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October 06, 2005

Hexagram Mondays

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at [SAT]

MONDAY, 10th October 2005; 6pm - free: Éric Raymond--Lanternes/Lighthouses: Recent works and issues; Jason Lewis--Writing the Next Text; and Niklas Damiris--Valorization through art and technology: an opportunity to add value and rethink economic valuation?

The SAT and Hexagram cooperate in organizing a series of conferences which will feature Hexagram’s creators-researchers and students sponsored by the Centre interuniversitaire en arts médiatiques (CIAM). Open to everyone, this series aims at the dissemination of Hexagram’s works within the network of creators-researchers from the Institute and independant media and technological artists, but to the the general public as well. The conferences will take place every second Monday of each month from September 2005 until May 2006, from 6pm to 8pm.

Éric Raymond: Lanternes/Lighthouses: Recent works and issues

My work raises questions about the origin of images. Through unexpected associations of found objects in former installations or the evanescent shimmering of electronic images, it explores issues related to the sources of visual and mental representations. Since 1997, I have been working on a body of work called Lanternes/ Lighthouses, which includes the recent Interiors project. I use photography and video in electronic installations that often involve landscape as a way of questioning the way in which we inhabit the earth. I am interested in the idea we have of Nature, but more specifically in the way this idea is influenced by technology and industry.

Eric Raymond has been active in the field of electronic arts for more than ten years. He has exhibited his work on the national and international scene notably at the Absolut L.A. International Biennial Art Invitational (Los Angeles), Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), L.A.Freewave (Los Angeles), InterAccess (Toronto), and Dazibao (Montreal).

Jason Lewis: Writing the Next Text

Jason Lewis (Concordia) will demonstrate and discuss work done as part of the Hexagram-sponsored Next Text project. Next Text is a conceptual and technical exploration of digital text, type and typography. We focus on asking how text can be written, displayed and read differently in the digital environment, and we develop software tools that support radical experiments in text-based creative expression.

Jason Lewis is a digital artist and technology researcher whose work revolves around experiments in visual language, text and typography. His other interests include computation as a creative material, emergent media theory and history, and methodologies for conducting art-led technology research. His creative work has been featured at the Ars Electronica Center, ISEA, and SIGGRAPH, among other venues, and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the English Arts Council, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Arts Alliance and Heritage Canada. Lewis was trained in philosophy and computer science at Stanford University and in art & design at the Royal College of Art. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University where he founded and directs Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media. Please see www.obxlabs.net for more information.

Niklas Damiris: Valorization through art and technology: an opportunity to add value and rethink economic valuation?

In this talk, I want to place the issues concerning artistic research and valorization in a larger systemic context. As the affinities between artistic invention and technical innovation are increasingly noted, so are the hopes and problems associated with such rapprochment. Many of the hopes are pinned on the transdisciplinarity this portends. But some of the problems are its corollary and stem from tensions due to the different institutional character of academic disciplines, business labs, and government agencies which frame the context in which "Research and Creation" is to happen. HEXAGRAM was founded in order to address some of these concerns.

Instead of asking how artists may use technologies to make money, or how technology products could become more profitable through artistic inflection, I problematize what I shall call the ’Art&Technology Complex’, in light of the undisputed pressures of globalization and the environment. To me, as currently understood, Art remains the ’sacred’ and Technology the profane manifestation of a Will to power that inadvertedly contributes to economic destitution and ecological devastation. So I want to ask their practitioners some hard questions:

What is the relevance of artistic work in today’s world?
What does it mean to engender monetary value through artistic production?
What does research imply in the context of art and technology practices?

These tough questions have to be raised in order not only to figure out the political or business consequences of "Research and Creation", but more importantly, in order to levarage this problematic to revision our sense of economy and sociality itself.

Niklas Damiris, Ph.D. is a theoretical physicist turned intellectual entrepreneur. For many years he was affiliated with Xerox-Parc. More recently he has been a Senior Fellow at the Knowledge Society Center at UCSC. Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, a Research Associate at the Swiss Banking Center, and a Consulting Advisor to IBM-Research. He is co-author with Stefano Franchi and Helga Wild of the monograph: "The Passion of Life" forthcoming by Lexington Books in 2006. He is also working on a book-trilogy focusing on money and its unique relation to work, to virtuality, and to ecology.

Posted by jo at October 6, 2005 08:43 AM

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