Although I’ve been keeping a low profile in the public debates about Wikipedia Art, I have had a few ongoing and private discussions with its critics and supporters. With his OK, the below is an excerpt from an email I wrote to Tom Moody yesterday.

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The main issue for me is not whether I (or others) like or dislike … the Wiki [(I actually think it an extremely valuable resource)], to game or not game the systems that contribute to it, and certainly not to canonize myself – you’ll note that other than our own page and my own blog, I have not at all participated in any of the discussions about the project (not on wikipedia, not on rhizome [another rhizome thread here], not on Paddy’s blog, etc). I care not about the rejection of the page, really; or even if you call it “art,” as Paddy suggests. I think the debates still have contextual value, even outside of the art space. People care about this: about art, about Wikipedia, about the blogosphere, about the conceptual frames and important people (whether of self-import or otherwise) that “control” these spaces through their online voices or backend deletions. The idea that this page got any less or more fairness or discussion than any other Wiki page is not my own – I’ve seen many debates just like this one spearheaded by just as many folks at the Wiki  – I feel lucky that [Wikipedia Art] got this much attention; a real failure would have been a speedy delete, and then nothing, which we always knew was a possible outcome. The point is, most people don’t see how arbitrarily many of these decisions are made, or where biases lie, despite the fact that, as you say, in the “post Gallery [post academy?] world Wikipedia is the new Academy, because it has the ability to control the discourse of who is an important artist (or art blogger)” [and more!]. A bunch of volunteers, of their own free will, cared enough to do all this, a bunch of artists and theorists care enough to carry on the debate. Paddy is right, perhaps “the discussion is my art” means I always “win” – but this project, art or not, is not about winning for me. And nor is Wikipedia, and nor is the art blogosphere.

I’m glad the [debate] carries on, because even if Wikipedia Art is not at all important, it has provoked a discussion around what is.

Archives

18 February 2009 by nathaniel

Wikipedia Art: so irrelevant we can’t stop talking about it (updated)

More 50-50, keep / delete discussions around Wikipedia Art, but now the debate is on Rhizome, and by the gatekeepers of, and participants in, the art blogosphere. I particularly love Curt Cloninger’s response to Tom Moody on Rhizome. Moody is a kind of anti-Lichty, being just as voiciferous in his dislike of the project, as Lichty has with regards to what he deems as its importance. Yay, platform. Happy to provide it for both of you. You’re great collaborators.

iDC discussion has some nice tidbits, too.

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