PLASMA 2015

JAN 26: Wooden Cities + Digital Poetry & Dance 2015 Preview

FEB 09: Martha Poon – Data & Society Research Center, NYC

FEB 16: Cory Arcangel – Media Artist

FEB 23: Ursula Biemann – artist, writer, and video essayist

MAR 30: Geert Lovink – Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) / Professor of Media Theory, European Graduate School

APR 13: Caitlin Fisher – Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture in the Department of Film at York University, Toronto. A co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab

APR 20: Gregory Ulmer – Professor, Department of English at the University of Florida / Professor, Electronic Languages and Cybermedia, European Graduate School

*New Addition* MAY 4: Agnieszka Kurant – Visual and installation artist, Warsaw and New York

BIOS

WOODEN CITIES: Wooden Cities is a collective of performers and composers seeking to help increase the performance and awareness of contemporary music in the WNY area through unique, educational presentations. Formed by director Brendan Fitzgerald in 2011, the group has grown to include nearly a dozen performers and is constantly seeking new works by new composers while continuing to present works by some of the essential, yet underrepresented composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Artist/Speaker Page: www.woodencities.org/

MARTHA POON: is a social scientist interested in how data-intensive systems are changing the public’s relationship to finance. She researches and writes about the impact of credit scoring technology on consumer access to credit. At Data & Society Research Institute Martha will be developing strategies for investigating, explaining, and communicating the role of information systems in financial innovation. She will present on “What Lenders See – A Story of Credit Scores and Invisible Algorithms”.

CORY ARCANGEL:

Cory Arcangel is a Brooklyn, New York post-conceptual artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance art, and video game modifications, for which he is perhaps best known. Arcangel often uses the artistic strategy of appropriation, creatively re-using existing materials such as dancing stands, Photoshop gradients, and YouTube videos to create new works of art. His work explores the relationship between digital technology and pop culture. Artist/Speaker Page: www.coryarcangel.com

URSULA BIEMANN:

Ursula Biemann (born 1955, Zurich, Switzerland) is an artist, writer, and video essayist. Her practice is strongly research based and involves fieldwork and video documentation in remote locations. Biemann investigates global relations under the impact of the accelerated mobility of people, resources and information, and works these materials into multi-layered videos by connecting a theoretical macro level with the micro perspective on political and cultural practices on the ground. The videos are neither linear nor didactic but a reflexive exploration of planetary and videographic organization. Biemann’s pluralistic practice spans a range of media including experimental video, interview, text, photography, cartography and materials, which converge in highly formalized spatial installations. Her work also adopts the form of publications, lectures, and curatorial as well as collaborative research projects. The artist had retrospective exhibitions at the Bildmuseet Umea in Sweden, Nikolaj Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, Helmhaus Zurich, Lentos Museum Linz, and at film festivals FID Marseille and TEK Rome. Her work also contributed to major exhibitions e.g. at the Arnolfini Bristol; Tapies Foundation Barcelona; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; LACE, Los Angeles, San Francisco Art Institute; Kunsthalle Brandt Odense; Kunstverein Hamburg; the Biennials in Gwangju, Shanghai, Liverpool, Bamako, Istanbul and Sevilla; steirischer Herbst, Graz; Flaherty Film Seminars, NY and many others. In March 2013, she had a solo show at Neue Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k. Biemann is appointed Doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea (2008) and received the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the national art award of Switzerland. Artist/Speaker Page: www.geobodies.org/biography

GEERT LOVINK:

Geert Lovink is a Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) and a Professor of Media Theory at the European Graduate School. From 2004-2013 he was an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Lovink is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open dialogue. As theorist, activist and net critic, Lovink has made an effort in helping to shape the development of the web. Artist/Speaker Page: networkcultures.org/geert/

CAITLIN FISHER:

Caitlin Fisher holds a Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture in the Department of Film at York University, Toronto. A co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab, her research investigates the future of narrative through explorations of interactive storytelling and interactive cinema in Augmented Reality environments. She completed York’s first hypertextual dissertation in 2000 and her hypermedia novella, ‘These Waves of Girls’, won the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2001 Award for Fiction. Her augmented reality poem, Andromeda, was awarded the 2008 International Vinaros Prize for Electronic Literature. She will show some examples of how creating AR poetry has changed as expressive tools and technologies have themselves changed over the past decade (from marker-based to natural feature detection most notably) and talk about her current work with meta spaceglass, a better-than-google-glass-like technology still in beta that promises a collaborative, networked and persistent AR experience that may change both mobile media and AR. The research project is entitled: “Augmented reality glass: sousveillance, wearable computing and new literary forms.” Artist/Speaker Page: http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/

GREGORY ULMER:

Gregory Ulmer is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida and a professor of Electronic Languages and Cybermedia at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/gregory-ulmer/biography/). Gregory L. Ulmer is the author of Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (Longman, 2003), Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Johns Hopkins, 1994), Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video (Routledge, 1989), and Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Johns Hopkins, 1985). In addition to two other monographs and a textbook for writing about literature, Ulmer has authored numerous articles and chapters exploring the shift in the apparatus of language from literacy to electracy. His most recent book, Electronic Monumentality: Consulting Internet Memory, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Ulmer’s media work includes two videos: “Telerevisioning Literacy” (Paper Tiger TV) and “The Mr. Mentality Show” (Critical Art Ensemble, Drift). He has given invited addresses at international media arts conferences in Helsinki, Sydney, and Hamburg, as well as at many sites in the United States. Ulmer’s Internet experiments are organized around the problematic of electronic monumentality – a long-term project concerned with the mutation of the public sphere in electracy and the consequences for American national identity. As coordinator of the Electronic Learning Forum , Ulmer collaborates with students and faculty at UF and elsewhere on projects relating to teaching, research, and service involving new media and technology. Artist/Speaker Page: users.clas.ufl.edu/glue/

AGNIESZKA KURANT:

Agnieszka Kurant is a Polish post-conceptual artist living in New York. Her works investigate “the economy of the invisible” in which immaterial entities, fictions, phantoms and emergent processes influence the political and economic systems. Analyzing the phenomena of virtual capital, immaterial and digital labor, collective intelligence, mutations of memes, manipulations of collective consciousness and the editing process as a political act Kurant probes the “unknown unknowns” of knowledge and the speculations and exploits of late capitalism. Kurant represented Poland at the Venice Biennale in 2010. She has an upcoming commission for the Guggenheim Museum (June 2015). Her recent solo museum exhibitions include ScultpureCenter, New York in 2013 and Stroom den Haag in 2014. Kurant’s work has also been exhibited at museums including Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Tate Modern, London; MoMA PS1, New York; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Moderna Museet; Mamco, Geneva. In 2009 she was shortlisted for the International Henkel Art Award (Mumok, Vienna). Her work was also included in Frieze Projects; Performa Biennial; Bucharest Biennale, and Moscow Biennale. Kurant’s artwork is currently on view at The Albright Knox Art Gallery as part of Overtime: The Art of Work through May 17th. Agnieszka Kurant’s talk is co-sponsored by the University at Buffalo’s Department of Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.