Events
Art, Tech & Culture

The Networked Avant-garde

Art, Tech & Culture
08 Oct, 2018

The Networked Avant-garde

with Kelani Nichole
Director, The Current; Founder, TRANSFER
In partnership with the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series

The networked culture that emerged at the end of the 20th century introduced a generation of artists who employ open, distributed, virtualized, and highly collaborative techniques. Their studios are built on commercial software, CGI aesthetics, online public exhibition, and peer-to-peer sharing and critique. They simultaneously embrace and subvert technology as a means of interrogation, expressing humanist, non-binary, and decolonialized futures. In building a ‘Simulism’ movement, they reckon with Silicon Valley, the platforming and globalization of culture, global climate change, and technologies of power like artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

But the networked avante-garde face unique challenges – technology changes quickly and constantly; conservation and preservation practices are still being developed; critics and scholars have overlooked decades of pioneering work; collectors have been slow, so far, to acquire this type of work.

Despite these challenges, this avant-garde stands to significantly change what making and distributing art means in the century ahead. New networks of support have emerged in the form of artist-curated projects, experimental exhibitions, commissions, and residencies. Leading institutions, like The Whitney Museum of American Art and experimental museum models like The Current are developing new models of support for challenging variable media art.

About Kelani Nichole

Kelani Nichole is a design strategist and exhibition maker based in NYC. She consults for agile product teams and startups, and founded TRANSFER, an experimental exhibition space in Brooklyn, NY. Nichole specializes in challenging variable media artworks – she designs exhibitions in the home, gallery and art market contexts. In 2018 Nichole began serving as Director of The Current, a cooperative collection of contemporary media art that examines technology's impact on the human condition.

About the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium

Founded in 1997, the ATC series is an internationally respected forum for creative ideas. The ATC series, free of charge and open to the public, is coordinated by the Berkeley Center for New Media and has presented over 170 leading artists, writers, and critical thinkers who question assumptions and push boundaries at the forefront of art, technology, and culture including: Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Sophie Calle, Bruno Latour, Maya Lin, Doug Aitken, Pierre Huyghe, Miranda July, Billy Kluver, David Byrne, Gary Hill, and Charles Ray.

Fall 2018 – Spring 2019: Fact & Fiction

What do we make now of this classic opposition? For centuries, artists and critics have placed pressure on both of these terms, often asking us to question how to separate truth from lies, the real from the artificial, and fact from fiction. Addressing a range of political contexts and utilizing an array of creative forms, speakers in this series offer new approaches to these age-old questions.

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium is presented in conjunction with Arts + Design Mondays at BAMPFA.

Monday Evenings, 6:30-8:00pm
Osher Theater, BAMPFA, Berkeley, CA
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/visit/getting-here
Seating free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted

2018

09/10 Roxane Gay: With One N
Roxane Gay, Author, Indiana
Registration required via Eventbrite.

10/08 The Networked Avant-Garde
Kelani Nichole, Director The Current, New York
In partnership with the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series

10/15 Image and Amnesia
Kerry Tribe, Artist, LA, CA
In partnership with the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series

10/29 The Good Anthropocene: Terraforming Earth
Kim Stanley Robinson, Author, Davis, CA
In partnership with CED Studio One

11/19 Daemons Tools Art Tech
Marisa Morán Jahn, Artist, Cambridge, MA

2019

02/11 News of the Future and the Future of News
Kevin Delaney, Editor, Quartz
In partnership with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

02/25 In and out of the Body and into the Machine
Chico Macmurtrie, Artist, New York

03/04 A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi Okorafor, Artist, Olympia Fields, IL
In partnership with CED Studio One,
the Department of African American Studies,
and the Department of English

03/18 On Digital Colonialism and 'Other' Futures
Morehshin Allahyari, Artist, New York
In partnership with the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series
and the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation
and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
and Stanford University

04/29 Places in Space
Adam Savage, Mythbusters, SF
In partnership with CED Studio One

For updated information, maps, please see:

http://atc.berkeley.edu/

Contact: info.bcnm [​at​] berkeley.edu, 510-495-3505

ATC Director: Ken Goldberg
BCNM Director: Nicholas de Monchaux
Arts + Design Director: Shannon Jackson
BCNM Liaisons: Lara Wolfe, Laurie Macfee

ATC Home Page (list of speakers, directions, mailing list):

http://atc.berkeley.edu

ATC Highlight Video from F10-S11 Season (2 mins)
http://j.mp/atc-highlights-hd

ATC Audio-Video Archive on Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive:
http://tinyurl.com/atc-internet-archive

ATC on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/cal-atc

ATC on Twitter:
https://www.twitter.com/cal_atc

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