New Media Workshop

BOOK OF MIRRORS: FILMS BY JOOST REKVELD

@ Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N State St

Thursday, October 8, 6pm | Joost Rekveld in person!

Joost Rekveld’s spectacular cinematic treatises on the nature of light have screened around the world, including Sundance, Rotterdam, Media City, and the Dutch Filmmuseum. Inspired by Medieval and Renaissance theories of optics, proto-cinematic technologies, X-ray photography, and visual music, Rekveld uses handmade equipment to produce the optical experiments at the heart of his work’s immersive cinematic experiences. In the award-winning #11, Marey Moiré (1999), Rekveld creates stroboscopic patterns from filaments of intersecting lights; in #23.2, Book of Mirrors (2002) he uses kaleidoscopes to refract light onto the film’s emulsion; and in his latest film, #37 (2009), Rekveld generates swarming tessellations from software used to explore the organic symmetries of crystals. Also featured is the short film, #3 (1994). 1994–2009, Netherlands, multiple formats, ca. 75 min.

Jason Salavon: Spigot

Opening Reception:
Sunday, September 27, 3-5 pm

More Info Here

September 20, 2009 – January 17, 2010, Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery

From September 20, 2009 to January 17, 2010, the Hyde Park Art Center will present a new eight-channel video projection on the Art Center’s façade, by Chicago-based artist Jason Salavon. The large-scale, real-time digital projection will be visible from both inside the gallery and outside the building on S. Cornell Ave.

Though Salavon works with a range of material forms—from photographic prints to video installations and real-time software—the common thread in his artistic investigations is discovering unexpected patterns in daily encounters. Largely influenced by American popular culture and innovations in information technology, Jason Salavon’s work manipulates digitized material while presenting unique approaches to familiar iconography. This exhibition is held in honor of Hyde Park Art Center Board Member and Chair Emeritus, Deone Jackman.

The common thread in his artistic investigations is discovering unexpected patterns in daily encounters

Jason Salavon received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Dutch National Foto Institute, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Salavon is currently a studio artist at the Hyde Park Art Center and associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts and the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.

Image: Jason Salavon, Spigot (My Last Three Searches) (detail from previous work), 2008, Dimensions variable, Two computers, video projection, industrial LCD panel, internet connection, Ed. 3 + 1 AP

The Chicago Humanities Forum Presents Adrian Johns, “The Politics of Media Piracy”
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
5:15–6:00 p.m.
The Gleacher Center,
450 North Cityfront Plaza Drive, Room 621, Chicago, IL

Adrian Johns is a professor in the Department of History and chairs the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998), which won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association, the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the SHARP Prize for the best work on the history of authorship, reading and publishing. He has also published widely in the history of science and the history of the book. Educated in Britain at the University of Cambridge, Professor Johns has taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, the University of California, San Diego, and the California Institute of Technology.

This event is open to the public. Please RSVP by October 30, 2009 by calling (773)702-8274 or emailing franke-humanities@uchicago.edu. You may also register online.

More info here

Immerse yourselves in some delicious futurism!

Fast Forward is an immersive multimedia exploration of how our future lives are being shaped today. This exhibit spotlights some of today’s visionaries working toward a limitless, sustainable future.

From cuisine made by ink-jet printers, to urban high-rise farming, to instant-messaged hugs you can feel, you’ll meet pioneers working on these and other amazing ideas that could change the way we live. Inventors tell us in their own words how they’ve worked to take their ideas from “what if” toward “here’s how.”

Test-drive some of these innovations yourself. Add your own visual ideas to interactive displays. Live Internet news feeds about invention and technology show you the future of innovation as it takes shape, minute by minute. Pushing the boundaries of what we can imagine, the ideas and innovators in Fast Forward may even spark your own “what if.”

Tuesday October 6 7pm

Film Row Cinema of Columbia College Chicago, 1104 S. Wabash Ave., on the 8th floor

Tickets can be reserved for no charge here on a first-come, first-served basis.

Biz Stone is co-founder of Twitter, a real-time, one-to-many network that is changing the way people communicate around the world. Previously, Stone helped build other popular social media services Xanga, Blogger, and Odeo. After launching the journaling service Xanga in 2000, he went on to publish two books about the origins and social significance of blogging.

In 2003, Google invited Stone to join a recently acquired Blogger.com team at its Silicon Valley headquarters in a full-time, senior role. Stone helped re-launch the service and grow Blogger significantly worldwide. He left Google in 2005 to rejoin the startup world.

Stone, 35, is a native of Boston, Massachusetts, and teaches an annual master class at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. In the fall of 2008, he debated and won at Oxford Union against the proposition, “The Problems of Tomorrow Are Bigger Than the Entrepreneurs of Today” along with his esteemed teammates, including Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.

Serving as an advisor to startups such as answer community Fluther.com, travel service Trazzler.com (which he co-founded), content encouragement service Plinky.com, and the non-profit organization Justgive.org, among others, allows Stone to share much of what he has learned over the past decade.

For more, click here.

Captive Senses & Aesthetic Habits

“Captive Senses and Aesthetic Habits,” a joint graduate conference at the University of Chicago between English Language & Literature and Art History, will take place October 8-9, 2009.

Keynote: Michael Taussig (NYU)

The conference is generously supported by the Departments of English Language & Literature and Art History, the Division of the Humanities, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, and the Center for Gender Studies.

For further information on the conference theme, and details for submitting paper proposals, see the Call For Papers. Please contact us at ucgradconf@gmail.com with any questions or comments.

Thursday, September 17, 6pm
Gene Siskel Film Center

GOLAN LEVIN

Golan Levin in person!
Whimsical, provocative, and sublime, the work of new media artist Golan Levin explores the possibilities of code, screens, interactivity, and our relationship with machines. Levin creates collaborative digital systems, resulting in performances like Dialtones (A Telesymphony) (2001), a musical composition with sounds generated through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones; software art such as The Dumpster: A Visualization of Romantic Breakups (2005), which offers novel perspectives on online communications; and installations like Eyecode (2007), which generates imagery from its viewer’s eyes. Levin will discuss these works and more in an interactive screening and lecture. Co-presented by the Department of Interactive Arts & Media, Columbia College Chicago. 1997–2009, USA, multiple formats, ca. 90 min.

GOLAN LEVIN (b. 1972, USA) is an artist and engineer whose work focuses on the language of interactivity—verbal, vocal, and visual. He has spent half his life as an artist embedded within technological research environments, including the MIT Media Laboratory, the Ars Electronica Futurelab, and the former Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto. His work has exhibited widely across North America, Europe, and Asia, including at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kitchen, and the Neuberger Museum, all in New York; the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan; the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo, Japan; and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, among other venues. Levin is currently the director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Associate Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also holds Courtesy Appointments in the School of Computer Science and the School of Design. His work is represented by the bitforms gallery, New York City. Visit www.flong.com.