Fall 2004

Digital Media Lecture Series September 21 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

September 21
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
Julia Scher 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
October 27 – CIT Building - 169 Weybosset St. – 5pm
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,
Urtica:
Mouse says: click! And human says: eek! October 27
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
Social behavior and communication in virtual social environments. Eduard Balazc, Violeta Vojvodic
Urtica, an art and media research group (Serbia and Montenegro) www.urtica.org
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”
Working together as the collective Urtica, Eduard Balaz and Violeta Vojvodic develop multidisciplinary
and “control lady voice.” Many of my works are on-line, and, intended as ominous portents of what
projects that merge art, science and social engagement. Work ranges from web-based projects, media
Gary Marx has characterized as our “Maximum Security Society.”
actions, and short videos broadcast to the general public on television.
Interview: http://www.rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2772
Exhibited internationally: Ars Electronica (Austria), FILE (Brazil),VIPER (Switzerland), Ogaki Biennale
(Japan). 2003 UNESCO Digital Arts Award at IAMAS, Japan.
Education & Interpretation presents at the Tate Modern
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting.htm
ArtsLink – Digital Media Artist in Residence Program

October 5 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

November 2 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm
Graham Harwood

October 5
Graham Harwood, Mervin Jarman
Francesca da Rimini
October 15
Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky)
Harwood 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
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. November 2
She received her Masters of Architecture from Princeton University, and has taught at Tulane
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
University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and currently teaches jointly at The Rhode Island Michelle Fornabai
the new eugenics. It is closely associated with the formation of social software and software art
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
through its development of Linker and HeritageGold, BlackLash. Harwood received the first
research investigates the innovative use of materials and technologies to explore issues of the body
online commission from Tate Gallery London’s ‘Uncomfortable Proximity’ (for which he won the
and environs. Her work has been exhibited at numerous sites including the Whitney Museum of
Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation in New Media). Harwood spent the last few
American Art at Altria, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and the Contemporary Art
years working in the Nederland’s with the Waag Society and Imagine IC constructing Nine(9) a
Center in New Orleans. She has lectured at the Whitney Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art
collaborative engine for celebrating the lives of those locked out of the cultural mainstream.
in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Art Institute and has been published in Surface and Praxis. Michelle
He now lives and works in Southend-on-sea with Matsuko (founder member of Mongrel) and
Fornabai’s current research into Soft Structures, in preparation for the Soft Structures: Pattern-Book
their son Lani where they continue their investigations.
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
Mervin Jarman
visual arts grant from the LEF Foundation for the patterning and prototyping of the Soft Structures
Mervin is a Community Art Activist, an Interactive Multimedia Designer, Human Computer
and has been working in collaboration with the Textile and Apparel Design departments at RISD on
Interface expert and a core member of the Mongrel Collective. He is a particular kind
the manufacture of inflatable and pneumatic prototypes. In the manufacture of ‘ready to wear’ Soft
of mongrel, a new breed of street art-hactivist emerging in new media and technology. mervin’s
Structures and the publication of Soft Structures : Pattern-Book, the medium of mass production is
theory on art is that ‘art is life’ hence his life is his only claim to being an artist, as his art
used to negotiate architectural scale in a new way, to interrogate the boundary between research
is a total expression of his life. His engagement with technology as a tool for empowerment
and practice, and like the architectural pattern-book, extend the base of architectural praxis to
and intervention stems from his various experiences both in Jamaica and in London. In Jamaica,
diverse audiences.
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
“Presently, ‘pattern’ and ‘patterning,’ find themselves located uneasily in the vernacular between the
migrate to London where he got his first taste of computers and new media. His timely
digital and material, technical logic and traditional technique. Pattern refers as much to nonlinear
collision with Harwood and Richard Pierre-Davis cemented the Mongrel Collective, who is now
dynamical fluid mechanics and metaphoric networks, as it does to methods of making, shaping or
the avant-garde of digitally engaging street culture worldwide.
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
“My involvement with mongrel has helped to foster a new design on media arts and community
reconsidered more generally and critically in the context of architecture, and used to refashion the
initiative ‘mongrel street’, out of this has risen the Container Project. This has enabled a kind of
classical architectural constructions of model, figure and order. The architectural pattern-book, a
social interaction that is not common to the community of Palmers Cross; there is a motion for
genre of technical treatise popular in the 19th century, that codified and outlined the principles and
the project to go to Sierra Leone and South Africa. The mongrel revolution has already begun...
mathematical formulas of Classical architecture, will act as a model for the publication of this
www.container-project.net”. Simply mervin
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
Francesca da Rimini
audiences. As the purpose of the Soft Structures: Pattern-Book is both instructive and iterative,
Francesca da Rimini makes video, internet projects and texts. Her practice is usually
the book will also disseminate a series of patterning strategies and patterns for the literal
collaborative and widely distributed. In 1991 she co-founded the artist collective VNS Matrix.
production of inhabitable spaces. The patterns may serve as templates for informed practice and as
Beginning with A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century in 1991, the group made
an instrument for experimentation in formation with its users.” —m.fornabai, Soft Structures
installations, computer games, CorpusFantasticaMOO, a virtual theme park and cinema ads.
During the 1990s Francesca investigated email relationships, MOO communities and web
http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/32235
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.
November 10 – Location TBA
http://gashgirl.sysx.org
http://www.mongrelx.org/ Japanese Mobile Phone as Culture
Presented in conjunction with Brown University
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,
November 10
being a part of our daily audiovisual experiences and popular culture. Artists and designers are Machiko Kusahara
involved in the process as well. Why ketai became such an important medium in a short time?
October 15 – RISD Auditorium – Lecture – 7pm
The lecture will try to answer the question while visually introducing the current ketai culture.
“Rhythm Science”
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
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
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
be the material for the mix, and the lecture presentation will focus on how dj culture has
the Garden (MIT Press) among others.
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
Her writings have been published in over ten languages. Kusahara has been curating and writing
for numerous publications, Miller is Co-Publisher of the respected, multi-cultural magazine
in the field of digital art since 1985. She was involved in founding Tokyo Metropolitan Museum
“A Gathering of the Tribes”, and was the first Editor-At-Large of the cutting edge digital media
of Photography and NTT/ICC, and is a co-founder of Digital Image, Japan’s largest organization
magazine “Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture.” His artwork has appeared in a wide
of artists and designers using digital media. Besides for ICC she curated many exhibitions
variety of contexts including the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture (year
internationally. In 2001 she curated a large-scale media art /technology exhibition Fushigi Jungle
2000); the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle,Vienna; The Andy Warhol
for the City of Kobe. She has been a jury member for international competitions including Ars
Museum in Pittsburgh and a host of other museums and galleries.
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
But even with all of this, Miller is most well known under the moniker of his “constructed
Foundation among many others.
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
Before joining Waseda University she taught at UCLA for one year as a visiting professor.
collaborated with a wide variety of pre-eminent musicians and composers such as Iannis
Previously she taught at Kobe University Graduate School of Science and Technology.
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
http://www.f.waseda.jp/kusahara/
by artists ranging from Metallica to Steve Reich. His own records include Riddim Warfare
http://www.f.waseda.jp/kusahara/media
(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. November 9 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

Ghosts in the Keyhole - Archaeologies of Visual Media

October 17 – Veterans Memorial Auditorium - Performance - 8pm

DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation

October 17
Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky)
Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation is a strikingly original and provocative work that addresses issues
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
of race, technology and the media in society, and should be one of the most discussed events
of 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
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
November 9
Erkki Huhtamo
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

October 19 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm

October 19 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
December 7 – RISD Auditorium – 7pm
Warren Sack professor at UC Berkeley, a research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory, and a research
Abstract Communication in Interactive Systems
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
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 December 7
and engineer, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship
Technology Center, University of New Mexico, with grants from the Rockefeller Foundation
and the NEA. The Translation Map was awarded an Emerging Artists/Emerging Medium
with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of Golan Levin
abstract communication and interactivity. Identified by Technology Review as one of the top 100
grant from the Walker Art Center and the Jerome Foundation and was shown in the Walker Art
innovators under age 35, and dubbed by El Pais as “one of the most brilliant figures in
Center exhibition /How Latitudes Become Forms/Translocations/ and can be seen online here:
contemporary audiovisual art,” Levin has exhibited widely in Europe, America and Asia.
translationmap.walkerart.org.
Golan Levin is an artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and
http://people.ucsc.edu/~wsack/
events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of
Presented in conjunction with Brown University
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