PerpiTube

Repurposing Social Media Spaces

Co-curated by Pato Hebert and Alexandra Juhasz

July 12 – September 6, 2011
Nichols Gallery

PerpiTube: Repurposing Social Media Spaces, co-curated by Pato Hebert and Alexandra Juhasz, models a purposeful, complex, and artful use of social networking technologies and the spaces that hold them. In the gallery and on YouTube, this novel art show organizes the media of 29 invited participants along side the video production of daily visitors to the gallery, everyday YouTube users, invited community members, and you.

The Space is Now Open for All of Us. Together we will collaborate to rethink and remake liveness and delay, mobility and place, presence and absence, solitude and community, both online and off.

PerpiTube responds to many of the criticisms expressed by Juhasz and her Pitzer College students who tried to teach and learn on YouTube. Juhasz’s born-digital, free, online video-book, Learning from YouTube (MIT Press, 2011) was one end result of this immersive interaction, and PerpiTube is another.

Over two months, 29 diverse artists, activists, and academics will interact with audiences at the gallery—invited youth, community members, and educators, as well as daily visitors. Over the two months, a collection of their archived works (and your responses to them) will be available to many more on YouTube.

Each day at 10 am (PST time) the gallery will be open for a unique, fifteen minute, live, interactive event followed by fifteen minutes of refreshments and conversation. The next day, with only the smallest of delays, video documentation of the artist’s presentation and the audience’s response will be added to the exhibition’s growing archive.

For the rest of each day (10:30 am-4 pm) the gallery will be closed to live presentations and repurposed for videomaking and learning via two workstations: one for YouTube research and another for YouTube video production.

Los Angeles media artist, Natalie Bookchin, whose recent work has focused on YouTube, will present a video to open each of four themed sections based on chapters from Learning from YouTube. These themes will continue to be activated by invited participants—Italian exchange students, native California youth, women in a transitional facility, and local educators—who will attend Bookchin’s opening presentation and then a video workshop, and whose video will be placed into the show’s growing archive to kick off and expand conversation.

The unique structure of the show is designed to highlight how various spaces, on and offline, amplify the connections and contradictions between local place and digital mobility, the reception and production of social media, the tension between the ephemeral and the archive, and the “artist” and “amateur.” By so doing, the curators and participants model how social media, lived spaces, and their intentional interactions can be repurposed to empower users and communities by using digital technology in productive, intentional, and focused ways.

Exhibition Schedule

Distraction/Depth

July 12 - Natalie Bookchin, video artist

Natalie Bookchin’s video installations explore new forms of documentary, addressing conditions of mass connectivity and isolation and exploring the stories we are telling about ourselves and the world. Her work is exhibited widely, including at LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Generali Foundation, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, and Creative Time. She has received numerous grants and awards, including from Creative Capital, California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Durfee Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, California Community Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, Daniel Langlois Foundation, a COLA Artist Fellowship and most recently an Artistic Innovation Award from Center for Cultural Innovation. In 1999-2000 Bookchin organized <net.net.net>, an eight month series of lectures and workshops on art, activism and the Internet at CalArts, MOCA in LA, and Laboratorio Cinematek in Tijuana. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is co-Director of the Photography & Media Program in the Art School at CalArts.

More information at https://bookchin.net/

July 13 - Sam Gregory, human rights activist, WITNESS

Sam Gregory, is Program Director at WITNESS www.witness.org), the leading global organization training and supporting people to use video in human rights advocacy. He supervises campaigning, training and knowledge-sharing, and policy leadership initiatives. In 2005, he was the lead editor on the widely used text Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press), and in 2007, he developed WITNESS Video Advocacy Institute, an intensive two-week training program for human rights advocates. He also teaches on human rights advocacy using new media as an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has worked extensively with human rights activists, particularly in Latin America and Asia, integrating video into campaigns on a range of civil, political, social, economic and cultural human rights issues. Videos he has co-produced have been screened to decision-makers in the U.S. Congress, the U.K. Houses of Parliament, the United Nations and at film festivals worldwide, and have contributed to changes in policy, practice and law.

Internationally known for his expertise on emerging forms of advocacy he has published in human rights, social entrepreneurship and visual media journals including most recently Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights, New Forms of Video Advocacy and Concerns about Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent in the Journal of Human Rights Practice (OUP, 2010). He attended the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government on a Kennedy Memorial Scholarship, and graduated with a Masters in Public Policy. He was formerly on the Advisory Board of the Tactical Technology Collective, and is on the Board of the US Campaign for Burma, and the Advisory Board of Games for Change. He blogs at https://blog.witness.org/author/sam and tweets at https://twitter.com/samgregory.

More information at https://www.witness.org/

July 14 - Shu Lea Cheang, net based innovator

Shu Lea Cheang is a media artist, conceptualist, networker and filmmaker. Noted for BRANDON, a one year web narrative (1998-1999) commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Cheang has since moved to Eurozone, producing works that traverse between hard and soft, sex and politics, fiction and reality, fantasia and earth-bound. Cheang is also much engaged in public participatory networked performance realized by formulating cross-discipline collectives. Recent works include Baby Love (2005, Palais de Tokyo, Paris), MobiOpera (Sundance New Frontier, 2007), Moving Forest (2008, Transmediale, Berlin). She is currently touring UKI live performance and developing UKI viral game.

More information at brooklynmuseum.org

July 15 - Dennis Keeley, photographer

Dennis Keeley has worked as an artist, photographer, teacher and writer for more than 25 years. His work has been exhibited in numerous one person and group shows and he is published internationally in books and studies concerning urban circumstance and condition. His photographs in the book Looking for a City in America: Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go, Getty Publications, won numerous awards. In addition to being the current chair of the Photography and Imaging Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he is a former Western Regional Co Chair of SPE and sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Music Center and the Angel’s Gate Cultural Center.

In 2005 Mr. Keeley spoke at the United Nations NGO Conference about utilizing photography as a tool in peace building and non-violent conflict resolution.

More information at denniskeeley.com

July 19 - Carole Ann Klonarides, curator and educator, media art

Carole Ann Klonarides is an independent curator, writer and consultant for artists and non-profit art organizations. She is the curator of 0.0.0.0. (RESET) A Virtual Site for Collaborative Feminist Performance as part of The Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival planned for January 20-29, 2012. Klonarides began working in 1980 with Michael Owen—as MICA-TV—creating videotapes in collaboration with other artists, including John Baldessari, Chuck Close, Dan Graham, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, that were included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, “The Pictures Generation, 1974—1984” (April 21-August 2, 2009). She earned her Masters degree in Media Studies from the New School of Social Research while participating in a pioneer program that became the Interactive Communications Program at the Alternative Media Center, New York University. While working as a video artist in New York City in the 80s, Klonarides programmed video art in galleries, alternative spaces, and music video after hour clubs. She moved to California in 1991, when she became media arts curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art, and then was the curator of programming at the Santa Monica Museum of Art from 1997-2001. Over the past fifteen years she has lectured and taught video history and media arts at California art schools and universities, including CalArts, UCLA, UCI, Otis, and Art Center. From 2006 to 2007 she served as a consultant for the Getty Research Institute for “California Video,” an exhibition and publication involving the acquisition of the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Collection.

More information at artslant.com

July 20 - Lewis Klahr, animator

Called “the reigning proponent of cut and paste” by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, master collagist Lewis Klahr has been making films since 1977. He is known for his uniquely idiosyncratic experimental films and cutout animations which have screened extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia – in venues such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the London Film Festival and Los Angeles Filmforum. In May of 2010 The Wexner Center for the Arts presented a five program retropsective of Klahr’s films. His film “Wednesday Morning Two A.M.” was awarded a Tiger Award for Best Short Film at the 2010 International Film Festival at Rotterdam. In Film Comment magazine’s recent poll of the top 50 experimental filmmakers from 2000 to 2010, Klahr was ranked fourth. His epic cutout animation “The Pharaoh’s Belt” received a special citation for experimental work from the National Society of Film Critics in 1994. He has also received commissions from European arts organizations such as the Gronnegard Theater in Copenhagen, Denmark (Lulu) and the Rotterdam International Film Festival (Two Minutes to Zero). His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

July 21 - Nmon Ford, operatic baritone

A featured soloist on the 2010 Grammy Award-winning Transmigrations (Telarc) and the three-time 2006 Grammy Award-winning (including “Best Classical Recording”) Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Naxos), Panamanian-American Nmon Ford has established himself on the 21st century creative scene as a performer, songwriter, arranger and producer with his classical and contemporary music projects, after starting his musical life as a piano prodigy at age 3. As an international opera singer, he hit the Top Ten on Billboard’s Classical and Classical Crossover charts, as soloist in the group Vai DaCapo (Universal), leading to sold out concerts in the US and Europe. The group’s concert film, Vai DaCapo – Songs of Delight,” was seen on television in prime time throughout the United States.

Nmon has sung leading roles at Los Angeles Opera, Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Hamburg State Opera, San Francisco Opera, Sferisterio Festival (Macerata, Italy), Cincinnati Opera, Spoleto Festival USA, and Teatro Sociale di Rovigo (Italy). He has soloed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall.

As an award-winning composer and arranger, Nmon was the vocal and musical arranger for Vai DaCapo – Songs of Delight (CD and film). He wrote and produced “CELEBRATE!”, the theme song for the top-rated syndicated radio show “A Celebration of Womanhood”; “CELEBRATE!” is also the official song for the new COW book and international conference in San Diego. The video for his song, “Nocturne (Dov’é l’amore)”, has received critical acclaim worldwide, and he is presently completing several songs for the soundtrack of a major motion picture.

In addition to his Grammy-winning Naxos and Telarc releases, Mr. Ford has recorded for eOne Music and Concord. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees from the University of Southern California, where he graduated cum laude and was named Outstanding Vocal Arts Graduate for both degrees.

July 22 - Ciara Ennis, in collaboration with Dan Glaister & Ali Kayley, Liz Glynn, Karen Lofgren, James Melinat and Warren Neidich

Ciara Ennis is the director/curator of Pitzer Art Galleries at Pitzer College and was the curator of exhibitions at the University of California Riverside/California Museum of Photography, particularly of Still, Things Fall From the Sky (2005), Ruby Satellite (2006) and Eloi: Stumbling Towards Paradise (2007). Ennis moved from London to Los Angeles where she was project director for Public Offerings, an international survey of contemporary art, at MOCA, Los Angeles in 2001. From there she became associate curator at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, where she initiated the Project Room and programmed a series of experimental exhibitions with such artists as Urs Fischer, Simon Leung, Mark Leckey, Johan Grimonprez and Eduardo Sarabia. Ennis has been director of Pitzer Art Galleries for the past three years, during that time she has curated a number of exhibitions including: Antarctica (2007); Narrowcast: Reframing Global Video 1986/2008, co-curated with Ming-Yuen S. Ma (2008); Veronica (2009); and Capitalism in Question, co-curated with Daniel Joseph Martinez (2010). Ennis’s curatorial practice blurs fact with fiction and focuses on storytelling as a means to explore the fluidity and fragility of identity, revealing the subtleties of the social, political, and the cultural issues that impact our lives. She received her MA in curating contemporary art from the Royal College of Art, London.

Ali Kayley graduated in fine art from Goldsmiths in 1990 and subsequently gained an MA in anthropology and film at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. She works in a variety of media, including film, video, photography, painting and sculpture. She has exhibited at Entwistle, London, the Cornerhouse, Manchester, South Bank Centre, London, Royal College galleries, Arnolfini, Bristol and Laure Genillard, London. Her work is in several collections including the British Council and the Arts Council of England.

Dan Glaister studied at the Polytechnic of North London and subsequently graduated with a MA in Soviet and Eastern European Studies from the University of London’s School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies. He joined the Guardian in 1991, and was the paper’s arts correspondent from 1994-1999. He spent five years as arts editor before moving to Los Angeles to become LA correspondent in 2004. He left the Guardian in 2010 to pursue his own projects.

Liz Glynn creates large-scale installations and participatory performances using epic historical narratives to explore the potential for change in the present tense. Her work has been presented at venues including The New Museum (NYC), LACMA, Paula Cooper Gallery (NYC), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), and Arthouse at the Jones Center (Austin). Reviews of her work have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Art Lies, Domus, Archaeology Magazine, and artforum.com. Liz received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, and her BA fromHarvard College. She is represented by Redling Fine Art (Los Angeles).

Karen Lofgren is a Toronto-born, LA-based artist who completed her MFA at CalArts. Solo exhibitions include Signs Point to Yes at LACE; Believer at Machine; and Gold Flood at Pitzer Art Galleries, for which she also received a grant from the Durfee Foundation. Other exhibitions include LACMA; PØST; Slab Projects; Anna Helwing Gallery; Black Dragon Society; 533; Mihai Nicodim Gallery; High Desert Test Sites; Daniel Hug Gallery; Circus Gallery; Glendale College Art Gallery; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art; and UCR Sweeney Gallery. Her work has been featured in artforum.com critics’ picks; LA Weekly; and Los Angeles Times; as well as books, catalogues, and album covers.

James Melinat Born 1980, Pasadena, California; lives and works in Los Angeles. His practice employs a mix of interdisciplinary methods such as sculpture, photography, drawing, painting, text, video and performance. Melinat studied at the University of California, Irvine (BA, 2004) where he was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research; and the California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 2007). He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. He recently participated in a group exhibition at Peter Blum Chelsea, New York and has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Anthony Greaney, Boston. His work has been exhibited in New York, throughout California, at Appettite Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Estación Tijuana, Tijuana, Mexico.

Warren Neidich is an internationally exhibited conceptual artist and writer who lives and works between Los Angeles and Berlin. His research based artworks combine strategies of performance, installation, and teaching in search of a new language with which to explore and critique the evolving conditions of Cognitive Capitalism which he sees as a threat to free will. His Cognitive Architecture: He is Instructor at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles and Research Fellow at the Delft School of Design, TU Delft, School of Architecture, Delft, The Netherlands.

July 26 - Natalie Bookchin, video artist and youth participants from Native Pipeline Program

Natalie Bookchin’s video installations explore new forms of documentary, addressing conditions of mass connectivity and isolation and exploring the stories we are telling about ourselves and the world. Her work is exhibited widely, including at LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Generali Foundation, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, and Creative Time. She has received numerous grants and awards, including from Creative Capital, California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Durfee Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, California Community Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, Daniel Langlois Foundation, a COLA Artist Fellowship and most recently an Artistic Innovation Award from Center for Cultural Innovation. In 1999-2000 Bookchin organized <net.net.net>, an eight month series of lectures and workshops on art, activism and the Internet at CalArts, MOCA in LA, and Laboratorio Cinematek in Tijuana. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is co-Director of the Photography & Media Program in the Art School at CalArts.

More information at https://bookchin.net/

July 27 - John Lucas/Claudia Rankine, filmmaker/poet

Claudia Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Rankine, a recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the National Endowments for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation, is the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.

John Lucas’s photography and multimedia projections have been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums and galleries. He is represented by O.K. Harris Works of Art in New York City. Presently he is working on a documentary feature film entitled, The Cooler Bandits.

More information at: www.claudiarankine.com/

July 28 - Elton Naswood, Red Circle Project, AIDS Project LA

Elton Naswood is of the Near to the Water People Clan, born for the Edge Water People Clan, his maternal grandfather’s clan is of the Mexican People, his paternal grandfather’s clan is of the Tangle People, this is how he is Navajo, Dine.

He is originally from Whitehorse Lake, New Mexico, and grew up in Window Rock, Arizona on the Navajo Reservation. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Mr. Naswood is the Program Coordinator for the Red Circle Project, a Native American HIV Prevention program at AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA,) the only HIV Prevention program for Native Americans/Alaska Natives in Los Angeles County.

He serves as a member of the Community Advisory Council for the National Native American AIDS Prevention Center; Advisory Board for the Office of Minority Health Resource Center, and Board of Directors for the Nakwatsvewat Institute. Locally, he was Co-Chair of the American Indian Mental Health Task Force and currently on the Board of Directors for the American Indian Community Council.

Mr. Naswood received his Bachelors of Arts Degree in Sociology and American Indian Justice Studies from Arizona State University and a Masters Degree in American Indian Studies at UCLA.

Elton enjoys reading Native American literature and poetry, watching collegiate sports especially volleyball and hanging out with close friends.

July 29 - Barbara Hammer, media artist

Barbara Hammer is a visual artist working primarily in film and video, installation, photography and performance. She has made over 80 moving image works in a career that spans 40 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema.

Hammer was honored with a month long retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City from September 11-October 13, 2010. In February 2011 she had a month-long retrospective at The Tate Modern in London. Generations, 2010 (made with Gina Carducci), and Maya Deren’s Sink, 2011, her two most recent films won the Teddy Award for Best Short Films at the 2011 Berlinale. Hammer’s experimental documentary film on cancer and hope, A Horse Is Not A Metaphor, premiered in June, 2008 at the 32nd Frameline International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in San Francisco and in February, 2009 at DocFortnight at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It won the Teddy Award for Best Short Film at the 2009 Berlinale and Second Prize at the Black Maria Film Festival. It was selected for Punta de Vista Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain; the Torino Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Italy; the International Women’s Film Festival Dortmund/Koln, and the Festival de Films des Femmes Creteil among others.

Her work is represented by the gallery Koch Oberhuber Woolfe in Berlin, Germany where her first solo exhibition ran from February 11-April 17, 2011. She has been nominated for the American Academy in Jerusalem, Israel, a newly created artist residency program whose goal is to bring artists to the communities of Jerusalem.

In March 2010 her book, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life published by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York was launched in a performance at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York. A 2010 book tour included The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; the British Film Institute in London, England; the Experimental Film Congress in Toronto, Canada; the University of California at San Diego Visual Arts Department; the San Francisco Cinematheque Crossroads Festival; the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum, and the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, Washington.

Barbara Hammer lives and works in New York City and teaches each summer at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

www.barbarahammer.com

August 3 - John Jota Leaños, social art practitioner

John Jota Leaños is a social art practitioner and Assistant Professor of Social Documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Leaños’ practice includes a range of film, new media, public art, installation, and documentary animation focusing on the convergence of memory, social documentation and decolonization. His work has been shown at the Sundance 2010 Film Festival, the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leaños is a Creative Capital Foundation Grantee and has been an artist in residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Center for Chicano Studies (2006), Carnegie Mellon University in the Center for Arts in Society (2003), and the Headlands Center for the Arts (2007.)

www.leanos.net

August 4 - Judy Drummond, writer, singer and elementary school teacher

Judy Zalazar Drummond is a retired teacher currently living in San Francisco. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she is part of the Partridge and Chavez families that owned and worked the land in Chavez Ravine. She was an eager student of oral histories about her indigenous family stemming from early Cahuilla times. She taught for 38 years at the elementary and middle school levels in San Francisco and Los Angeles and recently retired from the Teacher Education Department at the University of San Francisco. She has written teacher’s guides for the books and movies “500 Years of Chicano History,” and “The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Struggle.” Ms. Drummond’s lifelong activism includes the 1970s “Los Siete de la Raza” civil rights case, affordable housing on a community level, and lifelong activism on the part of students’ rights and needs.

August 5 - Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre

Jutta Treviranus is the Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) and professor of Design at OCAD University in Toronto (https://idrc.ocad.ca.) With it’s origins in the ATRC established in 1993, the IDRC is an internationally recognized center of expertise in the inclusive design of emerging information and communication technology and practices. Jutta also heads the Inclusive Design Institute, a multi-university regional center of expertise. Jutta has led many international multi-partner research networks that have created broadly implemented technical innovations that support inclusion. Jutta and her team have pioneered personalization as an approach to accessibility in the digital domain. Her team also leads many international open source projects that attempt to infuse inclusive user experience design sensibilities into open source networks. She has played a leading role in developing accessibility legislation, standards and specifications internationally (including WAI ATAG, IMS AccessForAll, ISO 24751, and AODA Information and Communication.)

idrc.ocad.ca

August 9 - Natalie Bookchin, video artist and students from Prototypes

Natalie Bookchin’s video installations explore new forms of documentary, addressing conditions of mass connectivity and isolation and exploring the stories we are telling about ourselves and the world. Her work is exhibited widely, including at LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Generali Foundation, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, and Creative Time. She has received numerous grants and awards, including from Creative Capital, California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Durfee Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, California Community Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, Daniel Langlois Foundation, a COLA Artist Fellowship and most recently an Artistic Innovation Award from Center for Cultural Innovation. In 1999-2000 Bookchin organized <net.net.net>, an eight month series of lectures and workshops on art, activism and the Internet at CalArts, MOCA in LA, and Laboratorio Cinematek in Tijuana. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is co-Director of the Photography & Media Program in the Art School at CalArts.

More information at https://bookchin.net/

August 10 - Max King Cap, multi-media artist

Employing a variety of genres Max King Cap has exhibited his artworks in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Vienna, Stuttgart, and many points in between. Born in Castle Rock, SD and graduated from the University of Chicago, this former public relations executive (and grandson of a Negro League third baseman) has received the support of the Creative Capital and Artadia foundations for projects as diverse as an installation/operetta and a tower of police batons. His one-man artist collective, Tropo Mfg—created in response to his interest in the psychology of community membership and the tension between authenticity and façade—is a manifestation of five separate artist personae whose disparate works have appeared together in group exhibitions. In addition to this discrete collective his role-playing extends to his series of works, Despots and Bardsmen, a group of painted and drawn self-portraits casting himself as real world dictators or villains from a Shakespeare apocrypha of his own invention. His performance Caliban in the Mirror, a collaboration with the former personal photographer of Michael Jackson, was included in the Redcat Theater’s performance series last spring.

His academic appointments have included the Illinois Institute of Technology, Columbia College Chicago, and Pitzer College, and he was a resident artist at the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe in southwest Germany. He has lectured at the Museum and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Pomona College, University of New Mexico, and many others. He has also curated, and written essays for numerous exhibitions. In life, as in art, he has always been a risk taker; as a military school cadet he declined the career surety of a congressional nomination to West Point, resigned the lifetime job security of a firefighter, and quit a tenured professorship to come make art in Los Angeles, where, he believes, the most significant art of this century will be authored.

www.maxkingcap.com

August 11 - Gabrielle Foreman, Professor of English and Black American Studies

P. Gabrielle Foreman is a literary historian who has authored more than a dozen essays as well as three books and editions including Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. While teaching in Los Angeles, Gabrielle collaborated with social justice organizations across Southern California and was named a Kellogg National Leadership Fellow for her work with youth. Partnering with young activists and colleagues from the non-profit sector, she co-founded Action for Social Change and Youth Empowerment (AScHAYE) which provided training, support and advocacy and put young people on the boards of directors of CA organizations that work with youth. She’s leaving Occidental College to join the faculty at University of Delaware as the Ned B. Allen Professor of English. There, in addition to her teaching and research, she plans to help launch a national summer institute for mid-career and senior scholars committed to diversification, access and community engagement efforts in higher education.

August 12 - Fran Ilich, media artist and activist

Fran Ilich is a media-artist, essayist and novelist, and current Eyebeam fellow. He is the author of the novels Metro-pop, Tekno Guerrilla and Circa 94 and of the book-length essay Otra Narrativa Es Posible. He is currently working on a book about the material and ideological possibilities for narrative in the digital age with a year-long fellowship from FONCA. Ilich is the founder of Borderhack; he headed the Literature department at Centro Cultural Tijuana; he was the screenwriter for Interacción, a television program for Discovery Channel Latin America; in Mexico City he was Editor-at-Large for Sputnik Cultura Digital magazine and worked as a researcher at Centro Multimedia; and he directed seminars on narrative media for the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía in Sevilla. He has participated in Berlinale Talent Campus, Transmediale, ARCO, Documenta 12, How Latitudes Become Forms at the Walker Art Center, Streaming Cinema Festival, Antídoto and the EZLN’s Festival Mundial de la Digna Rabia (by personal invitation of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos). He is studying an M.A. in Media Art Histories at Donau-Universität Krems, in Austria with a scholarship from the Leonardo Foundation. He is currently working on Diego de la Vega, a cooperative media conglomerate that includes a web server Possibleworlds.org), a virtual community investment bank Spacebank.org), a research and development initiative on narrative media (https://www.Ficcion.de”), a collective online radio, a community newspaper from Tijuana elzorro.org), the think-tank Collective Intelligence Agency and the Brooklyn Stock Exchange, among other enterprises.

August 16 - Dont Rhine, political sound artist

In 1994, Dont Rhine co-founded the sound art collective Ultra-red in Los Angeles. Since then, the group has conducted numerous investigations where sound is the site and the means of inquiry. With nine members based in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, the collective develops projects in relation to social movements wherein Ultra-red’s members have worked as organizers, activists and researchers. While, traditionally, much of the relationship between art practice and social movements has been understood in terms of images and visual representation, Ultra-red turns the focus to the ear; the sound of communities organizing themselves, the acoustics of contested spaces, the demands and desires in our voices and in our silences, and the echoes of historical memories of struggle. Drawing on the traditions of musique concrète, conceptualism, popular education, and militant inquiry, Ultra-red approaches composition with field recordings as a sound object for collective listening and analysis. Ultra-red have been hosted by institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Art Gallery of Ontario, Tate Britain, Raven Row Gallery in London, Serpentine Gallery, Vera List Center at The New School in New York, and Fritt Ord Foundation in Oslo. Ultra-red curates the online record label and archive, Public Record (www.publicrec.org).

https://bookchin.net/

August 17 - Campbell X, filmmaker

Campbell is an award-winning filmmaker/curator and has written/produced and directed Stud Life an urban queer feature film, currently in post-production.

Campbell’s films include the award-winning BD Women (1994), Viva Tabatha (1996) and Paradise Lost (2003). She made Broken Chain (2008) a BBC/Film collaboration. Other titles include the award-winning Legacy (2006), which explores the lasting impact of slavery on Black families, and Fem (2007,) a butch homage to queer femininity.

Campbell’s body of work was honored by the Queer Black Cinema festival in New York in March 2009. Image, Memory and Representation was a retrospective of her work which was programmed at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival 2007.

Campbell curated No Heroes as part of the Progress Reports 2010 at Iniva, which also screened at the Red Cat Arts Centre in Los Angeles in 2010, Mix NYC in New York in 2010 and BAAD NYC in 2011. She was a selector for GFEST cross arts LGBT festival in 2009/10. She was invited to program the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 2004 – 2005. She was also the festival director for The Fire This Time! – Queering Black History Month 2006 which focused on the work of queer artists of color for Black History Month.

She has written published short stories and articles on film, sexuality and gender for Diva Magazine, Feminist Review, The Pink Paper, Critical Quarterly, Chroma Magazine, BFM Magazine, Luxonline and BFI Screenonline.

Campbell was sound mixer for The OWLS (2010) directed by Cheryl Dunye, DoP for For Cultural Purposes Only (2009) directed by Sarah Wood, Bend It (2008) directed by Jules Nurrish, camera person for feature films Do I Love You? (2002) and Tick Tock Lullaby (2007) directed by Lisa Gornick.

www.blackmanvision.com

August 18 - Susan Hebert, film producer

Susan Hebert is a producer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles, CA.

August 19 - Kara Keeling, Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts and African American Studies

Kara Keeling is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007).

usc.academia.edu

August 19 - Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Science fiction storyteller

Thenmozhi is a transmedia science fiction storyteller. Growing up as Indian Untouchable she was driven to tell the stories of marginalized communities. This led to her founding an international media training organization called Third World Majority (TWM). Through TWM she worked in the U.S, France, Tunisia, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, and India. She was also featured in 2003 in both Utne Magazine as one of the top 30 visionaries under 30 and in Source Magazine as one of the top ten political forces in hip hop. Further, she was in residence at the MIT Center for Reflective Community Practice writing about storytelling, diversity, and future technology. This research inspired her transition to become a 3d director and rock roll musican. As a singer/director she fuses epic stories with complex visuals and melodies. Her films often explore interactivity, stereoscopic imagery, projections, and use science fiction to examine societal issues. While her music blends Indian, punk, rock, and RNB vocal stylings with thoughtful lyrics that draw from diverse themes including science, mathematics, esoteric mysticism, mythology, love, darkness, and hope. Her work in the field has been recognized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, NEH Institute for Digital Humanities, Annenberg Innovation Center, U.S. Social Forum, Alliance for Community Media, Grantmakers for Film and Electronic Media, Producers Guild of America’s Diversity Program, Slamdance, Sebastapol Film Festival, Chicago International Children’s Festival, La 3d Move Festival, Indian film Festival of Los Angeles and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

August 23 - Natalie Bookchin, video artist

Natalie Bookchin’s video installations explore new forms of documentary, addressing conditions of mass connectivity and isolation and exploring the stories we are telling about ourselves and the world. Her work is exhibited widely, including at LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Generali Foundation, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, and Creative Time. She has received numerous grants and awards, including from Creative Capital, California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Durfee Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, California Community Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, Daniel Langlois Foundation, a COLA Artist Fellowship and most recently an Artistic Innovation Award from Center for Cultural Innovation. In 1999-2000 Bookchin organized <net.net.net>, an eight month series of lectures and workshops on art, activism and the Internet at CalArts, MOCA in LA, and Laboratorio Cinematek in Tijuana. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is co-Director of the Photography & Media Program in the Art School at CalArts.

More information at https://bookchin.net/

August 24 - Shawn Sobers, community media educator

Shawn Sobers is Senior Lecturer of Photography and Media at the University of the West of England, as well as a filmmaker, photographer and community media producer with Firstborn Studios. His research and creative practice concern the role of media and arts in political discourse, critical pedagogy and identity.

https://bookchin.net/

August 25 - Kiffen Madden-Lunsford, Plasencia Elementary, LAUSD

Kiffen Madden-Lunsford has been a public school educator in Los Angeles for 22 years. He has taught in the elementary classroom with gifted, intervention and mainstreamed students and worked with colleagues as a math coach, SDAIE coach and arts program coordinator. He is married to children’s author Kerry Madden and they have three children, Flannery, 22; Lucy, 20; and Norah, 12.

www.lausd.k12.ca.us

August 26 - Sue Bell Yank, writer and arts organizer

Sue Bell Yank is a writer and arts organizer. She is currently the Assistant Director of Academic Programs at the Hammer Museum, and adjunct faculty in the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. She graduated from the Masters of Public Art Studies program at USC, and completed her thesis on the role of contemporary art in rebuilding efforts after a crisis, focusing on post-Katrina New Orleans. She has worked with artist Edgar Arceneaux as a co-founder and Assistant Director for the Watts House Project, and has a deep-seated investment in non-profit organizations and arts-based urban planning practices. She worked at the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design as an administrator, at the non-profit gallery LA><ART as a public art curatorial assistant, was part of the curatorial team for the 2008 California Biennial, and most recently served as a curatorial advisor for the upcoming Creative Time Living as Form exhibition. Her writing has been featured in the 2008 California Biennial exhibition catalogue, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, the Huffington Post, Mammut magazine, and various arts blogs including her ongoing essay blog entitled Social Practice: writings about the social in contemporary art.

www.suebellyank.com

August 30 - Favianna Rodriguez, printmaker & artist activist

Favianna Rodriguez is a celebrated artist and new media organizer based in Oakland, California. Using high-contrast colors and vivid figures, her composites reflect literal and imaginative migration, global community, and interdependence. Whether her subjects are immigrant day laborers in the U.S., mothers of disappeared women in Juárez, Mexico, or her own abstract self portraits, Rodriguez brings new audiences into the art world by refocusing the cultural lens. Through her work we witness the changing U.S. metropolis and a new diaspora in the arts.

www.favianna.com

August 31 - Janie Geiser, experimental filmmaker

Janie Geiser is a visual/theater artist and experimental filmmaker, whose work explores the emotional power of inanimate objects, the nature of artifice, and issues of power and ephemerality. An Obie award-winning director, Geiser has made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary puppet theater through her innovative multidisciplinary performances. Her work has been presented at MOCA, The Public Theater, The Walker Art Center, Redcat, Dance Theater Workshop, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Arts at St. Ann’s, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater. “- Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.” (—Holly Willis).

Geiser’s films have been screened at the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Redcat, the Getty Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the New York Film Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, The Hong Kong Experimental Film Festival, and The Toronto Film Festival. Geiser’s film The Fourth Watch was noted by Film Comment as one of the top ten experimental films of the last decade. Her film The Red Book was included in the Library of Congress’ 2009 National Film Registry. Her films are in the permanent collections of MOMA and the Donnell Media Center of the New York Public Library.

www.janiegeiser.com

September 1 - Michael Strangelove, Watching YouTube

Michael Strangelove is widely recognized as one of Canada’s foremost Internet pioneers. The Financial Post Magazine has called Strangelove “an international expert on cyberspace and a netrepreneur.” In the commercial Internet field he has many firsts associated with his name. Strangelove coauthored the first directory to scholarly Internet resources (1991), founded and published the world’s first print-based magazine to address the commercial Internet (1993), and wrote what may well be the first book to address Internet advertising and consumer behaviour (1994). These accomplishments led Wired Magazine to call Strangelove “the Canadian guru of Internet advertising.”

The Globe and Mail Report on Business referred to Strangelove as “one of the first Canadians to make use of the Net as a sales tool” for good reason. He has been publishing on the Internet and marketing goods and services to academic, government and business clients since 1991.

During the earliest days of the commercial Internet, Strangelove created a company that offered practical, business-related Internet and intranet communication, training and publishing services, long before such services were available through other sources. In light of such accomplishments, Canadian Business magazine referred to Strangelove as the “acknowledged dean of Internet entrepreneurs and the man who literally wrote the book on commercialization of the Net.”

Over the past two decades he has been invited to speak at conferences across North America, England, Europe, South Africa, and Australia. Dr. Strangelove has written numerous articles for business and academic publications. He has appeared frequently as a regular guest on CBC radio and CBC national television, BBC television, and other media across the globe.

www.strangelove.com

September 2 - Lisa Nakamura, Professor of Communication and Asian American Studies

Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies and Cinema Studies Department and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press: winner of the Asian American Studies Association 2010 book award in cultural studies), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000) and Race After the Internet (Routledge, forthcoming 2011). She is writing a new monograph on social inequality in digital media culture, entitled “Workers Without Bodies: Towards a Theory of Race and Digital Labor in Virtual Worlds.”

Related Events

Closing reception and discussion with the curators
Tuesday, September 6, 2011, 4–6 p.m.
Nichols Gallery, Pitzer Art Galleries, Pitzer College

Symposium with co-curators Pato Hebert, Alexandra Juhasz
and PerpiTube participants

Friday, October 21, 2011, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.
Broad Performance Space, Broad Center, Pitzer College

Special thanks to Intercollegiate Media Studies, Office of the Dean of Faculty, Office of Public Relations and to Rob Fossum, Director, Special Programs & Campus Operations.

Curatorial Team

Pato Hebert

Alexandra Juhasz

Ciara Ennis

Anna Mendoza

Ana Iwataki

James Shickich