SVA presents “Critical Information: Mapping the Intersection of Art and Technology,” an interdisciplinary graduate student conference hosted by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department on Saturday, December 3 at 132 West 21 Street, 6th floor, New York City. Beginning at 10am, this daylong event features multiple panel discussions and follows seven tracks—Art, Technology and Identity; Information Art; Digital Costs; Site and Subjectivity; the Future of Signs; the Art of Sound; and Mediated Memory.
The conference’s international roster of participants represents a wide array of disciplines, from cultural studies and media arts to design and art history. Presentation topics include a discussion by Victoria Salinger (University of Chicago, Art History PhD) on the role of gender in the perception of art, science and technology in the 1970s through a comparison of the work of conceptual artists Hanne Darboven and Sol LeWitt. Matthew Lange (MFA 2011 Photography, Video and Related Media) presents a performative lecture called the “Plummet Machine,” which is a satirical cosmological theory consisting of seven Organs, each of which is an outlandish or anachronistic symbol of power that represents order and governance in contemporary society. And Erin Bell (Wayne State University, English, PhD) asks us to consider how social networking sites are transforming not only our lives, but also our deaths.
After the panels, McKenzie Wark, Associate Professor of Culture and Media at the Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, delivers a keynote address at the SVA Theater, 333 West 23 Street, at 4pm. Wark’s lecture entitled “Spectacles of Disintegration” reconsiders the role of art in contemporary society by suggesting that art practice is about the place where aesthetics and technology meet. Wark has written at length on new media, and critical theory. His books include The Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard University Press 2007), and The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (Verso, 2011).
“Critical Information: Mapping the Intersection of Art and Technology” is free and open to the public. For more information and a complete schedule of panels and presentations, visit http://criticalinformationsva.com.
Image: McKenzie Wark.
