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This post was written by and was published on September 18th, 2022 under the categories Events.

Tues. Oct. 11th: Artist Panel: The Feminist Future of Art

Freedom Baird – Mined

Recording of the event:

Friends, after a long hiatus we are thrilled to return with a new ATNE event!

Join artists of FeministFuturist for a discussion about value, currency, monuments and exchange in art now and in the future.

This conversation accompanies the exhibition, CURRENCY. The exhibition—on display now through Sunday October 16, 2022 at The Boston Cyberarts Gallery—is created, curated and presented by the collective and encompasses both physical and virtual work. CURRENCY’s themes include the concept of monuments (their permanence or impermanence in physical or digital realms); Feminism in digital platforms; and ways in which a Feminist perspective can heal Earth from a male-dominated, capitalist-technological hegemony.

When: Tuesday, October 11th, 7 pm
Where: Virtually on Zoom
Presenters: FeministFuturist artists
Free event
Please register in advance.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.

About the Presenters

FeministFuturist artists on the panel: Freedom Baird, Christina Balch, Marjorie Kaye, AK Liesenfeld, Carolyn Wirth

Intro by Chris Clepper of Art Technology New England (ATNE)

Freedom Baird is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring the interconnection between humans and nature. Her work addresses systems and society, and often includes performance and viewer participation. She holds master’s degrees from the Media Lab at MIT and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and has exhibited recently at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and the Fuller Craft Museum.

Christina Balch (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist, producer, and technologist. Her work explores perceptions of self through digital technology and data. 

Marjorie Kaye is a visual artist currently based in North Adams in the Berkshires. Although primarily a painter working with gouache, she has also explored her wild, unruly, yet precise compositions in wood as well. She is the Director of Galatea Fine Art in Boston’s SoWA Art and Design District in addition to her art practice, and has had extensive exhibitions and has been awarded grants from the Provincetown Art Museum and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Anna Katharina (AK) Liesenfeld is a fashion designer and virtual reality concept artist. She has worked with Boston Fashion Week, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, creating garments and accessories exploring identity in fashion. AK will be showing a salon made entirely using VR. With this piece, she hopes to inspire the audience to join her in the conversation around the legacy of pioneering female educator Helen Temple Cooke.

Carolyn Wirth, a Boston-area sculptor and occasional installation artist, uses the figure to describe people and landscapes historically unrepresented due to gender bias. Her practice inhabits the experiences of feminist-defined representation; she has been artist-in-residence at several regional museums and exhibits in numerous New England galleries.

This post was written by and was published on September 17th, 2022 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Wed. Feb. 12th: Nostalgia Tech

Please join us for a discussion of the exhibition, Nostalgia Tech, currently on display at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery. With this exhibit of Nostalgia Tech artist and designer pieces, basic historical references are made to 19th Century and 20th Century creations using technology of the period to elicit delight, amusement, admiration and even astonishment. We’ll be joined by two of the artists and the co-curator of the show.

When: Wednesday, February 12th, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenters: Nathan Miner, Chris Fitch, & Mark Favermann
Free event

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About the Presenters

Nathan Miner is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of classical painting and new media. His projects incorporate sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, installation and extended-reality technologies. He is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, and has exhibited extensively throughout New York and New England.

Chris Fitch is a sculptor, engineer and inventor. His prize-­‐winning mechanical sculptures, installations and performance-­‐based artwork have been presented internationally.His puppets and state-­‐of-­‐the art miniature theaters have appeared with major symphony productions in New York and Los Angeles. His credits for work in animation include Sesame Street, Motorola, Disneyland, and Samsung. Further projects have included the design of a toy factory, independent invention, landscape design, a tree house bed and breakfast inn in the Philippines, and the development of workshops about kinematics, motion as medium, and foam latex stop motion puppetry.

Mark Favermann of Favermann Design is an urban designer and planner who focuses upon the details and enhancement of the urban fabric. For over three decades, his design firm has been involved in developing civic signatures by using the tools of street furniture, streetscape enrichment, wayfinding and signage, and social media as well as public art to create what Mark refers to as urban or community branding. He received his undergraduate degree from Washington & Lee University and his masters in urban design and planning from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University where he was a National Endowment of the Arts Fellow. An artist associate fellow twice at the former Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, his public projects and functional sculptures have won national and international recognition. His Coolidge Corner Theatre design is a Brookline, MA town symbol and cultural icon. A design consultant to the Boston Red Sox for 19 seasons, previously, he was one of five designers of the “Look” of 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, designer of the 1999 Ryder Cup in Brookline, MA, co-designer of the 2000 NCAA Final Four in Indianapolis, IN, and a creative force for various other major national and international sports events. One of the four authors of the international award-winning masterplan Esplanade Vision 2020, he wrote about the over century old park’s sense of place. He has extensive involvement in branding and wayfinding projects for various size cities and towns, and for the past several years has been a consultant to the Downtown Initiative Program of the Massachusetts Office of Housing and Community Development as well as other individual communities for branding, wayfinding, streetscapes, public art and social media. Over the past quarter century, he has published over 600 articles primarily about architecture, design and public art.

This post was written by and was published on January 28th, 2020 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Fri. Oct. 4th: Re:Constructing Evidence

Join us for a walkthrough of the current Boston Cyberarts Gallery exhibit, Re:Constructing Evidence, before the opening reception.

Re:Constructing Evidence explores the role of evidence and practices of evidence construction — both physical and digital — in public controversies and civic life. The exhibition features four case studies focused on climate change, waste management, assumptions in data analytics, and the construction of breaking news narratives. Rooted in discourses of architecture, journalism, media art and environmental humanities, these projects investigate the constructed nature of evidence — construction not as an arbitrary process, but as a form of collective sensemaking.

This exhibit includes works by Jennifer Gradecki and Derek Curry, Meg Heckman, Dietmar Offenhuber, and Ang Li.

When: Friday, October 4th, 5:00pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: Dietmar Offenhuber
Free event

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About the Presenter

Dietmar Offenhuber is Associate Professor at Northeastern University in the areas of information design and urban affairs. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT. His research focuses on the relationship between design, technology, and urban governance. Dietmar is the author of the award-winning monograph Waste is Information (MIT Press) and has published books on urban data and related social practices. He also works as an advisor to the United Nations Development Programme.

This post was written by and was published on September 27th, 2019 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Wed. May 1st: Dietmar Offenhuber

Photo by Frank Kleinbach

Dust.zone – does matter communicate?

As digital information plays an increasingly central role in society, questions of truthfulness, authority, and hidden biases have become a widespread concern. Visualization and data analytics are seen as critical tools to separate the signal from the noise. These tools, however, are silent about how data comes into being, the material conditions and social practices of data collection. As symbolic representations, data are disconnected from the material world.

Especially the discourse around climate change and environmental pollution depends on large data sets and computational methods, whose results cannot always be reconciled with human experience. In my talk, I will focus on the evidentiary practices of identifying, revealing, and interpreting physical traces. To this end, I will introduce the concept of sensory accountability, which encompasses visual practices and communication strategies that focus on physical evidence to make the process of data collection accountable and accessible to sensory experience.

When: Wednesday, May 1st, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: Dietmar Offenhuber
Free event

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About the Presenter

Dietmar Offenhuber is Associate Professor at Northeastern University in the areas of information design and urban affairs. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT. His research focuses on the relationship between design, technology, and urban governance. Dietmar is the author of the award-winning monograph Waste is Information (MIT Press) and has published books on urban data and related social practices. He also works as an advisor to the United Nations Development Programme.

This post was written by and was published on April 13th, 2019 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Wed. April 3rd: Mike Mittelman

Merging the Analog and the Digital

For over twenty years Michael Mittelman has been experimenting and exploring new materials and processes in contemporary art. Along this journey has been a consistent need to maintain an aspect of the analog, even while using the most digital of means. In his earliest works in virtual reality, Michael was extracting the object into real space and then merging it with the virtual images. In his most recent work, Michael is using digital fabrication techniques on natural materials. This talk will discuss the journey between then points and the ideas that have driven it.

When: Wednesday, April 3rd, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: Mike Mittelman
Free event

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About the Presenter

Michael Mittelman has a background in both architecture and fine arts, completing studio art degrees at Wesleyan University (BA) and Massachusetts College of Art (MFA), including a year-long architecture intensive with the Columbia University New York/Paris program. For over twenty years, he has been working at the intersection of art and technology. In the mid 1990’s, Michael was creating virtual reality sculptures and then realizing them in welded steel. At the turn of the millennium, he was creating interactive installations which explored the psychology of domestic environments. Since 2013, Michael has been using digital fabrication to create sculptures which express the new possibilities of these methods of creation while simultaneously retain the analog properties of their materials. Core to Michael’s process is rapid iteration through early stages of exploration by using software and then settling into a refinement process that includes full physical realization of the concept. His sculptures, installations, and digital art have been shown nationally, including at the List Center for Visual Arts and the deCordova Museum and his work is in the Spalter Digital Art Collection.

This post was written by and was published on March 17th, 2019 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Sun. Mar. 3rd: Alexander Reben

Alexander Reben will be discussing his exhibition, Creative Work as Adversary: The AI and Machine Art of Alexander Reben at the Urban Arts Media Art Gallery at Emerson College. Reben is an artist and roboticist who explores humanity through the lens of art and technology. Even the title of this exhibition was generated through a neural network, into which Reben fed every exhibition titles of the Museum of Modern Art. The AI generated numerous variants and the artist and curator chose this one.

When: Sunday, March 3rd, 4pm
Where: Emerson Urban Arts Media Gallery, 25 Avery Street, Boston, MA 02115
Presenter: Alexander Reben
Free event

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About the Presenter

Alexander Reben’s work probes the inherently human nature of the artificial. Using tools such as artificial philosophy, synthetic psychology, perceptual manipulation and technological magic, he brings to light our inseparable evolutionary entanglement to invention which has unarguably shaped our way of being. This is done to not only help understand who we are, but to consider who we will become in our continued codevelopment with our artificial creations. Using “art as experiment” his work allows for the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts. “With a new generation of technology comes a new generation of scientists, scholars, engineers and artists exploring the relationship between people and machines. At the heart of this nexus is Alexander Reben, an MIT-trained roboticist and artist whose work forces us to confront and question our expectations when it comes to ourselves and our creations,” reports NPR’s Tania Lombrozo. Reben’s artwork and research have been shown and published internationally, and he consults with major companies, guiding innovation for the social machine future. He has exhibited at venues including The Vitra Design Museum, The MAK Museum Vienna, The Design Museum Ghent, The Vienna Biennale, ARS Electronica, VOLTA, TFI Interactive, IDFA, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Camden Film Festival, Doc/Fest, and The Boston Cyberarts Gallery. His work has been covered by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, New Scientist, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Cool Hunting and WIRED, among others. He has lectured at TED, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, CCA, MIT, and other universities. Reben has built robots for NASA, and is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, where he studied human-robot symbiosis and art. He is a 2016-2017 WIRED innovation fellow, a Stochastic Labs Resident, and a recent visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley psychology department.

This post was written by and was published on February 15th, 2019 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Sun. Jan. 20: Nancy Baker Cahill

Fine Art, Public Access and XR: Integrating Emerging Technologies into a Studio Practice

Join us for a special artist talk with Nancy Baker Cahill. Cahill is a visual artist whose works encompass drawing, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) Her one-person exhibition, Hollow Point is currently on view at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery.

When: Sunday, Jan. 20th, 4pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: Nancy Baker Cahill
Free event

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About the Presenter

Nancy Baker Cahill is a multi-disciplinary artist and founder of 4th Wall, a free augmented reality app which allows users to place art in 360 degrees anywhere in the world. She also created the ongoing, collaborative, AR public art exhibition Coordinates, a new feature on her app, which allows individual artists to activate their work in site-specific locations. She received her B.A. from Williams College and began her career describing TV and movies for the blind and visually impaired at WGBH in Boston. From 2010-2012 she initiated and led a collaborative art project at Homeboy Industries called Exit Wounds. Works from this project were exhibited throughout Los Angeles as part of the Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM)’s Folk Art Everywhere program. In 2015 she designed and led a collage workshop with homeless individuals under the aegis of a CAFAM grant. She is the recipient of an ARC Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, was a featured TEDx speaker in September 2018 in Pasadena, and is profiled in a Bloomberg Media short documentary airing in early 2019. In January of 2019 she will be honored as an Impact Maker to Watch at LA City Hall.

Solo exhibition highlights include the Pasadena Museum of California Art, her virtual reality public art project on the IF (Innovation Foundation) sponsored Sunset Digital Billboards, Cyber Arts Gallery in Boston (upcoming), and a VR/AR event at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in April 2018. She has been profiled by Forbes Magazine, ARTnews, the Los Angeles Times, Fast Company, The Smithsonian Magazine, Bloomberg Media, The Art Newspaper, VRScout, ZDNet, KCET’s award-winning Artbound series, Aesthetica, Good Magazine, LA Magazine, LA Weekly, La Stampa, Peripheral Vision Arts and on several podcasts, including Feminist Crush, Bookish, and State of the Art. She served for years as a member of the Hollywood Public Art Advisory Board, is a member of the Pasadena Art Alliance, an Advisory Board member of Fulcrum Arts and Vice Chair of the Board of Directors at LACE.

This post was written by and was published on January 4th, 2019 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Sun. Dec. 16: Zenovia Toloudi

Architectural Apparatuses for Immaterial Transformations

With the occasion of multimedia installation “Photodotes I: Light Donors” being part of Boston Cyberarts’ “Future of History” group show, this talk unfolds around artworks that embody processes of immaterial transformations such as kinesis/movement. To present these machines that produce effects as well as time-sensitive and ephemeral spaces, the talk employs the term of architectural apparatus. An architectural apparatus can be either an individual structural element with particular forms, materials, textures, and perforations, or an opening and a threshold, or a design of particular scales, geometries, proportions, and dimensions, or a strategically positioning of a building or monument to produce an effect in the eyes of the beholders. The architectural apparatuses can intervene in particular buildings or conditions to either transmit light, or recreate an image to interrupt the daily routine in a building through the production of ever-changing phenomena, or to produce an illusion of infinity. Through this artistic research certain ideas prevail about architectural apparatuses: they are artifacts yet non-representational; they become portals for phantasmagoria; they disrupt the spatial homogeneity and lifestyle monotony; they recalibrate the senses and cognitive abilities of the viewer; they displace temporarily one’s image in relation to the surroundings; they are theatrical, literal, and temporal; they become transitional objects or communicative devices; and they become co-producers of space.

When: Sunday, Dec. 16, 4pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: Zenovia Toloudi
Free event

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About the Presenter

Zenovia Toloudi is an artist, architect, and Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College. Zenovia makes art to realize imaginative architectures that generate inclusion through digital and organic media, and to experiment with subjective perception of space and engagement. Her work, poised at the intersection of art and architecture, critiques the alienation of humans from nature and each other and strives to restore broken relationships. Zenovia has exhibited at the Biennale in Venice, the Center for Architecture in New York, the Athens Byzantine Museum, and the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens and won commissions from Illuminus Boston, and The Lab at Harvard. Her work belongs to permanent collections at Aristotle University and the Thracian Pinacotheca. In addition, she has published on bioart, immaterial architecture, and the public sphere in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, Technoetic Arts Journal of Speculative Research and MAS Context’s issue on the Ordinary. A Research Fellow in the Art, Culture, and Technology Program at MIT and a Fulbright Fellow, she received her doctorate from Harvard’s GSD, a M.Arch. from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and a diploma in Architectural Engineering from Aristotle University. Raised at a periphery of Greece, she works in the Mediterranean and in North America and her fascination with borders is reflected in art that ranges in reference and material across the boundaries of biology and technology.

This post was written by and was published on November 27th, 2018 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Thurs. Oct. 11th: Art21 Screening

Join us for a screening of the “San Fransisco Bay Area” episode from Season 9 of Art21, followed by a conversation.

Episode Synopsis: A longtime home for political progressives and technological pioneers, the San Francisco Bay Area is a magnet for artists who are drawn to its experimental atmosphere, countercultural spirit, and history of innovation. In addition to presenting three artists working across photography, installation, and new media, this episode features a nonprofit art center, spotlighting multiple artists with physical and cognitive disabilities who work in a range of mediums. The artists in this hour are united by their steadfastness and persistence in creating; their art serves as an essential expression of their experience of the world.

When: Thursday, October 11th, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Featured Artists: Creative Growth Art Center, Katy Grannan, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Stephanie Syjuco
Free event

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About the Featured Artists

Creative Growth Art Center was founded by Elias and Florence Katz in 1974. Operating in a former car-body shop near downtown Oakland, California, Creative Growth provides studios, gallery space, and supplies to more than 150 artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities, who work in a wide array of media. Predicated on the belief that art is fundamental to human expression and that all people are entitled to its tools of communication, Creative Growth is an incubator of artistic activity that has fostered exemplary artists, such as Dan Miller, Judith Scott, William Scott, and Monica Valentine.

Katy Grannan was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1969. A photographer and filmmaker, Grannan is fascinated by the lives of what she describes as “anonymous people” on the margins of society in the American West. Grannan develops long-term relationships with transient residents, which lead to stunningly beautiful and unsettling portraits.

Lynn Hershman Leeson was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1941. At once a pointed critic and a sly practical jokester, Leeson has worked across a wide range of mediums, from drawing, painting, and sculpture to interactive films, net-based media works, and artificial intelligence. Overlooked for the better part of her decades-long career, Leeson is a pioneering multidisciplinary artist, critiquing the deep-seated gender biases that have excluded her and other women artists.

Stephanie Syjuco was born in Manila, Philippines, in 1974. Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing. Her work explores the tension between the authentic and the counterfeit, challenging deep-seated assumptions about history, race, and labor.

This event is produced in collaboration with Art21, a nonprofit global leader in art education, producing preeminent films on today’s leading visual artists and education programs that inspire creativity worldwide.

This post was written by and was published on September 26th, 2018 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Sun. June 24th: “History of the Future” Exhibition Walkthrough

We are hosting a walk-through of the Boston Cyberarts show History of the Future with artists Carlos Del Castillo, Daniel Alexander Smith, Yao Wang, Jeffu Warmouth and more!

This exhibition is the result of an open call for work that pairs art and technology in a thought provoking and visually engaging manner. History of the Future features fifteen artists hailing from as far away as Singapore and Switzerland, as well as local Bostonians and places in-between. Many of the works incorporate historical and cultural references into the medium and message of their technologically savvy contemporary artworks.

The show features work by: Jenny E. Balisle, Tyler Bohm, Sara Bonaventura, Keaton Fox, Bob Kephart, Pat Lay, Bang T. Luu, Nick Montfort, Hye Yeon Nam, Molly O’Donnell, Lalie S. Pascual, Daniel Alexander Smith, Yao Wang, Jeffu Warmouth, and Jody Zellen.

When: Sunday, June 24th, 4pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenters: History of the Future artists Carlos Del Castillo, Daniel Alexander Smith, Yao Wang, Jeffu Warmouth and more
Free event
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About the Presenters

Artist bios can be found at Boston Cyberarts.

This post was written by and was published on June 6th, 2018 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Sun. May 13th: Joseph Farbrook

Join us for a special artist talk with Joseph Farbrook whose work is currently on display as part of Now You See It…

Farbrook’s piece Amorphous Ball is an augmented reality kinetic sculpture. He writes about it, “We’ve come to expect that the device that we carry in our pocket will be all things at once. One by one, our other things are beginning to disappear as this pocket toy becomes the only toy that we play with. We’ve lost our cameras, camcorders, postcards, letters, notes, maps, tape recorders, flashlights, radios, stereos, watches, wallet photos, newspapers, calculators, answering machines, not to mention telephones. Like an amorphous ball, this shape-shifting device that we carry has also absorbed boredom, getting lost, physical contact, eye contact, talking, meeting, connecting, observing, remembering, asking advice, and discovering by chance.”

This talk is on Mothers Day and the final day of the exhibition. We would love to see you and your mother!

When: Sunday, May 13th, 4pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: Joseph Farbrook
Free event
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About the Presenter

Joseph Farbrook grew up in New York City and Santa Fe. His father was a concrete poet and his mother, a painter. Farbrook creates digital artwork in the form of electronic installations, interactive video, augmented and virtual reality, video sculptures, live performances, and interactive screen projections. He has invented customized media platforms that mix physical and virtual art making practices. Within his work, he explores the evolution and consequences of cultural mythology and mediated perception. 

Farbrook exhibits his work regularly in galleries and museums worldwide, including SIGGRAPH, International Symposium for Electronic Arts, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Watermans Gallery in London, Galerie Vaclava Spaly in Prague, and numerous solo and group exhibitions in NYC, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle and other cities. Joseph Farbrook is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona.

This post was written by and was published on April 26th, 2018 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Wed. May 2nd: Augmented Reality Art Curator’s Talk

Join in on a special curator’s talk about the history of augmented reality and art while exploring the Boston Cyberarts Gallery Now You See It… exhibit which will be up from Saturday, March 31 to Sunday, May 13. This new exhibition is of augmented reality artworks created by Joseph Farbrook, Carla Gannis, Claudia Hart, Michael Mittelmann and Will Pappenheimer.

When: Wednesday, May 2nd, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: George Fifield
Free event
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About the Presenter

George Fifield is the founding director of Boston Cyberarts Inc., a nonprofit arts organization, which programs numerous art and technology projects, including the Boston Cyberarts Gallery in Jamaica Plain and two large public LED screens in downtown Boston, Art on the Marquee, on the 80 foot video marquee in front of the Boston Convention Center and the Harbor Island Welcome Center screens in the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy. This year, Boston Cyberarts has curated The Augmented Landscape, large augmented reality sculptures at The Salem Maritime National Historic Site. He was executive co-producer for The Electronic Canvas, a documentary on the history of the media arts that aired on PBS in 2000. Fifield writes on a variety of media, technology and art topics for numerous publications.  In 2006, the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Boston Chapter honored Fifield with the First Annual Special Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Arts Community. In 2007 the Boston Cyberarts Festival was the recipient of the Commonwealth Award in the category of Creative Economy.

This post was written by and was published on April 15th, 2018 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Postponed Twice! Thursday, March 22nd: Caitlin Foley & Misha Rabinovich

Postponed a second time! Another Wednesday, another Noreaster… We are moving this salon back one night to Thursday the 22nd. See you then!

Postponed! Due to the possibility of bad weather, we’ve decided to move this event to the 21st. Please join us in two weeks!

Caitlin Foley & Misha Rabinovich work collaboratively to create works that engage ideas and practices that involve sharing communities, livable ecologies, and the transmutation of waste. They employ traditional drawing and sculptural techniques within a contemporary framework of interactive media and participatory installation. Among other things they create participatory installations, games, and happenings where audience participation is a key component of the work and its message. During their talk they will provide an overview of some of their ongoing projects and the themes that run throughout them. Some of you may have seen their arcade-style game Total Jump which trains people for a coordinated worldwide jump when it was at Boston Cyberarts. The impossibility of accomplishing a Total Jump contrasted with the ease and fun of training for it invites the audience to bridge the gap between a postmodern pluralistic world and the necessity of globally coordinated solutions in the face of the Anthropocene. The recent cultural, political, and environmental upheavals in the US and the rest of the world are worrisome. Their Worries Bash project, which was developed for an exhibition in Berlin and will be at Proof Gallery in Boston this Spring, is an opportunity to share worries and consider similarities in emotional cycles across communities via electroacoustic pinatas which act as worry browsers when hit.

When: Thursday, March 22nd, 7:30pm (was March 7th and also March 21st)
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenters: Caitlin Foley & Misha Rabinovich
Free event
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About the Presenters

Caitlin Foley & Misha Rabinovich are recent recipients of a NEFA Creative Opportunity Grant, frequent residents at NYC’s Flux Factory, and have exhibited at venues such as the the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival (NYC), Machine Project (LA), the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), SIGGRAPH (LA), and currently at the Open Data Institute (UK). Misha is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at UMass Lowell and Caitlin is Assistant Director at Boston Cyberarts and Art Consultant/Curator for the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.

This post was written by and was published on February 14th, 2018 under the categories Events , Past Events.

Dec 2nd: USCO Gallery Talk

Join ATNE for an artist talk with USCO members Michael Callahan and Gerd Stern. This salon will be a rare opportunity to discuss these artists’ pioneering work in multi-media performance, forays into the emerging new media field and their technological innovations that helped inspire a new generation of artists. The USCO individual and collective histories trace a fascinating path from 50s Bay area and Beat culture through 60s New York downtown media experiments and into the genesis of the computer and information era art.

When: Saturday, Dec. 2nd, 4pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenters: Michael Callahan & Gerd Stern
Free event
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About the Presenters

Michael Callahan

Michael Callahan was born in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in 1944. While still a student at Lowell High School, he became the first Technical Director of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, joining Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnik and Pauline Oliveros. During this period Callahan worked with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Harry Partch, John Cage and David Tudor among others. In 1963 he began a collaboration with the poet Gerd Stern, initially on Stern’s Who R U and What’s Happening mixed media performance at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Shortly thereafter a joint presentation with Marshall McCluhan was held at the University of British Columbia.

In 1964 Callahan joined Stern and the painter Stephen Durkee in New York to start what became known as the USCO Group (Company of Us). The church building that served as their studio was recently placed on the National Register of Historic Places due to their work there. USCO’s first activity was again with Marshall McCluhan, this time at the University of Rochester.

In addition to gallery and museum exhibitions, USCO toured the United States with a mixed-media performance incorporating multiple slide and film projections, multi-channel sound mixes, and on occasion was joined by Carolee Schneemann.

USCO’s kinetic sculptures, paintings and immersive environments has been shown at museums around the world, including Centre Pompidou, Tate Liverpool, Whitney, Kunsthalle Wein, and most recently in the Walker Art Center’s Hippie Modernism show that traveled to the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum.

From 1977 to 1994 Callahan held an appointment at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Since then he has served as president of Museum Technology Source Inc., concentrating on the electronic and media aspects of museum exhibits.

Callahan resides in North Reading, Massachusetts with Adrienne, his wife of forty five years.

Gerd Stern

Gerd Stern is a poet and multimedia artist with experience in both film and video. He has published several books of poetry including First Poems and Others (1952), Afterimage (1965), a serigraphed selection with drawings by David Weinrib Conch Tales in 1984, and a chap book Fragmeants in 2002. His oral history was published by the University of California (ROHO) Berkeley in 2002 and is available on line and in hard cover.

A founder of the nineteen-sixties media arts collaborative USCO, Stern’s first show of electronic sculptures and collages was at Alllen Stone Gallery in 1962. In 1963 his one person exhibit at San Francisco Museum of Art featured a first multi-media performance Who R U & What’s Happening which was also performed at the University of British Columbia with a lecture by Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan — with whom Stern was associated for a number of years.

During the past few years Stern was artist in residence for DAAD in Berlin, Germany and at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha Nebraska and at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice. He read poems and exhibited collages both at the DAAD Gallery in Berlin, and at the Thiess gallery in Munich. USCO work was part of Summer of Love at Liverpool’s Tate, in Vienna, Frankfurt and at the Whiney Museum of Art, NYC and in Traces du Sacre at Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The recent issue of CAA’s Art Journal has a twenty page, illustrated article, on USCO and Stern, by Michel Orin titled, Getting Out of Your Mind to Use Your Head. This summer New Yorker Kunst Geschichten by Kat Schuetz published by Verlag Moderne Kunst, Nuernberg includes a twenty five page chapter about Gerd Stern and his work. He now is in his eighties and lives in northern New Jersey

This post was written by and was published on November 14th, 2017 under the categories Events , Past Events.

July 2nd: Vibrations: A Sound Experience

ATNE is teaming up with the Boston Cyberarts gallery to explore their current show, Vibrations: A Sound Experience. The show is an interactive sound exhibition with work by MJ Caselden and Derek Hoffend. Come hear both artists talk about their work, with background provided by curator Stephanie Dvareckas.

When: Sunday, July 2nd, 5–6:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenters: MJ Caselden, Derek Hoffend, & Stephanie Dvareckas
Free event
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About the Presenters

MJ Caselden: I am a sound artist and inventor. I lead a design firm in New York City dedicated to prototyping and innovative use of technology, helping artists and tech companies realize new ideas.

My artwork often explores ritualized listening, offered as guided group sound meditations, or as sound-generating sculpture. Resonating sculptures surround listeners, creating immersive listening spaces for self-reflection and contemplation.

Recent exhibitions showcase a new invention I call “Magnetic Sound”, sculptures that use varying magnetic fields to induce vibrations in metal and wood. I work with this magnetic energy to create repetitive, mantra-like vibrations conducive to deep listening and meditation.

I’ve been exploring integration of these meditative sounds with lifestyle, releasing sculptures for other people to develop their own at-home sound experiences. As the project continues to grow, we are also experimenting with teachers from long-standing healing arts practices such as Asana Yoga, Tibetan Tummo breathwork, acupuncture, and Ch’an meditation.

The Magnetic Sound project has grown to include collaboration with tech companies such as Intel, and been featured in art, meditation, and retreat spaces around the world including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Times Square. For more information, visit www.magneticsound.com.

The Magnetic Sound project is made possible with the support of Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, Canon Inc., D.S. Solidworks Corp., Intel Inc., NEW INC, Mombucha Kombucha, and The New York State Council on Arts.

Derek Hoffend: My work is characterized by installations that combine sculptural forms with sound and interactive experiences. Pieces explore the intersection of sound as a medium with sculptural forms and structures, as well as light, sites, spaces, and the human body to create immersive and participatory experiences for viewers, employing sonic, electronic, and physical media.  Works are often interactive and invite participation through touch or motion, exploring cause-and-effect relationships of viewer action within reactive systems, as well as personal and social dynamics found in play and collaboration.

Recent work explores an interest in facilitating somatosensory responses, therapeutic experiences, and shifts in consciousness via direct viewer participation. I am particularly interested in works that create a space where scientific and metaphysical ideas can cohabitate, creating a bridge between the physical and supernatural, and inviting the potential for interplay between sensory and spiritual experiences.

To this end, I am inspired by and employ a variety of processes and theories in my work such as vibro-acoustics for haptic experience, entrainment theory (rhythmic, biomusical, and neural), acoustic phenomena such as monaural and binaural beating, and components of sound therapy, sacred-geometry, and color therapy. Biofeedback principles and techniques are also employed such as using heart-rate monitors to trigger external events in the form of sound and light feedback.

My music practice includes recording and performing electronic music under the moniker Aether Chroma as well as my own name. Live performance works have varied between collaborative electro-acoustic improvisation, solo immersive soundscape journeys, and beat-driven electronica working extensively with digital and analog synthesis, software such as Max/MSP, hand-made circuits, field-recordings, and modular synthesizers.

Works have been performed or exhibited at Mobius Artist Space (Boston/Cambridge, MA), IBM (Cambridge, MA), Microsoft Start-up Labs (Cambridge, MA), the Distillery Gallery (South Boston, MA), Studio Soto (Boston, MA), Union Square (Somerville, MA), The Enormous Room (Cambridge, MA), sQuareone Studio (Boston, MA), 90.3 WZBC (Boston, MA), Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), Sonotheque (Chicago, IL), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Athenaeum Theater, (Chicago, IL), and Consolidated Works (Seattle, WA).

~~~ Hoffend holds a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art and Technology (2004), a MA from New York University in Studio Art (2001), and a dual-major BFA from the State University of New York at Fredonia in Sculpture and Photography (1997). He is currently Associate Faculty of Interactive Media at Becker College in Worcester, MA, and Adjunct Faculty in Animation at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, MA. He lives and maintains a studio in Boston, MA.

Stephanie Dvareckas is Assistant Director at Boston Cyberarts and the Art Consultant for the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. Dvareckas holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design’s Studio for Interrelated Media. Currently, Dvareckas is a candidate for a Masters in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dvareckas is the founder and project manager of bostonartguide.org, a responsive website designed to connect artists, dealers, collectors and other patrons of the art world with the Boston art-sphere. She has spoken at several colleges including the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Emerson College, and Montserrat. Dvareckas’s latest exhibitions concerning consciousness in contemporary art include Deep in the Dream (Proof Gallery, Boston, May – June 2017); Vibrations: A Sound Experience (Boston Cyberarts, Boston, June – July  2017).  Dvareckas has written a research paper entitled Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Gender, Transformation, and Multiplicity, as well as the foreword for Take Care Magazine and many exhibition catalogs.

This post was written by and was published on June 11th, 2017 under the categories Events , Past Events.

May 17th: Games and Politics: Jeff Warmouth

ATNE hosts three nights of discussion and exploration related to the Games and Politics exhibition at Boston Cyberarts and the Goethe-Institut. Please join us from 7–9pm on each night for a presentation followed by hands-on interaction with the exhibit.

This week Jeff Warmouth & Seth Alter will lead a conversation about Games as Systems.

When: Wednesday, May 17th, 7:00–9:00pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenters: Jeff Warmouth & Seth Alter
Free event
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About the Presenters

Jeffu Warmouth was born in San Diego, California in 1970. He received a BA from the University of Michigan in 1992, and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University in 1997. He lives in Groton, MA and works in Fitchburg, MA, where he is Professor of Communications Media at Fitchburg State University.

Warmouth’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA; Experimenta Media Arts, Melbourne, Australia; Kaunas Photo Festival, Kaunas, Lithuania; The Window Project, Atlanta, GA; Art on the Marquee, Boston, MA; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA; Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Boston, MA; Art Interactive, Cambridge, MA; SHOW Gallery, New York, NY; University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA; Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, KS; Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA; MicroCineFest, Baltimore, MD; Brainwash Film Festival, Oakland, CA.

Seth Alter creates political art games that model social systems. Seth takes existing game conventions such as the turn based strategy or the manager sim and deconstructs them to highlight the complicity of the player in a predatory role, while above all showing compassion for the collateral human suffering.

Seth has released two games on Steam, Neocolonialism and No Pineapple Left Behind. He was recently an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and was awarded a fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in recognition of outstanding work. He is currently working on Traitor Nightly, a small game that experiments with narrative.

This post was written by and was published on April 25th, 2017 under the categories Events , Past Events.

May 3rd: Games and Politics: Ben Houge

ATNE hosts three nights of discussion and exploration related to the Games and Politics exhibition at Boston Cyberarts and the Goethe-Institut. Please join us from 7–9pm on each night for a presentation followed by hands-on interaction with the exhibit.

When: Wednesday, May 3rd, 7:00–9:00pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: Ben Houge
Free event
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About the Presenter

Composer, digital media artist, and video game developer Ben Houge has long been exploring the intersections of divergent disciplines. Highlights from his twenty-year career in the game industry include serving as audio director of Tom Clancy’s EndWar (2008) and composing the celebrated soundtrack for Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura (2001). His performances, sound art, and generative video have been presented internationally, most recently at Boston’s ILLUMINUS Festival, Music Acoustica in Beijing, and, in collaboration with acclaimed dance group New Movement Collective, at Southbank Centre in London. In 2012 he was a visiting artist at MIT, and he currently teaches iPad programming and digital narrative at Berklee College of Music, having returned to Boston after two years helping to launch a new master’s program in music technology at Berklee’s new campus in Valencia.

This post was written by and was published on April 18th, 2017 under the categories Events , Past Events.

April 26th: Games and Politics: George Fifield & Annette Klein

ATNE hosts three nights of discussion and exploration related to the Games and Politics exhibition at Boston Cyberarts and the Goethe-Institut. Please join us from 7–9pm on each night for a presentation followed by hands-on interaction with the exhibit.

When: Wednesday, April 26th, 7:00–9:00pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: George Fifield & Annette Klein
Free event
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About the Presenters

George Fifield & Annette Klein are representing Boston Cyberarts and the Goethe-Institut, respectively.

This post was written by and was published on April 16th, 2017 under the categories Events , Past Events.

April 5th: Coded_Couture

Customization has always been at the heart of couture: the hand-beaded, hand-stitched, one-of-a-kind gown as a unique garment with a specific connection to its wearer. In the exhibition Coded_Couture, on view at Tufts University Art Gallery, until May 21, 2017 curators Ginger Duggan and Judy Fox propose a new definition of couture, in which coding supplants handwork as a means to extreme customization of garments. Judy will introduce the work in the exhibition in this illustrated presentation.

When: Wednesday, April 5th, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA (next to the Green Street Station)
Presenter: Judy Fox
Free event
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About the Presenter

Judy Fox works with co-curator Ginger Duggan, under the moniker c2 (curatorsquared), to develop exhibitions of cross-media contemporary art and design that explore current issues in culture.

With an undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College and graduate degree from the University of Minnesota, Judy trained at Walker Art Center. She was curator at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College; Museum of Art, RISD; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and has been Visiting Curator at Harvard Art Museums and Krannert Art Museum-University of Illinois.

Duggan and Fox have organized exhibitions for Boston Society of Architects; Design Museum Holon- Israel; Krannert Art Museum-University of Illinois; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford MA; Ulrich Art Museum-Wichita State University KS; Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT, Pratt Manhattan, NY and Orlando Museum of Art.

Their writing has been published internationally. The Association of Art Museum Curators has recognized their exhibitions with awards and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Elisabeth Stone Graham Foundation have supported their work.

This post was written by and was published on March 19th, 2017 under the categories Events , Past Events.