State Of The Art: Recent Episodes
State of the Art Org
Each week, host Gabriel Barcia-Colombo speaks with a new artist, curator, technologist, AI, collector, innovator, about the ever-changing relationship between art and tech.
Ali Santana is a director and multi-disciplinary artist working with video, sound, collage, installation, and performance. Santana, a native Brooklynite is influenced by community, natural patterns, music and, ancient cultures. His work often explores topics related to Black American identity, observations of nature, and sensory perception.
Ali's audio-visual works combine video art, performance and experimental cinema with booming beats, sound design and original recordings which are chopped, looped, and arranged in real-time to create an abstract method of storytelling that he dubs Boom Bap Cinema.
Ali is an award winning educator having received the 2019 award for 'Innovation in Teaching Artistry' from the Association of Teaching Artists for his work with The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Teens Program. He enjoys sharing his artistic practice with students of all ages, teaching video art, collage, and beatmaking. He prioritizes accessibility, creative problem-solving and resourcefulness, emphasizing that anyone can use art as a tool for change.
Visit his website: http://www.alisantana.com/
Follow him @boombaye
Brett Volker and Steve Milton are the founders of Listen, a cultural innovation agency rooted in sound and music, but seasoned at the strategic use of cultural programs to make an impact. They work with brands and innovative artists to craft boundary-pushing creative projects.
Learn more about them at www.wearelisten.com
Follow them @wearelisten
Ziv Schneider is an artist and designer working with new and emerging technologies, often in the context of non-fiction storytelling. She is an alumna, former research fellow, and sometimes lecturer at NYU ITP.
Ziv is currently a Creative Technologist at The Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
Her recent projectSylvia is a storytelling experiment that disrupted the virtual influencer landscape for a short period of time. Unlike her “peers” who are designed to appear young forever, Sylvia was designed to age rapidly. She posted to Instagram from July to November 2020, and during these five months, her image aged five decades, from 30 to 80 years old.
Check out @myfriendsylvia
Learn more about Ziv's work https://zivschneider.com/
Follow her on IG @zivschneider
Vivian Greven’s painting is based on an adept play with various notions of bodies, being and representation, with concepts of classical antiquity merging with pop art and digital image worlds. Vivian Greven’s painting is characteristic of our present times, which are shaped by the internet and social media and thus dissolve the hierarchies between original, reproduction and simulation. The art historical and contemporary historical nestling corresponds with Greven’s painterly treatment of surfaces. Parts of her painting rise as actual reliefs that encounter sprayed or painted fictions of bodies and space. The aesthetic of her pictures vacillates between the vocabulary of physical painting and the ethereal illusion of LCD windows.
Learn more about her work http://www.viviangreven.de/
Yuge studied drawing under Chinese contemporary painter Kaixi Cui 崔开玺and eventually moved into Video Artafter earning her Master of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yuge’s work addresses connections, isolation and longing across urban and natural environments. She creates immersive experiences through digital collaging and sculptural reliefs. Yuge also directs and curates the 3300-square foot 150 Media Stream, a unique public digital art installation in Chicago. In addition to her MFA, she holds a masters degree in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University.
Yuge has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including the Grand Rapids Art Museum; Elmhurst Art Museum; Spartanburg Art Museum; Ars Electronica Center at Linz, Austria; Chicago Cultural Center; SIGGRAPH Asia in Kobe, Japan; Microscope Gallery in NY among many others. Yuge’s work has been featured in various publications such as the New York Magazine, HYPEBEAST, and The Atlantic Monthly. Yuge received the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award in 2017 and Honorary Mention in the 2020 Prix Ars Electronica. She is currently an artist at NEW INC, the world's first museum-led incubator for art, technology and design founded by New Museum.
Follow her work @yugezhou
Learn more about her workhttp://yugezhou.com/
Greg is the co-founder and CEO of Backyard Brains, an Ann Arbor-based company started as a neuroscience graduate student at the University of Michigan. Greg is a published neuroscientist and engineer and develops tools, curriculum and experiments that allow the general public participate in neural discovery. He is an award-winning investigator at the National Institute of Health, a Senior Fellow at TED and the recipient of the White House Champion of Change award from Barack Obama for his commitment to citizen science.
Learn more about Backyard Brains here: https://backyardbrains.com/about/
Follow @backyardbrains
In this episode, Peruvian artist Efraín Rozas talks with us about his career, projects, how he uses software programming to produce sound installations and his experience dancing with robots.
-About Efraín Rozas-
Peruvian performer/composer and robotics/software developer. His work was described as “A heady confluence of technology, culture and cognition” by The New Yorker, and “A deep psychonautic dive” by Wire Magazine. He will be resident at The Kitchen on 2021. He is recipient of the NY State Council on the Arts/ Wavefarm Media Arts Assistance Fund, Jerome Foundation/Harvestworks New Works Commission, and Knockdown Center (NYC) residency for time based art.
He has performed at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Levitation Festival, Museum of Contemporary art of Lima and Central Park Summerstage Fania Records 50th anniversary. His album Roza Cruz was named one of the best Latin American albums of the decade by Zona Sucia and Estereofonía. Featured at CNN, BBC, Washington Post, Daily News, and NPR.
He holds a PhD (NYU) on new integrations of body, mind and technology through ritual and rhythm. He published the book “Fusión: a soundtrack for Peru”, and released albums via Names You Can Trust (NYC), Futura Resistenza (Amsterdam) and Buh Records (Lima).
He produces the radio show “La Vuelta al día en 80 mundos” nominated to best “World Sounds” by Mixcloud.com. He was a professor at NYU music department and directs Tangible: Sound Research Lab (Lima). Based in Lima and NYC.
Learn more about Efraín at http://efrainrozas.com/
Follow Efraín @efrainrozas
Listen to his project ¨I enjoy the world¨
In this episode, multidisciplinary artist, Saks Afridi discusses his collaborative projects with artisans and technologists across the globe to create sociopolitical and thought provoking works of art. These collaborations range from the creation of intricately designed traditionally woven rugs featuring UFOs to explorations with archaeological leanings, and something Saks calls "Sci-fi Sufism".
-About Saks Afridi-
Saks Afridi is a multi-disciplinary artist living in New York City. Saks’s art practice is two-fold: Collaborative and Personal. His personal work investigates the predicaments and perplexities of the life of an ‘Insider Outsider’. This is the practice of achieving a sense of belonging while being out of place, finding happiness in a state of temporary permanence, and re-contextualizing existing historical and cultural narratives with the contemporary.
His latest project ‘SpaceMosque’, exists in a new genre he terms as ‘Sci-fi Sufism’. Here he explores the idea of ‘Spiritual Machines’ that fuse mysticism and technology, bringing humanity closer to understanding itself. He draws inspiration from Afrofuturism, South Asian folklore, Sufi Poetry, Islamic mythology, architecture and calligraphy.
Saks likes to let the concept lead the medium he works in, often working with architects, artisans, modelers and fabricators to bring the work to life. He comes to art with a background in advertising, as a Creative Director on brands such as Mercedes-Benz, MTV and White Castle. He studied advertising at the Academy of Art and later sculpture at the Art Students League of New York. He speaks English, Urdu, Pashto and conversational Arabic.
He is the proud recipient of 2 Gold Cannes Lion Awards, 3 D&AD Pencils, 2 OneShow pencils and a United Nations Award for Peace & Understanding. His work has also been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, CNN and The Colbert Report.
Learn more about Saks at http://www.saksafridi.com/
Follow Saks @saks__
In this episode, we speak with video artist Kameron Neal who uses his body and personal narratives to explore intimacy and to challenge socio-political ideologies.
-About Kameron Neal-
Kameron Neal is a queer Black video artist, designer, and performance-maker based in NYC. Forbes described Kameron’s solo exhibition at Detroit Art Week 2019 as “an absurd escape that simultaneously provokes and entertains.” Kameron is currently in residence at CultureHub, The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group, and the Bemis Center. As a Resident Artist at Ars Nova, he co-created MukhAgni, an irreverent multimedia performance memoir, with Shayok Misha Chowdhury; the piece was curated in Under the Radar 2020. His stop-motion self-portrait Liquid Love was awarded Best of Show at Digital Graffiti Festival 2017 where he returned in 2018 as an artist in residence. Kameron’s video art has been featured in music videos for Billy Porter and Rufus Wainwright. His work has also been seen in National Geographic, HYPEBEAST, Studio Magazine, and at BAM, New York Theatre Workshop, SohoRep, La Mama, Bushwick Starr, New Orleans Film Festival, Blue Balls Festival, the Type Director’s Club, Vox Populi, and Williams College Museum of Art.
Learn more at kameronneal.com
Follow Kameron @kamer_n
In this episode, SOTA host Gabriel Barcia-Colombo speaks with David Goodman, former VP of Digital Development & Marketing at Sothebys about the role of media in the arts, his work at Sotheby's, his trajectory into the art world, and how art infiltrates many corners of everyday life.
-About David Goodman-
Experienced C-Suite executive who has spent 30+ years running divisions of global multi-media organizations, spearheading/overseeing growth, revenue, marketing, content creation, production, product/technology innovation/services, distribution and oversight of some of the worlds most recognizable brands and properties. Most recently he served as Executive Vice President, Marketing and Digital Development at Sotheby's where he and his team (advertising, technology, content creation, audience development, exhibition design/creative services, sponsorship, membership) were responsible for numerous initiatives which resulted in record growth in audience (physical/digital), revenue, e-commerce sales, on-line audience, content creation (web, mobile, social, video, print, AR/VR) while incorporating best-in-class technology into client-facing products and processes.
Today we speak with Mona Kasra, new media artist, interdisciplinary researcher and Assistant Professor of Digital Media Design at the University of Virginia. Mona uses her tech to explore, document, and augment nature, culture, theater and more. Together, Mona and Gabe discuss her trajectory into the arts initially through video experimentation, the significance and history of selfie-rallies, and her collaborative interactive and immersive VR projects which merge nature and music, and preserve and present traditional aboriginal dances.
Projects Discussed
It's Misogyny That's HumiliatingGif Animation (2013)
Dwelling in the Enfolding(2020) created in collaboration with Matthew Burtner (composer)
Embodied Cultural Practices & Immersive Media(2019-Present) created in collaboration with Luke Dahl (UVA Music Dept) and the indigenous community of Peppimenarti
-About Mona Kasra-
Mona Kasra is a new media artist, interdisciplinary researcher, and Assistant Professor of Digital Media Design at the University of Virginia (UVA).
Her research trajectory involves exploring the confluence of media technologies, art, and culture, reflecting on the impact of emerging media on personal, political, and creative expression, and experimenting with affordances of such media for artistic practices of performance and installation. Currently, she is researching representational, affective, and creative possibilities of immersive media, and designing experimental and performative experiences in Virtual Reality (VR/360). One of her latest projects is in collaboration with music prof Luke Dahl where we will be exploring how motion capture, spatial audio, and interactive XR environments can represent and transmit embodied cultural practices.
Mona was born in Tehran, Iran. I hold a Ph.D. in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication from the University of Texas-Dallas, an M.F.A. in Video/Digital Art from California State University Northridge, and a B.A. in Graphic Design and Visual Communication from the Art University of Tehran.
Learn more about Mona at https://www.monakasra.com/
Follow Mona @monaism
Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian media artist, activist, educator, and curator uses technology as a philosophical toolset to explore the social, political, and cultural. Her projects are often research heavy and employ new media as a method of documentation and as acts of resistance. In this episode we discuss Allahyari's use of 3D printing to recreate and preserve cultural artifacts destroyed by ISIS, and her exploration and reframing of Middle-Eastern myths and folklore to include female/queer figures.
Projects Discussed
Material Speculation: ISIS
She Who Sees the Unknown
-About Morehshin Allahyari-
Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, writer, and educator. She was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives and struggles in the 21st century. Morehshin is the co-author of The 3D Additivist Cookbook in collaboration with writer/artist Daniel Rourke.
Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Archittectura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Tate Modern, Queens Museum, Pori Museum, Powerhouse Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst. She has been an artist in residence at BANFF Centre (2013), Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (2015), Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco (2015), the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research in association with Transmediale, Berlin (2016), Eyebeam’s one year Research Residency (2016-2017) in NYC, Pioneer Works (2018), and Harvest Works (2018). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera, among others.
She is the recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), The Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship, and the leading global thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Her 3D Additivist Manifesto video is in the collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and recently she has been awarded major commissions by The Shed, Rhizome, New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Liverpool Biennale, and FACT.
Learn more at http://www.morehshin.com/
Follow her Morehshin @morehshin
Multidisciplinary artist, Emilio Chapela uses a diverse range of mediums and media to delve into concepts around time. Together, Emilio and SOTA host Gabe BC, discuss cosmic micro waves, the Big Bang and its relation to white noise, and the construct of time.
Projects Discussed
Usumacinta
Noise Paintings
Ask Google
The Earth is dying… (from the "Ask Google" series)
-About Emilio Chapela-
Emilio Chapela is a visual artist with a background on mathematics, photography and the moving image. His work explores intricate connections between science, technology and ecology through the art practice. He enquires on notions of time and space that are manifested through various forces and agencies such as astronomical phenomena, light, gravity, rocks, plants, volcanoes and rivers.
Challenging our fixed notions of time and space, Emiio aims to develop a practice that visualizes our bonds and connections with humans and nonhumans to reconcile with the world’s temporalities and movements.
Emilio is interested in the poetic possibilities of the visual arts as a means to establish a connection with the world. Emilio enjoys writing, walking, hiking and stargazing, which are tools that he deploys in his art practice.
Learn more by visiting http://www.emiliochapela.com/
Follow Emilio @echapela
Web artist Molly Soda's work delves into our internet identities, our online legacy and archiving the internet.In this episode, Molly shares her thoughts on growing up on the internet, the evolution of her work, how and why she embraces past online iterations, and why she thinks the internet has become boring.
Projects Discussed
Inbox Full
Wrong Box
House Tour
-About Molly Soda-
Amalia Soto, known as Molly Soda, is a Brooklyn-based artist and internet celebrity. Soda works across a variety of digital platforms, producing videos, GIFs, zines, and web-based performance art, which are presented both online and in gallery installations in a variety of forms. Molly Soda's work explores the technological mediation of self-concept, contemporary feminism, cyberfeminism, mass media and popular social media culture. Molly Soda is the co-editor with Arvida Byström of the 2017 book, Pics or It Didn't Happen: Images Banned From Instagram.
Learn more at https://mollysoda.exposed/
Follow Molly @bloatedandalone4evr1993
AIYA is a digital human that analyzes the world’s problems and philosophically weighs in with knowledge from our greatest thinkers and problem-solvers. Inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, creators Lady PheOnix and Jacqueline Assar designed AIYA to emote and age as she consumes media content in real-time.
In this episode, we discuss how Project AIYA explores heightened humanity in AI, the future of grieving, and the role digital humans may play in our future.
-About Lady PheOnix-
LADY PHEONIX is a curator of contemporary art and a passionate producer of creative works at the intersection of visual art and technology. She elevates and amplifies the work of artists through curated group shows organized in her virtual gallery, @yesuniverse.art on Instagram. She has organized exhibitions for the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, 836M in San Francisco, Library Street Collective in Detroit and HuffPost Arts. As an autodidact, she began curating in 2015 as a form of creative self-care. #theyesuniverse has reached a global audience of millions, making it a virtual institution. Lady PheOnix is regarded as one of the most influential virtual gallerists and curators, having built an engaged community of dynamic artists and collectors by leveraging virtual space’s ability to generate and facilitate new forms of collaboration. She currently lives and works in the Bay Area.
Follow Lady PheOnix @yesuniverse.art
-About Jacqueline Assar-
JACQUELINE ASSAR is an XR creator with an academic background in cognitive science. Her work explores the relationship between humanity and emerging technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. She currently works at Magic Leap. Prior to Magic Leap, she founded Coresights, a virtual reality healthcare platform with real-time biometrics backed by MIT Play Labs. She was selected as a 2016 Oculus Launchpad Fellow, a Microsoft SH//FT Spotlight recipient and her work has been shown at the MIT Tech Conference, Institute of Contemporary Art, TEDxYouth and Games for Change. Her most recent project AIYA explores the creation of digital humans with traditionally non-digital traits such as empathy, grief, and aging.
Follow Jacqueline @wonderxmotion
At State of the Art we strongly believe Black Lives Matter and stand firmly against injustice and abuse of any kind. This week we revisit our conversation with social-activist, Glenn Cantave. Originally recorded in November 2019, Glenn shares with us his personal story into activism, how and why he began working "outside of the system", and how his nonprofit, Movers & Shakers, employs AR to highlight the narratives of oppressed communities.
Where to Contribute Your Support:
The Legal Rights Center: Provides criminal defense and legal services for low-income people of color in and around Minneapolis, including arrested protesters.
legalrightscenter.org/donate
National Bail Out: a Twin-Cities based organization created to deal with police brutality on an ongoing basis. NBO works on day-to-day abuses, extreme cases, and provides support for survivors and families of victims of police brutality. Their overriding goal is to create a climate of resistance to abuse of authority by police organizations and to empower local people with a structure that can take on police brutality and actually bring it to an end.
cuapb.org
Black Table Arts: Gathering Black communities through the arts, towards better black futures.
blacktablearts.com
Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha: CTUL is a worker-led organization where workers organize, educate, and empower each other to fight for a voice in their workplaces and in their communities.
ctul.net
Bail Out Funds:
New York: The Brooklyn Community Bail Fund is bailing out protestors and pressuring Governor Cuomo to take action on defunding New York City police. Donate at brooklynbailfund.org/donate
Los Angeles: Los Angeles Black Lives Matter chapter is supporting organizers and fighting to adopt a "People's Budget" that reallocates police funding to vulnerable communities. Donate at blmla.org
National: The Bail Project works nationally, including several cities where protests are taking place, including Los Angeles, Louisville, and New York City. Donate at bailproject.org
-About Glenn Cantave-
Glenn Cantave is an activist, performance artist and social entrepreneur who uses immersive technology to highlight the narratives of the oppressed. Through his non-profit Movers & Shakers NYC, he organized a pop up slave auction performance piece/AR exhibit, ran the NYC Marathon in chains, and is creating AR educational content focused on highlighting the narratives of marginalized communities. He is also the Creator, Executive Producer of We the People, a 360 documentary focused on activism in the age of Trump. His team has documented the actions of several New York based activist groups and captured footage from events such as the Trump Inauguration, Charlottesville Riots, and a White Lives Matter Rally in Tennessee. He is a TED Resident, incoming artist in resident at Eyebeam NYU Something un Residence and a member at New Inc, an arts/tech incubator with the New Museum. He will be speaking about his work at TEDx in Ghent, Belgium this December.
In this episode we speak to Melinda Lauw, Co-Creator and Artistic Director of Whisperlodge, an immersive performance of live ASMR. Melinda guides us through the history of ASMR, common misconceptions around ASMR culture, how Whisperlodge took a medium that solely existed online and brought it into the physical world with live experiences. Melinda also treats us to an impromptu ASMR experience on air.
-About Melinda Lauw-
Melinda Lauw is a Singaporean artist, curator and performance creator based in San Francisco.
Melinda is the co-creator of Whisperlodge, an immersive spa for the senses. Combining her interests in immersive theatre and ASMR, Whisperlodge is based on the idea of providing ASMR in a live, one-to-one environment, translating the work of ASMRtists on Youtube, into a tangible, physical performance.
Her co-creators are Andrew Hoepfner, creator of Houseworld, and Steph Singer, founder of Bitter Suite. Whisperlodge has completed two sold-out runs in 2016 and is currently preparing for more performances.
Learn more at https://melindalauw.com/
-About Whisperlodge-
Whisperlodge is an immersive spa for the senses. Based on ASMR, Whisperlodge provides one-to-one live ASMR treatments for our guests in a safe and relaxing environment. Whisperlodge is designed to relax the body and mind, expand awareness and heighten the senses.
Co-created by Melinda Lauw, Andrew Hoepfner, and Steph Singer, Melinda now serves as its creative director.
Whisperlodge has performed 7 sold-out runs in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and have been featured in The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, VICE, Nylon and TimeOut. Melinda will also be speaking at the Immersive Design Summit 2018 in San Francisco.
Learn more at https://whisperlodge.nyc/
Follow them at @Whisperlodge
Addie Wagenknecht uses the basic tech devices to create art that pokes fun at our expectations of and reliance on technology, and how these instances in turn influence our relationships with one another. Her conceptual installations have co-opted Roombas, cell phones, drones, surveillance cameras, and more.
Projects Discussed
Internet of Things
Asymmetric Love
Beauty
Deep Lab
The perfect cat eye with or without your Zoom date
-About Adde Wagenknecht-
Addie Wagenknecht's work explores the tension between expression and technology. She seeks to blend conceptual work with forms of hacking and sculpture. Previous exhibitions include MuseumsQuartier Wien, Vienna, Austria; La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, France; The Istanbul Modern; Whitechapel Gallery, London and MU, Eindhoven, Netherlands. In 2016 she collaborated with Chanel and I-D magazine as part of their Sixth Sense series and in 2017 her work was acquired by the Whitney Museum for American Art.
Her work has been featured in numerous books, and magazines, such as TIME, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Art in America, and The New York Times. She holds a Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, and has previously held fellowships at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City, Culture Lab UK, Institute HyperWerk for Postindustrial Design Basel (CH), and The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.
Learn more at http://www.placesiveneverbeen.com/
Follow Addie @WheresAddie
Lauren Lee McCarthy creates experimental performances that take a close look at our intimate relationships with smart devices and our interactions with one another in our increasingly tech-driven and surveilled existence. In this episode, we discuss a selection of Lauren's thought-provoking experiments, including LAUREN in which she takes on the role of an Amazon Alexa, Follower wherein she becomes a physical, IRL "follower," and more.
Projects Discussed:
LAUREN
Follower
Later Date
24h HOST
-About Lauren Lee McCarthy-
Lauren Lee McCarthy (she/they) is an LA-based artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source JavaScript platform that aims to make creative expression and coding on the web accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, and beginners. She is Co-Director of the Processing Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to promote software literacy within the visual arts, and visual literacy within technology-related fields—and to make these fields accessible to diverse communities. She is an Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.
Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as Ars Electronica, Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, SIGGRAPH, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. She's a 2019 Creative Capital Grantee, ZERO1 Arts Incubator Resident, and has previously held residencies with Sundance New Frontiers, Eyebeam, CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk, NYU ITP, and Ars Electronica, among others. She's the recipient of grants from the Knight Foundation, the Online News Association, Mozilla Foundation, Google AMI, Sundance Institute New Frontiers, Turner Broadcasting, and Rhizome. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT.
Learn more at https://lauren-mccarthy.com/
Follow Lauren at @LaurenLeeMack
We speak with Claire Evans and Jona Becholt of YACHT, Young Americans Challenging High Technology, about their use of tech to produce albums and performances that push the boundaries of how music is experienced, produced, delivered, and more. Such projects include their Grammy-nominated album Chain Tripping created with the assistance of AI. In this episode, we speak with YACHT about the creative process to produce Chain Tripping, address misconceptions around their use of AI, YACHT's origin story, and Evans' recently published book, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.
-About YACHT-
YACHT stands for Young Americans Challenging High Technology, but they're neither young nor all-American. YACHT is three people—Jona Becholt, Claire L. Evans, and Rob Kieswetter—working in Los Angeles, California, asking questions and answering them with records, texts, videos, objects, installations, scores and performances. They make as much as possible with as little as possible and learn by doing.
Chain Tripping is their Grammy-nominated seventh album, composed by running their 18-year back catalogue through a scotch taped-together assortment of machine learning models and then reckoning with the results.
Learn more at https://teamyacht.com/tour/
Follow YACHT at @teamYACHT
We speak with producer and director, Jennifer Juniper Stratford who uses analog media to create video art pieces inspired by the look and feel of 80s and 90s late-night TV. Jennifer and SOTA host Gabe dive into topics ranging from analog broadcasting tools to Dungeons and Dragons, music videos, and more.
Projects Discussed:
MoCA LOTION
John Maus, Touchdown (music video)
-About Jennifer Juniper Stratford-
Jennifer Juniper Stratford is a photographer, director, and artist based in Hollywood, California.
Her photographs have appeared in magazines and publications around the world. and she has directed science-fiction serials, video installations, title sequences, concert visuals, short films, and music videos.
In 2004, she established Telefantasy Studios, an underground television studio and analog media lab. Inspired by decades of video art, late-night television, and experimental film Telefantasy Studios is dedicated to the creative use of analog broadcast tools on the verge of becoming obsolete and integrating them into the digital age.
Her work has been exhibited, broadcast, and screened internationally and includes MoCA, The Hammer Museum, LACMA, The Getty, Cinemarfa, CPH:DOX, The Museum of the Moving Image New York, New Beverly Cinema, BAM Cinématek, and on public access stations across the United States, and various exhibitions in cyberspace. In 2016 she was awarded a grant from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
Learn more at http://telefantasystudios.com/
Follow Jennifer at
Jon Han creates surreal, digital renderings that meld digital environs with painterly mark-making. His process combines contemporary digital tools, traditional painting, and collage to produce unconventional illustrations. Learn more about his trajectory into illustration after pivoting away from mechanics, his mission to stay authentic, and the process of illustrating for heavy-hitters like the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Los Angeles Times by tuning in.
-About Jon Han-
Jon Han was born and raised in California. He has a BA of illustration, from Art Center College of Design. Jon currently lives and works out of Los Angeles, California.
Learn more at http://jon-han.com/index.html
Follow Jon @jonwrhan
Ghostwriter turned creative technologist, Ross Goodwin uses machine learning to develop fully automated writing machines. Goodwin's inventions have authored poetry, stories, and even film scripts. Tune in to learn more about his projects, what he calls "narrated reality," and how his creations are intended to be used as tools for human writers, singers/song-writers, authors, and directors.
Select Projects:
Sunspring
Please Feed the Lions
On the Road
-About Ross Goodwin-
Ross Goodwin is an artist, creative technologist, hacker, gonzo data scientist, and writer of writers. Goodwin is a graduate of NYU ITP & MIT and a former Obama administration ghostwriter. He employs machine learning, natural language processing and other computational tools to realize new forms and interfaces for written language.
Learn more about Ross at https://rossgoodwin.com/
Follow him @ross.good.win
Today we speak with Can Büyükberber about his immersive installations inspired by philosophy, physics, and dreamscapes. Can's multidisciplinary approach experiments with virtual and augmented reality, projection mapping, geodesic domes, large-scale displays and digital fabrication.
Projects Discussed:
MORPHOGENESIS
MULTIVERSE SERIES
NOUMENON
-About Can Büyükberber-
Can Buyukberber is a visual artist working on immersive audiovisual experiences blurring boundaries between physical and digital spaces. His practice consists of experiments with virtual/augmented reality, projection mapping, geodesic domes, large-scale displays and digital fabrication. Driven by an interdisciplinary thinking which extends to art, design and science, his work focuses on human perception, exploring new methods for non-linear narratives and emergent forms. Received his Master’s Degree in Art & Technology from San Francisco Art Institute as a Fulbright Scholar and been selected to Autodesk’s Pier 9 and Adobe's AR Artist Residencies; exhibited at museums, galleries and media art festivals around the world, including ZKM, Karlsruhe; Ars Electronica, Linz; SAT, Montreal; Sonar D+, Barcelona; California Academy of Sciences and Exploratorium, San Francisco; Signal Festival, Prague; Akbank Sanat, Istanbul; Art Futura, Rome; MUTEK.JP, Tokyo; ZeroSpace, New York City; collaborations with musical artists such as Grammy-Award winning rock band Tool, Shigeto and Czech Philharmonic Orchestra
Learn more at https://canbuyukberber.com/
Follow Can at @cbuyukberber
Heidi Lee harnesses technology to create surreal headwear that walks the line between fashion, design, and fine art. Her whimsical pieces derive inspiration from mythology and have been worn by celebrities, including JLO, Madonna, Missy Elliot, and Lady Gaga. In this episode, we discuss her trajectory into millinery, her first creations, including an origami hat, and take a deep dive into some of her most recognizable designs, like the Endless Echo Hat.
-About Heidi Lee-
A RISD graduate and recipient of the 2012 MET Museum Costume Institute Accessory Design Award, Heidi Lee is a NYC-based artist and designer whose hats have featured in VOGUE, V, W, Visionaire, Dazed & Confused, MTV, SHOWstudio, NYT, New York Magazine, The Creators Project, etc. Exhibitions include The National Centre for Craft and Design (UK) "The World is Your Dressing Up Box" and MAD Museum’s “MAD Biennial: 100 Makers that manifest the cultural capital of NYC." Her clientele include JLO, Billy Porter, Anne Hathaway, Madonna, G-Dragon, Lady Gaga, Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill.
Learn more at https://www.heidi337.com
Follow Heidi at @HEIDI_337
Angelo Vermeulen has worked with astronauts, artists, and activists, integrating his love for science and artistry in his cross-disciplinary work.
-About Angelo-
Angelo is an artist, biologist and space systems researcher. In 2009 he co-founded SEAD (Space Ecologies Art and Design), an international transdisciplinary collective of artists, scientists, engineers, and activists. Its goal is to reshape the future through critical inquiry and hands-on experimentation. Biomodd is one of their most well-known art projects and consists of a worldwide series of interactive art installations in which computers coexist with internal living ecosystems. For the last ten years, he has been collaborating with the European Space Agency’s MELiSSA program on biological life support for space. In 2013 he became crew commander of the first NASA-funded HI-SEAS Mars simulation in Hawai’i. Currently, he works at Delft University of Technology, developing bio-inspired concepts for interstellar exploration. He advises several European space companies, and together with the LDE Center for Sustainability, he connects space technology and horticulture to foster innovation in global food production. He is also preparing a series of art/science experiments on board the International Space Station. Vermeulen has been (guest) faculty at universities across Europe, the US, and Southeast Asia. He is a Senior TED Fellow and was selected in 2017 as one of the Top 5 Tech Pioneers from Belgium by the newspaper De Tijd. His TED Talk about his space-related work has garnered over a million views.
Learn more about Angelo at http://www.angelovermeulen.net/
Tweet him @angelovermeulen
Maja Petric creates transformative spatial experiences using data-gathering technology and light installation. In this episode Maja shares her thoughts on what it is to be an artist, her journey from site-specific performance art to techart, and offers insight into her celestial-based work using AI and machine-learning.
-About Maja Petric-
Maja Petric creates immersive art installations that engage human connection with nature and other living beings. She combines light with new technologies such as artificial intelligence, computer vision and spatialized sound to expand the multi-sensory apparatus through which art can be experienced. Her approach is research-based, scientific and technical. Fusing these disciplines with art lets her impact people’s experiences in a way that would not be possible otherwise.
She received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington (DXARTS) and a M.P.S. from New York University (ITP) on the topic of transforming the poetic experience of space through the experimental use of technology. Training at these pioneering institutions allowed her to explore various artistic methods to manipulate people’s senses through which they experience space cognitively and emotionally.
Learn more at https://www.majapetric.com/
Follow her @Maja_Petric
Drilling holes in grains of sand, creating larger-than-life seashells, organizing thousands of radio operators to say "hi" to satellites, these are some of the projects Dan Goods has brought to life in his creative attempts to make fathomable some of life's intricacies. In this episode, Dan discusses his work with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and how he employs art to engage and impart knowledge onto others.
Artworks Discussed:
The Big Playground
eCloud
Orbit
HI JUNO
-About Dan Goods-
Dan Goods is passionate about creating moments during which people are reminded of the gift and privilege of being alive. During the day, Dan works as a “Visual Strategist” for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where he leads an amazing team in developing new methods of communicating complex concepts into meaningful stories that can be universally understood. JPL's projects are exhibited in public spaces, art museums, and in outer space.
In addition to his work with JPL, Dan collaborates on other creative problem-solving projects around the world. He is currently working with the Museum of the Future in Dubai and trying to imagine how one could simulate standing in the middle of a stadium with a million people singing.
Dan was recently honored with NASA’s Exceptional Public Service Award. In the past, he was listed as “One of the most interesting people in Los Angeles” by the LA Weekly. In 2002 he graduated valedictorian from the graphic design program at Art Center College of Design. Dan currently lives in Altadena, CA with his wife and three kids.
Learn more at http://www.directedplay.com/
Follow Dan @iamdangoods
Tweet him @dangoods
Estella Tse creates VR and AR experiences with pointed and conscientious consideration of the user's experience. In this episode, she shares insight on her VR recreations of art historical masterpieces using Google's Tilt Brush, including Gustave Klimt's The Kiss and Rembrandt's The Night Watch, her residencies, and just how she got involved in the world of virtual and augmented realities in its early days.
-About Estella Tse-
Based in Oakland, CA, Estella integrates emerging VR/AR technologies and visual storytelling into a new art form.
Estella has been an artist-in-residence with Google, Adobe, Cartoon Network Studios, performs and speaks internationally. She strives to inspire new ways to connect, educate, and build empathy with her work in creative innovation.
Her work has been featured on Forbes, CNet, The Australian, and more.
Learn more at https://www.estellatse.com/
Follow her @estellatse
Winslow Porter discusses his trajectory into the world of immersive installations and his use of tech to craft virtual realities rooted in narrative simulations intended to shift perspectives. Winslow was most recently involved in the production of Tree, a VR simulation that transforms participants into a rainforest tree, allowing them to experience the tree’s growth from a seedling to its fullest form and eventual destruction.
Learn more about Tree here
-About Winslow Porter-
Winslow Porter is a Brooklyn based director, producer and creative technologist specializing in virtual reality and large-scale immersive installations. In 2014 he produced the Tribeca Film Festival Transmedia Award-winning documentary CLOUDS. Winslow formed studio the New Reality Company with Milica Zec in 2016, creating the critically acclaimed cinematic VR experiences Giant and Tree. Both were named designers in residence at A/D/O, a BMW sponsored design center in Greenpoint Brooklyn and selected as two of Adweek’s Top 100 creatives. In 2018, Tree won the Lumiere award for Best Location Based VR Short at Warner Brothers Studios in Los Angeles, the Most Innovative Award at Games For Change, two Telly Gold Awards for Use of VR and Social Responsibility in Branded Content, and the Webby People’s Voice Award for VR: Interactive, Game or Real-Time. Winslow Porter is New INC mentor and a World Economic Forum Cultural Leader.
Learn more at http://newreality.co/
Follow Winslow at @winslowturnerporteriii or @newrealityco
Sarah Rothberg chats with Gabe about her creative process working as a VR and AR artist, her journey from the world of poetry to interactive media art, how she incorporates memory into her immersive environments, and debates the use of "users" vs. "participants."
Check out her latest show opening at bitforms gallery, 131 Allen Street, New York, NY 10002. On view February 06 - March 15, 2020.
-About Sarah Rothberg-
Sarah Rothberg is an interactive media artist who captures the interplay between technology, systems, and the personal, creating meaning through unique and idiosyncratic experiences that encourage new ways of thinking, understanding, and communicating.
Sarah's work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Sotheby's S2 gallery, MUTEK festival, Miami Art Week, and bitforms gallery. She teaches new media at NYU's Interactive Media Arts and Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch.
Sarah is a current member at NEW INC’s Experiments in Arts and Technology track (in partnership with Rhizome.org, funded by Bell Labs) Sarah is a adjunct faculty and a "Human-in-Residence" at NYU working on artistic applications of AR, avatar research, and VR as a tool for performance.
In the past, she has been an artist-in-residence at Mana Contemporary, Harvestworks, and LMCC with her collective More&More Unlimited, and was an Engadget Alternate Reality Prize awardee. Currently, she is a featured artist in Apple’s [AR]T initiative, for which she co-created an augmented reality art lab that runs at Apple stores around the world.
Learn more about Sarah at https://sarahrothberg.com/
Follow Sarah @rothbergrothberg
Dr. Annette Doms is an art historian with additional degrees in archaeology and psychology. Her interests have toward becoming a specialist in digital art and the art market. Annette, runs Independent Contemporary Art Advisory (ICAA), established the first art fair dedicated to media art, UNPAINTED, and has built an extensive collection of digital art pieces which exist both in IRL and URL.
Learn more about Annette Doms by visiting http://www.annettedoms.net/en/
Follow her @annettedoms
Tweet her @Anette_Doms
Learn more about ICAA here
Sophie Kahn uses a 3D laser scanner to create fragmented sculptures that captivate viewers through their haunting beauty and visual association with death masks. Kahn's technique emerges from an interest in the restriction of technology and the narrow agendas of its design; in other words, she uses devices in ways they weren't intended to be used. In this episode, she discusses her discovery of this medium which expanded her practice beyond photography, and shares insights on her latest series currently in the works.
-About Sophie Kahn-
Sophie Kahn is a digital artist and sculptor, whose work addresses technology’s failure to capture the unstable human body.
She grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and is now based in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a BA (Hons) in Fine Art/History of Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London; a Graduate Certificate in Spatial Information Architecture from RMIT University, Melbourne; and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was awarded a full tuition Trustee Scholarship.
Her work explores the resonances of death in the technological image. It owes its fragmented aesthetic to the collision of the body with new imaging devices. The precisely engineered 3d laser scanner she uses was never designed to capture the human body, which is always in motion. When confronted with a moving body, it receives conflicting spatial coordinates, generating glitch. She outputs this damaged data as prints, video and hand-painted, 3D printed sculptures. The works that result draw inspiration from funereal and memorial sculpture, and appear to be faux-historical forgeries – or contemporary relics.
Learn more at https://www.sophiekahn.net/
Follow Sophie at @sophie_k_kahn
SOTA host Gabe Barcia-Colombo, visited the Big Easy this week to experience LUNA FÊTE, New Orleans' public festival of light, art, and technology. Produced by the New Orleans Arts Council, LUNA FÊTE first emerged in 2014 as a celebration of New Orleans creative industries. Now in it's sixth iteration, Gabe had the opportunity to speak with Lindsay Glatz, New Orleans Arts Council Creative Director and Curator of LUNA FÊTE, as well as two participating artists, Camille Grosse, and Courtney Egan.
-About LUNA FÊTE-
LUNA Fête is a visionary initiative created by the Arts Council New Orleans to demonstrate the power of art to transform communities.
This free and open to the public festival of light, art, and technology celebrates New Orleans creative industries and provides a memorable experience for diverse event attendees.
Since its 2014 inception, LUNA Fête has presented some of the top light and projection-based artists in the world, while simultaneously providing training to local artists to advance their capabilities to create large-scale and interactive art animated with light. More than 200 New Orleans artists and 60 youth have advanced their technical and artistic skills through this unique educational opportunity.
-About Lindsay Glatz-
Lindsay joined the Arts Council in 2009 after serving as a Senior Communications Strategist for Deveney Communication where she managed communications efforts for the collective New Orleans Tourism Industry following Hurricane Katrina. With a commitment to social innovation, she has served as a Propeller consultant assisting in the launch of Birthmark Doula Collective and Where Y’Art. Lindsay holds degrees in Journalism & Mass Communications and Leadership Studies.
Learn more at https://www.artsneworleans.org/about/staff/
-About Camille Grosse-
Camille Gross is a french visual designer born in 1984. Art passionate since her childhood, she studied at l’ESAT in Paris, where she graduated in section scenography in 2008. The same year, she worked with a french artist video with whom she collaborate for 4 years on international light projects.
Freelance since 2012, she collaborates regulary with the french agency Cosmo Av on various projects
Learn more at http://camillegross.com/
-About Courtney Egan-
Courtney Egan’s projection-based sculptural installations mix botanical themes with shards of technology. In 2010 she presented a solo show, “Field Recordings,” at Heriard-Cimino Gallery in New Orleans. Recent group shows include “Louisiana Contemporary” at the Ogden Museum of Art, “Uniquely Louisiana” at the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, “NOLA Now II” at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, “The World According to New Orleans” at Ballroom Marfa, and “Frontier Preachers,” at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis. Her work has been featured in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, OxfordAmerican.com, PelicanBomb.com, Artforum.com, and in The Gambit.
Courtney has also screened short films at many festivals, including the New Orleans Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, MadCat Women’s International Film Festival, Kasseler Dokumentarfilm & VideoFest, and the Black Maria Film Festival.
Courtney was an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute and at Louisiana Artworks in New Orleans. She is a founding member of the New Orleans-based visual arts collective Antenna.
Courtney holds an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art. She taught art and media in elementary, secondary, and college classrooms since 1991. Courtney is currently a Media Arts faculty member at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA).
Learn more at
http://www.courtneyegan.net/project-type/video-sculpture-installation/
In this episode, Gabe speaks with Dr. Hannelore Roemich and Christine Frohnert who are leading the new Time Based Media (TBM) initiative at NYU. The three discuss the use of technology throughout art history, how conservation is evolving and developing alongside its use, and how the IFA's new Time Based Media initiative is preparing a new generation of art conservators to preserve the integrity of such works well into the future.
-About Dr. Hannelore Roemich-
Dr. Hannelore Roemich (PhD in Chemistry from the University in Heidelberg, Germany) is the Hagop
Kevorkian Professor of Conservation at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York
University (NYU). Since 2007 Dr. Roemich offers instruction in the core program at NYU, teaching
Preventive Conservation and Materials of Art and Archaeology as well as advanced conservation science
courses. Dr. Roemich served for eighteen years as a conservation scientist at the Fraunhofer-Institut für
Silicatforschung (ISC) in Würzburg, Germany, where she conducted research on the deterioration and
conservation of stained glass and outdoor bronze sculpture, glass sensors for environmental monitoring,
and lectured widely on her work. Dr. Roemich is currently Program Director for the TBM initiative at
NYU.
-About Christine Frohnert-
Christine Frohnert (Graduate degree 2003, Conservation of Modern Materials and Media, University of
Arts, Berne, CH) is partner of Bek & Frohnert LLC, Conservation of Contemporary Art, based in New
York City since 2012. Previously, Ms. Frohnert served for 12 years as a conservator and later as chief
conservator at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. She was Chair of the Electronic Media Group
from 2008 - 2012 and initiated the conference series TechFocus. Ms. Frohnert was named the inaugural
Judith Praska Distinguished Visiting Professor in Conservation and Technical Studies at the Conservation
Center of the Institute of Fine arts, NYU, in 2012. Since then, as Institute Lecturer, she offered instruction
in time-based media art, including the course Art With A Plug: The Conservation of Artwork Containing
Motion, Sound, Light, Moving Images and Interactivity; Topics in Time-Based Media Art Conservation as
well as Technology and Structure of Works of Art -Time-based Media. Christine Frohnert is currently
Program Coordinator for the TBM initiative at NYU.
In this episode we speak with Chilean-born artist, Andrea Wolf about her multimedia installations which explore memory-making, the act of remembering, and shared memories. Together with host Gabe Barcia-Colombo, Andrea discusses her obsession with memories, where and how she sources her preferred art-making materials, what she means by the “cultural practices of remembering,” and how tech affects and transforms our methods of remembering and storytelling.
Artworks Discussed in this Episode:
Future Past News
Weather has been Nice
Deer (Little Memories Series)
-About Andrea Wolf-
Andrea's work consists of ongoing research into the relationship between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering. She creates multimedia installations that explore how technology, media and memory affect and transform each other, creating models of remembrance that are culturally shaped.
Working with an archive of found footage, with anonymous stories - Andrea leaves an open space to be filled by the meaning that each of us brings to the work through our personal experience. Her installations are places in which memory becomes an action that is constantly actualized in the present, while recognizing a system in which the function of the past is not that of truth but of desire.
Andrea holds MFAs in Documentary Filmmaking from Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and in Digital Arts from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and an MPA in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU. In 2013, she was a fellow at the Artist in the Marketplace Program at the Bronx Museum, culminating in the biennial exhibition “The Bronx Calling”. In 2015, Andrea was an artist in residence at the IFP New York Media Center and is currently a member at NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator program. She has shown her work and given lectures and workshops widely in New York and internationally, in venues such as: Festival Sonar Santiago; New Media Biennial (2009 & 2011) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile; Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago; Centro Cultural Palacio de La Moneda, Santiago; Galería AFA, Santiago, Sala de Arte CCU; SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2015 & 2017), New York; NEW INC’s “Public Beta” at the New Museum, New York; Bitforms Gallery, New York; Dumbo Arts Festival, New York; the Paley Center for Media, New York; Scholes 319, New York; Brooklyn Fire Proof, New York; Wave Hill, New York; MIT Media Lab, Boston; Utah Arts Center; Digital Culture Center, Mexico City; VIZZI Festival, Kiev, Ukraine; Tou Scene, Stavanger, Norway; and Medialab-Prado, Madrid.
She also founded and directed REVERSE, a non profit art space in New York for the development of new ideas and interdisciplinary practices, promoting artistic collaboration and innovative projects at the intersection of art, science and technology. Between 2012 and 2016, REVERSE hosted more than 30 exhibitions, multiple performances and an active calendar of workshops taught by a diverse roster of artists.
Learn More at http://www.andreawolf.me/
Follow Andrea @andreawolf
In this episode, self-described Humanitarian Technologist, Benedetta Piantella discusses her work and describes what a "humanitarian technologist" is/does, how her 2004 trip to Sri Lanka changed the course of her life shifting her practice from artist to designer and developer, and why she's an advocate for open source.
-About Benedetta Piantella-
Benedetta was born and raised in Parma, Italy. She received a BFA from Tufts University and SMFA Boston in 2004, while taking courses at Harvard, MIT and Mass Art. During her time in Boston, she worked as teaching assistant at SMFA introducing new technologies in the world of digital photography and light sensitive materials. She assisted in the preparation of the American Pavilion of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, while working for the MIT LIST Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. The same year she organized her own emergency response efforts during the Tsunami of 2004 in Sri Lanka. In 2008 she obtained a Master's from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and a Master's from CUNY and La Sapienza University in online community management and journalism; during this time she taught Lego robotics in New York schools.She has worked for companies like Tinker.it! and ARDUINO in Milan and Smart Design in NY, brainstorming and producing fully functioning prototypes for high-end clients.
Benedetta is Co-founder of GROUND Lab®, an Engineering R&D company focused on building sustainable solutions to humanitarian, social and environmental challenges worldwide. For GROUND Lab, she has built partnerships with organizations such as the UN, UNICEF and the Earth Institute, as well as with Universities such as NYU, Columbia, University of California Berkeley and Princeton. With their support she has designed, prototyped, manufactured and field tested a multitude of projects in many countries such as Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
She is a frequent lecturer and speaker at conferences and is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU ITP.
Learn more at https://www.benedetta.cc/index.html
Today we speak with activist, Glenn Cantave about his use of A/R to create interactive interruptions addressing social issues and highlighting the histories of overlooked communities.
-About Glenn Cantave-
Glenn Cantave is an activist, performance artist and social entrepreneur who uses immersive technology to highlight the narratives of the oppressed. Through his non-profit Movers & Shakers NYC, he organized a pop up slave auction performance piece/AR exhibit, ran the NYC Marathon in chains, and is creating AR educational content focused on highlighting the narratives of marginalized communities. He is also the Creator, Executive Producer of We the People, a 360 documentary focused on activism in the age of Trump. His team has documented the actions of several New York based activist groups and captured footage from events such as the Trump Inauguration, Charlottesville Riots, and a White Lives Matter Rally in Tennessee. He is a TED Resident, incoming artist in resident at Eyebeam NYU Something un Residence and a member at New Inc, an arts/tech incubator with the New Museum. He will be speaking about his work at TEDx in Ghent, Belgium this December.
SOTA host Gabe Barcia-Colombo speaks with Neon Saltwater, an artist who creates digital renderings of lonely interiors immersed in sentiments of false nostalgia. In this episode, the two discuss Neon Saltwater's aesthetic, her obsession with interiors, how her spaces moved from the digital to the physical sphere, and how she came to found the Room Wave Movement.
-About Neon Saltwater-
Neon Saltwater (aka Abbey Dougherty) has built a steady Instagram following through her digital renderings of pale, empty rooms erected in geographic grids and glossy marble, with fluorescent lights bouncing off of their reflective surfaces.
Neon Saltwater has designed spaces for Barneys, her work has been featured in Vogue and she is the founder of Room Wave.
Follow her @NeonSaltwater
On Halloween, we speak with startup founder, artist, and engineer Abhishek Singh who's inventions include everything from bringing Super Mario and The Ring into "reality" to building a robot that communicates entirely through GIFs.
-About Abhishek Singh-
Wearer of many hats, experienced startup founder, part artist, part engineer with a love for building delightful physical & digital products & experiences. Work has been featured on BBC, Techcrunch, Mashable, Wired, Verge, Vice, Motherboard, Times of India, Fast Company, Cnet, UploadVR & countless more.
Learn more about Abhishek at http://shek.it/
Tweet him @shekitup
In this episode we speak with Alfredo Caro-Salazar about his latest piece, Dreams of the Jaguar’s Daughter which uses VR to immerse patrons in the migrant experience. Alfredo also discusses the Digital Museum of Digital Art, a virtual institution he founded with collaborator, William Robertson.
Check out Dreams of the Jaguar's Daughter's Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwB4t1eeC60&t=0
Or experience it in 360 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ohxAz_rC5k&t=0
-About Alfredo Caro-Salazar-
Alfredo Salazar-Caro is a multimedia artist who works at the intersection of portraiture, installation, documentary, virtual reality, video, and sculpture.
Together with William Robertson, Salazar-Caro conceived the Digital Museum of Digital Art, a groundbreaking project that functions as a virtual institution and a virtual reality exhibition platform dedicated to the promotion and distribution of new media art. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in exhibitions such as Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum, New York; The Wrong Biennale in São Paulo; New Normal at The Hangar, Beirut and Supa Salon, Istanbul; Die Ungerahmte Welt at the Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel; Siggraph Asia, Bangkok; and 1Mes1Artista, Mexico City, among others. His work has been featured in publications such as Leonardo, Cultured Magazine, Art F City, Vice Magazine and Creators Project.
Learn more at http://salazarcaro.com/
Follow him @tmvrtx
In this episode we speak with Neil Mendoza, self-described "maker of stuff," about his humorous art inventions which poke fun and draw attention to contemporary culture and social issues. These include a fish-controlled hammer that smashes miniatures of human things, a knife orchestra, and a hamster powered drawing machine just to name a few. Tune in to hear more about Neil's wacky inventions and his reflections on tech art and contemporary culture.
-About Neil Mendoza-
Neil Mendoza’s work combines sculpture, electronics and software to bring inanimate objects and spaces to life. By decontextualizing objects with technology and vice versa, the constituent parts of his work can be looked at in a new ways. Using this medium, he explores themes of the absurd, the humorous, the futile and the surreal. He has an MA in math and computer science from Oxford University and an MFA in design media art from UCLA and has taught classes on art and technology at Stanford and UCLA.
His artwork has been exhibited by AND Festival, Arena 1 Gallery, The Barbican, BBC Big Screens, The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Currents New Media Festival, The Exploratorium, ISEA, Kinetica, Minnesota Street Projects, Oi Futuro, PICNIC Festival, The Museum of London, The Nottingham Playhouse, YouFab, Young Projects Gallery, The Science Museum, The V&A and Watermans among others.
He has created digital artworks and installations for a wide range of clients including Accenture, Adidas, Adobe, AntiVJ, Arcade Studios, Audi, Bentley, Brother, Burton Snowboards, Doritos, Ford, Guild LA, HTC, IBM, Jason Bruges Studio, LCF, The Light Surgeons, Local Projects, Moving Brands, New Angle, Nokia, Nuit Sonores, O2, Orange, Poke, Swatch, Universal Everything, Wieden & Kennedy and Wired Magazine. He also co-founded the art collective is this good?.
Learn more at http://www.neilmendoza.com/
Follow him @neilmendoza
Ari Melenciano is an interdisciplinary artist using tech to underscore racial dynamics and alter our experiences in reality. She is the founder of Afrotectopia, a new media festival championing black artists, activists, and designers working with technology in creative and innovative ways. Today Ari speaks with us on her current projects, shares her thoughts about tech and the limitations faced when using tech-based tools, and dives into the trajectory of Afrotectopia now entering its 3rd year in 2020.
-About Ari Melenciano-
Ari Melenciano is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist. Her research lies at the intersections of human-computer interactive technologies, social impacts of technology, culture, sound/audio-visuality, experimental pedagogy and speculative design.
Ari is the founder of the social institution, Afrotectopia, most commonly experienced via their annual New Media Arts, Culture and Technology Festival.
She is currently an adjunct professor at NYU teaching in the Interactive Telecommunications Graduate Program (ITP) and Photography undergraduate department. She is also a consultant for NYC’s Department of Education, helping to build STEAM curriculum that is culturally relevant.
She is currently incubating audiovisual experimental work at CultureHub in their arts and technology residency, and at New Inc (the first museum-led incubator) in the Experiments in Arts and Technology track in partnership with Rhizome and Bell Labs.
Learn more at http://www.ariciano.com/
Follow her @ariciano
Bailey Hikawa and Scotty Wagner's Emotional.Store brings to life ridiculous scenarios fully rooted in contemporary culture's addiction to digital engagement and our increasingly digitally and physically hybridized world. Through comedic storytelling, Bailey and Scotty's large scale, multimedia projects explore, and poke fun at our phone dependency, angst around free WiFi, our relationship with screens and entertainment, and the emergence of alternate personalities online. In this episode, the two share Emotional.Store's origin story, discuss the topics performances like 100 Year Plan and Trial Child address, and share their thoughts on free WiFi, commercials, smartphones, and Kusama.
You can listen to the full Emotional.Store Kusama Song featured in this episode by visiting: https://soundcloud.com/emotional-store/post-infinity
-About Emotional.Store-
Emotional.Store creates large scale, multimedia projects that explore the newly forming collective consciousness brought about by the union of the physical with the virtual.
Through comedic storytelling, magical language and technological seduction, Emotional.Store projects weave audience members through a viscerally weird conversation around the interplay between systems that drive technological progress and the phenomenology of engagement in a digitally and physically hybridized world.
Emotional.Store is the collaborative duo Bailey Hikawa and Scotty Wagner.
Learn more at https://emotional.store/
Follow Emotional.Store @emotional_store
Ani Liu uses scientific processes to create art pieces that delve into the diverse aspects of humanity and our ever-evolving culture. These fringe art experiments have taken the form of biologically-modified plants, mind controlled sperm, a "forced" happiness lab (using science to induce positive feelings), and much, much more. Through all these art explorations, Ani questions, in this technologically mediated age, what does it mean to be human?
-About Ani Liu-
Ani Liu is a research-based artist working at the intersection of art & science.
Her work examines the reciprocal relationships between science, technology and their influence on human subjectivity, culture, and identity.
Ani's work has been presented internationally, and featured on National Geographic, VICE, Mashable, Gizmodo, TED, Core77, PCMag, FOX and WIRED. Her work has been shown at Ars Electronica, the Queens Museum Biennial, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Asian Art Museum, MIT Museum, MIT Media Lab, Mana Contemporary, Harvard University, and Shenzhen Design Society.
She is the winner of the Princeton Arts Fellowship (2019-2021), the S&R Washington Prize (2018), the YouFab Global Creative Awards (1st place, 2018), the Biological Art & Design Award (2017). She is currently teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is on critique panels at Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, NYU, UNC Charlotte, Pratt, Parsons. At MIT, she is on the committee of Art Scholars.
Ani has a B.A. from Dartmouth College, a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Master of Science from MIT Media Lab.
Ani continually seeks to discover the unexpected, through playful experimentation, intuition, and speculative storytelling. Her studio is based in New York City.
Learn more about Ani at studio@ani-liu.com
Follow here @ani.liu.studio
One of the biggest challenges facing media artists today is the concept of preservation. Any work of art needs to be restored, touched up and preserved to last over time. But with rapidly evolving technology, it's become hugely necessary to regularly maintain and put systems in place to keep tech-art alive and functioning as it should. In this episode, we speak with Morgan Kessler, Media Collections Manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) who oversees the preservation of the museum’s collection of Time-Based art.
Artworks Discussed in this Episode:
Mungo Thomson, Composition for Marimba, 2016
Nam June Paik, Video Flag Z, 1986
-About Morgan Kessler-
Morgan Kessler has been working with museums and artists as an Audio Visual Specialist since 2008. She joined LACMA in 2012 as a Time-Based Media Technician in the Gallery Media department. In her current role as Media Collections Manager, she is charged with the care of the museum’s collection of Time-Based artworks.
You can tweet Morgan @IamtheMogie
Often, when we think about the intersection of art and tech our minds wander to innovations like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, projection mapping, etc. In this episode, new SOTA host, Gabriel Barcia-Colombo speaks with interdisciplinary artist, Alicia Eggert on technology as a medium by which she explores our understanding of time, language, and everyday abstractions we take for granted. How do we measure "now"? What is "eternity"? Together the two also touch upon Alicia's current experiments in interactive art underscoring the importance of collaboration and connectivity, and how her creative process is influenced by her childhood growing up within a Pentecostal family.
-About Alicia Eggert-
Alicia is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the relationship between language, image and time. Alicia's work has been exhibited at notable institutions nationally and internationally, including the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, the Triennale Design Museum in Milan, the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, the Amsterdam Light Festival, the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2012) at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History in New Mexico, Sculpture By the Sea in Sydney, Australia, and many more. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Galeria Fernando Santos (Porto, Portugal), The MAC (Dallas, TX), T+H Gallery (Boston, MA), Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA), and Artisphere (Arlington, VA). Alicia’s work is represented by Galeria Fernando Santos in Porto, and Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas.
Alicia is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a TED Fellowship, a Washington Award from the S&R Foundation, a Direct Artist Grant from the Harpo Foundation, an Artist Microgrant from the Nasher Sculpture Center, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission. She has been an artist in residence at Google Tilt Brush, Sculpture Space, True/False Film Festival, and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, BBC Future, Vulture, and publications such as Typoholic: Material Types in Design, Foundations of Digital Art and Design, and Elements and Principles of 4D Art & Design.
Alicia earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Interior Design from Drexel University in 2004, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture/Dimensional Studies from Alfred University in 2009. She is currently a Presidential Early Career Professor of Studio Art and the Sculpture Program Coordinator in the College of Visual Arts & Design at the University of North Texas. She lives with her son, Zephyr, in Denton, Texas.
Learn more at https://aliciaeggert.com/nav/about.html
Follow her @APlaceintheUniverse
State of the Art Founder Ethan James Appleby returns to introduce our new host, Gabriel Barcia-Colombo (aka Gabe), and SOTA's return to its roots primarily as an art + tech podcast. Gabe was previously a guest on the podcast, back in 2018 in episode 48 "The Art of Collecting Memories". Together they discuss Gabe's latest projects and where he plans on taking the podcast.
You can email Gabe at gabe@thestateoftheart.org
-About Gabriel Barcia-Colombo-
Gabriel Barcia-Colombo is a mixed media artist whose work focuses on collections, memorialization and the act of leaving one's digital imprint for the next generation. His work takes the form of video sculptures, immersive performances, large scale projections and vending machines that sell human DNA. His work plays upon this modern exigency in our culture to chronicle, preserve and wax nostalgic, an idea which Barcia-Colombo renders visually by “collecting” human portraits on video.
Gabriel was commissioned to be the first digital artist to show work at the New Fulton Terminal Stop with the MTA Arts & Design program in New York City. His work has been featured in the Volta, Scope, and Art Mrkt art fairs, Victoria & Albert Museum as well as Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library. He recently received an Art and Technology grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where he created "The Hereafter Institute," a company that questions the future of death rituals and memorials and their relationship to technology. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Gabriel served as a member of the artist advisory board at the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the education committee member at the Museum of Art and Design. In 2012 Gabriel gave a TED talk entitled "Capturing Memories in Video Art," and in 2014 he gave another entitled "My DNA Vending Machine" and was awarded a Senior TED fellowship.
In 2016 Gabe founded Bunker.nyc a pop up gallery showcasing emerging art made with technology. Bunker became the first pop up digital art gallery to open in the Sotheby's Auction House in New York Summer 2017. Gabe is a New York Foundation for the Arts grant awardee and faculty member at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Learn more about Gabe at https://www.gabebc.com/
Follow him @GabeBC
In this laid back discussion with the crew, Host Andrew Herman (Herm) reflects on his time at State of the Art as he says goodbye to podcasting—for now. Together we share reflections on hitting 100 episodes, how the podcast has evolved, thoughts on AI Art, and Herm goes on a ride in Ethan's time machine.
We continue our exploration into AI art this time speaking with San Francisco-based artist, Camila Magrane, whose recent project, OSMA, combines artificial intelligence and social media with plant-life.
-About Camila Magrane-
Camila Magrane is a multimedia artist originally from caracas, venezuela. having a father from the us and a mother from venezuela, she grew up alternating between both countries. Being fully exposed to two different cultures gave her a greater understanding of what it means to have various perspectives.
After graduating from film school in caracas, she moved back to san francisco where she freelanced as an editor and camera operator, working on a wide range of fictional films, documentaries, and music videos. camila later moved on to work in the game industry as a cinematic artist.
Most recently, camila has been exploring the involvement of technology and interactivity in art. this has driven her to obtain a bachelor of science in computer science with a concentration in game development. She continues to hone her skills as a creative coder through the creation of interactive videos, installations and games.
She has been most noted for the creation of her “digital photogram collages” where she has established a postmodern aesthetic by combining traditional darkroom techniques with the use of digital tools.
Learn more at https://www.camilamagrane.com/
Follow here @CamilaMagrane
We're diving into art and AI with Chief Technology Officer of Serpentine Galleries, Ben Vickers. In this episode, Ben shares his views on the introduction of AI into the world of art, to what degree AI in the arts is being employed today, its implications, and where he would like to see AI applied or integrated.
- About Ben Vickers -
CTO @SerpentineUK | Current Exhibitions: The Deep Listener
Publishing House @IgnotaBooks | Next Up: States of the Body Produced by Love
Initiator of @unMonastery
Trustee @AutoItaliaLive
Jury @Lumenprize, @ArtsAtCERN
Advisory Board @Transmediale, @SXSW and @BANNERREPEATER
Founding Member @Guild_is
Advisor to @ArtxN+@ZIEN, @Furtherfield
Advocate of @MethodKit and @Matera2019
Learn more at http://benvickers.net/
At the end of 2018, the State of the Art team reflected on how State of the Art could become more inclusive given our own feelings around underrepresentation in the art world. To that end, in 2019 we introduced monthly themes and guest hosting in an effort to bring more voices and diverse art-related topics onto our platform.
Today we celebrate having aired 100 episodes! Coupled with this milestone achievement is a growth in our listenership alongside the success of our first round of guest hosts. Tune-in to hear soundbites of some of the most impactful quotes from our guest host episodes. Below, please find a list of our amazing 2019 guest host lineup and links to listen to the full interviews featured in this mini-episode.
We're immensely grateful to our first round of guest hosts:
Tre Borden, The Black Creative, February 2019 | Featured Episode (72): The Black Creative 02: Leila Weefur, Artist, Writer & Curator
Meg Zany, Sex Positive, March 2019 | Featured Episode (77): Sex Positive: The Art of Shaping Body Politics with Uncle Reezy, Artist
Dorothy Santos, Queerness, June 2019 | Featured Episode (93): Queerness with Guest Host Dorothy Santos & Artist, Designer, & Researcher, Yasheng She
Michelle Hartney, Art & Morality, July 2019 | Featured Episode (98):Art & Morality with Michelle Hartney & the Guerilla Girls
Guest host, Michelle Hartney rounds out her month-long dive into Art & Morality with Decolonize This Place. Decolonize This Place is an action-oriented collective of activists who stage protests in cultural institutions to open conversations related to Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification. In this episode, Michelle and Marz Saffore, along with, Amy Weng members of Decolonize This Place, discuss the practice of "art washing," who defines what art is or isn't, issues of display, and the responsibility museum and institutions have to hold their board members accountable for actions which go against their values.
Notably, at the time of this recording, Michelle and Decolonize This Place members debated the position of Warren B. Kanders as, then, Vice-Chairman at the Whitney Museum. Kanders company, Safariland, produces tear-gas canisters and other supplies used by the military and law enforcement. Safariland canisters have been used against unarmed migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, Turkey’s Gezi Park, the Gaza Strip, Standing Rock in North Dakota, and, most recently, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Decolonize this Place has led the charge in protesting Kanders presence on the Museum's board hosting 9 weeks of art and action in the weeks leading up to the Whitney Biennial. Today, on July 25, 2019, Warren B. Kanders announced his resignation as Vice-Chairman at the Whitney.
- About Decolonize This Place -
Decolonize This Place is an action-oriented movement centering around Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification. Facilitated by MTL+ Collective. #decolonizethisplace
Learn more at https://www.decolonizethisplace.org/
Follow them @decolonizethisplace
Guest host, Michelle Hartney discusses the decolonization of museums with Heather Campbell Coyle, Chief Curator and Curator of American Art at the Delaware Art Museum, and Amelia Wiggins, Assistant Director of Learning & Engagement at the Delaware Art Museum. Together, they break down what decolonizing museums means and entails. Heather and Amelia share and explain the Delaware Art Museum's reinstallation efforts as an empathetic museum and how this new approach reshape the acquisition process, language-use and presentation in the production of new exhibitions.
-About Heather Campbell Coyle-
Heather Campbell Coyle is Chief Curator and Curator of American Art at the Delaware Art Museum. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware. She lectures, publishes, and researches primarily on American painting, photography, and popular illustration from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is a specialist in the art of John Sloan and the Ashcan School, a strength of the Delaware Art Museum’s collection.
-About Amelia Wiggins-
Amelia Wiggins is Assistant Director of Learning & Engagement at the Delaware Art Museum, where she manages the guide corps, oversees gallery programs, and develops interpretation integrating community voices. She previously worked in family programs and museum education positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Franklin Institute, and The Stark Museum of Art. Ms. Wiggins has been honored with awards in excellence in label writing from the American Alliance of Museum and an award for excellence in programming from the Mountain-Plains Museum Association. She holds an MSEd in Leadership in Museum Education from Bank Street College and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Special thanks from the Delaware Art Museum to the following collaborators who have spearheaded the Museum's reinstallation project and its diversity and inclusion initiatives:
Stacey Mann and Janeen Bryant of Empathetic Museum, Stace Treat of Crystal Bridges Museum, Dan Rahimi of Penn Museum, Scott Wilcox of Yale Center for British Art, Judy Koke of Institute for Learning Innovation, Kathleen McLean of Independent Exhibitions, Museums as Sites for Social Action (MASS Action), Keonna Hendrick
And the following organizations whose leadership on these issues informed the Museum's work and thinking: Museums and Race, The Incluseum, Museums Are Not Neutral , Visitors of Color, Participatory Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
In this episode, guest host Michelle Hartney tackles gender and racism in the arts with art historian, Catherine McCormack. Catherine is an academic and writer who's done extensive research on women in the arts and the exclusionary practices of the art world. Together, Michelle and Catherine discuss the "male gaze," the use of female bodies versus male bodies in the arts and their divergent meanings, and the role of the #MeToo movement in the art world.
-About Catherine McCormack-
Catherine is a writer, art historian and independent curator based in London.
She's currently working on two book projects – the first is about patriarchy, feminism and art history after #MeToo and will be published by Icon Books in 2020. The second is a collection of fine art ceilings from around the world and is called The Art of Looking Up (White Lion 2019). She is also working on an exciting curatorial project about imaging motherhood. In May 2019 Catherine spoke at the Venice Biennale about exhibiting women artists and contemporary art.
Catherine's literary agent is Becky Thomas at Johnson and Alcock agency
When not writing, Catherine can be found teaching art history at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, where she is the course director for the summer school on Women and Art. Catherine has a PhD in Art History from UCL where she worked as a Teaching Fellow. She has appeared on Sky News and BBC Breakfast talking about art.
Her writing has been published in The Independent, the Architectural Review, Stylist, Glass magazine, Label magazine, and in international academic journals and museum exhibition catalogues.
Learn more about Catherine at https://thisiscatherinemccormack.com/
Follow her @womeninthepicture
Michelle Hartney kicks off Art & Morality by speaking with a founding member of the feminist art collective, the Guerrilla Girls (GG) on sexism and racism in the arts--from the study of its history to representation in museum, institutions and galleries. Michelle asks GG founder, speaking under the pseudonym Frida Kahlo, about the emergence of the Guerrilla Girls in the 80s, the Westernization of the art world, and the arguments made against "over-contextualizing" art and the fear of censorship in the art world.
Helpful Links
Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, Netflix Special
The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art
Guerrilla Girls, Three Ways to Write a Museum Wall Label When the Artist is a Sexual Predator, 2018
-About the Guerrilla Girls-
The Guerrilla Girls are feminist activist artists. Over 55 people have been members over the years, some for weeks, some for decades. Our anonymity keeps the focus on the issues, and away from who we might be. We wear gorilla masks in public and use facts, humor and outrageous visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias as well as corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture. We undermine the idea of a mainstream narrative by revealing the understory, the subtext, the overlooked, and the downright unfair. We believe in an intersectional feminism that fights discrimination and supports human rights for all people and all genders. We have done over 100 street projects, posters and stickers all over the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Mexico City, Istanbul, London, Bilbao, Rotterdam, and Shanghai, to name just a few. We also do projects and exhibitions at museums, attacking them for their bad behavior and discriminatory practices right on their own walls, including our 2015 stealth projection about income inequality and the super rich hijacking art on the façade of the Whitney Museum in New York. Our retrospectives in Bilbao and Madrid, Guerrilla Girls 1985-2015, and our US traveling exhibition, Guerrilla Girls: Not Ready To Make Nice, have attracted thousands. We could be anyone. We are everywhere. What’s next? More creative complaining!!
Learn more at https://www.guerrillagirls.com/
We're excited to introduce our listeners to Michelle Hartney, Chicago-based artist and activist who will be leading this month's discussion on Art & Morality. In this episode, Andrew speaks with Michelle about her ongoing project, Correct Art History, which calls attention to the art world's tendency to sweep the reprehensible behavior of art icons and heroes under the rug. Together they address the issue of morality when it comes to viewing art, whether or not institutions have a responsibility to inform audiences on the good, the bad & the ugly of the artists on their walls, the role of the #MeToo Movement and its influence in the art world, and why censorship is not the answer to the controversy of art and morality. Michelle also touches upon additional topics she will be addressing during her month-long takeover and introduces a few of the guests she has lined up to join the discussion of Art & Morality.
-About Michelle Hartney-
Michelle Hartney is a Chicago based artist whose work addresses a broad range of topics, from women’s health issues, to the concept of heroes, love, and the cosmos. She works in a variety of materials, including fiber, wood, found objects, installation, community based interactive performance, and the internet. Her interest in using art to address social issues began during her graduate studies in art therapy at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was an Albert Schweitzer Fellow.
In 2015 she became the Chicago rally coordinator for the non-profit organization Improving Birth's nationwide Labor Day rallies, and created a performance and installation at Daley Plaza called Mother’s Right, a piece about the United States’ high rates of maternal mortality, postpartum PTSD, and obstetric abuse.
Hartney founded the Women's Health Collective in 2016, an organization dedicated to utilizing creative approaches to raise awareness about women's health issues by linking artists, designers, writers, musicians, technologists, healthcare providers, and activists to work collaboratively on socially engaged, community based projects. Their first project, Kimberly Said No, collaboration with five Chicago actors, included a public performance that addressed an obstetric assault that was captured on film.
Since the 2016 election, Hartney has temporarily shifted the focus of her work away from maternal healthcare issues. She has been focusing on creating work to support the resistance, with a focus on peace and love, in addition to highlighting the misogyny, racism, and hatred embedded in Trump’s rhetoric.
Hartney has two children and resides in Chicago.
Learn more about Michelle Hartney at https://www.michellehartney.com/
Follow her @MichelleHartneyArt
In this episode, SOTA founder and former host, Ethan James Appleby, returns to speak with guest host, Dorothy Santos on her findings while focusing on queerness during the month of June. The two reflect on the diverse cultural interpretations & connotations around queerness that emerged during June's interviews, they revisit the idea of viewer's perception versus author's intent in relation to queer characters, and dive into what a queer space is. We also learn more about Dorothy, her current and future projects, and her love & disdain for the art world.
Helpful Links:
Untitled Art Fair, Live Panel Recording
Strange Magic Podcast is the "witchy woo woo" podcast referenced by Dorothy
Peperomioides is the name of Dorothy's favorite plant
-
Thank you Dorothy Santos for being our June 2019 guest host on State of the Art Podcast.
Guest hosting is a new project we're exploring on SOTA in 2019 as part of our initiative to be more inclusive, bring on diverse voices better suited to discuss certain topics, and to build community. If you are interested in guest hosting or have a theme suggestion, please comment on our Instagram @StateoftheArt.
In this episode, Dorothy Santos speaks with digital artist, Lark VCR , on queering the digital art spaces to address hypothetical realities that are very much within the realm of possibility within are increasingly tech-guided lives. Together they discuss a selection of Lark's projects which delve into topics surrounding surveillance and trauma; these include their heart rate bio feedback devices Babumpand Tattle-Tale Heart, as well as their collective-healing project, Traumagotchi.
-About Lark VCR-
Lark Alder aka. Virtually Conflicted Reality explores multiplicity of meaning and experience in an increasingly digitized world, nudging at the dissolving boundary between body and machine. Lark is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s MFA program, and has shown at Frameline, MIX NYC, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, Schuwels Museum in Berlin, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and is currently teaching at the CADRE Digital Media Art Program at San Jose State University.
Learn more at https://larkvcr.com/
Follow her @LarkVCR
Afro Guatemalan-Salvadoran cartoonist, Breena Nuñez joins Dorothy Santos in a discussion about comics, graphics novels, and queerness through a multicultural lens. Breena dives into the back story of some of her comics, her experiences growing up as Afrolatinx and how the seemingly unconnected threads of her childhood converged to weave her into the cartoonist she is today.
Helpful Links
Nagual - animal guardian
Comics mentioned in this episode:
Trinidad Escobar, http://www.trinidadescobar.com/
Avy Jetter, http://nuthingoodat4.com/
Julie Fiveash, https://jooliefiveash.tumblr.com/tagged/jooliecomix
-About Breena Nuñez-
Breena is an Afro Guatemalan-Salvadoran cartoonist based in Oakland, CA by way of San Bruno and South San Francisco. Breena also identifies as a non-binary womxn who uses She/Her/They/Them pronouns.
She is currently pursuing an MFA in Comics at California College of the Arts. Breena's drawings and writings focus on Afrolatinx diaspora, Central American experiences, queer people of color, and socially awkward animal people. Her comics are primarily self-published as zines, and are accessible at zine fests, small press expos and through her online Etsy shop.
Breena's work has been featured in online articles and interviews with CultureStrike, Fierce Mitú (one authored by Alán Pelaez Lopez and another by Stephanie Ginese), Taco Talk with Julio Salgado, Huffington Post, Prime Vice, Colorlines, The Beat, Remezcla, and The Baylies.
Learn more at https://www.breenache.com/
Follow her @breenache
In this episode, Dorothy Santos brings us a discussion with Yasheng She on queer and femme narratives as represented in a wide array of media, including games, film, and manga. Together they look at the progressive rhetoric taken on by collectives like CLAMP, and dissect the role of audience perception versus the author's intent when it comes to reconciling a character or narrative as queer.
-About Yasheng She-
Yasheng She is a Washington-based audio, visual, and textual storyteller. He has written for Gnovis blogs – a peer-reviewed journal at Georgetown University and produced audio stories for Georgetown Forum – a radio program also at Georgetown University. Yasheng is a self-starter and highly motivated in everything he does. As a content producer, Yasheng has been telling stories in many forms, regardless of whether it is a podcast, a blog, or a video. Over five years of research experience and ability to speak Mandarin Chinese, English, and Japanese fluently help him to become a studious and observant storyteller. He is passionate about understanding how macro-level social, political, and cultural changes shape how individual formulates her or his own narrative. He is driven and motivated in everything he does and is well versed in psychology, communication, and whatever he can learn to create compelling content.
Dorothy Santos speaks with Pakistani artist, Anum Awan about their new media work focused on non-western narratives, queerness, and spirituality. Together they touch upon the evolution of interactive design, debate the line between design & art, and how Anum incorporates South Asian culture and history in their practice.
Helpful Links
Digital Sufi Shrine, http://www.anumawan.com/digital-sufi-shrine
Dawn of Freedom, https://vimeo.com/315713041
Other Futures, Opens June 14, 2019, San Francisco, https://grayarea.org/event/other-futures/
Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth, Jun 20-22, San Francisco, http://counterpulse.org/event/tomorrow-inherit-earth-revolutions-queer-muslim-future/
-About Anum Awan-
Anum is a Bay Area based interaction designer and new media artist who crafts mixed-reality experiences by blending physical and digital media centering queer, immigrant and non-western narratives. They were born and raised in Pakistan and came to the U.S. in 2008 to pursue a practice in art and design. They are a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design and California College of the Arts.
Learn more at: http://www.anumawan.com/
Follow her @AnumAwan
Dorothy Santos is a writer, curator, researcher, academic, educator, artist, and, currently, a doctoral student at UC Santa Cruz. Her passions run from film to mysticism and "witchy things." She is also the host of Art Practical podcast, PRNT SCRN, focused on bridging the gaps between analog, new media, and digital art practices.
In this episode, SOTA host, Andrew Herman introduces Dorothy and, together, they discuss her journey into the arts, her background in science and love for biology, and the wide variety of interests Dorothy explores through her art writing and creative projects. They also touch upon June's theme, "Queerness," as Andrew hands off the mic for the remainder of the month.
Helpful links:
Dial Up App:https://dialup.com/
-About Dorothy Santos-
Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, curator, and researcher whose academic interests include digital art, computational media, and biotechnology. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow.
Her work appears in art21, Art Practical, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Ars Technica, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She serves as a co-curator for REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective, the program manager for the Processing Foundation, and host for the podcast PRNT SCRN produced by Art Practical.
DADA.nyc is a truly unique community of digital artists who are finding new and innovative ways to communicate through their artwork. Moreover, Dada’s CEO and founder, Beatriz Helena Ramos, is exploring radical and visionary ways for artists to support themselves through the power of community--all mobilized by state of the art blockchain technology.
In this episode, Beatriz shares how her commercial success as an artist, animator and entrepreneur ultimately led her to question her legacy, what makes Dada’s community of artists exceptional, and what experiments in new economies for artists Dada is working on.
Learn more at https://dada.nyc/
Show your support for Dada at https://www.seedinvest.com/dada
-About Beatriz Helena Ramos-
Beatriz is many things -- an artist, an illustrator, an animator, an entrepreneur. She has created illustrations for the New York Times, worked on animated series for MTV, Disney and Cartoon network, and exhibited paintings in New York City galleries. Her prolific creative career continues on to include creating comics, illustrating children’s books, photography, set design, sculpture, live action directing, and even puppet making in Prague.
In 2002 she founded Dancing Diablo Studio in New York City, a content studio whose clients include Coca Cola, Macy’s, Kraft Foods, Jet Blue, Bayer, General Mills, Sesame Workshop, Hasbro, PBS, Nickelodeon, MTV, Disney, ESPN and more.
Maecenas provides “Art investment, without intermediaries,” claiming to let art investors “invest in fine art in the most transparent and efficient way.” In this episode, Andrew speaks with Marcelo Garcia Casil, co-founder & CEO of Maecenas about getting Maecenas up and running, how Maecenas has reshaped concepts of ownership and users relationship with investing, and who is using Maecenas.
Learn more at https://www.maecenas.co/
-About Mareclo Garcia Casil-
A Financial Technology Innovation expert who has wide-ranging experience designing and building mission-critical systems for investment banks in Europe and Asia, and consulting for financial institutions.
We speak with Jesse Cory, co-founder and CEO of 1xRUN, a limited edition art print publisher, and Murals in the Market, dedicated to reinvigorating cities with murals by local artists. As an active member of the street art art scene, Jesse has seen his share of copyright infringement cases brought to him by artists he has worked with personally, and continues to fight for artists to maintain and enact their rights over their creations when threatened by brands and media companies.
In this episode, Jesse recounts cases he's seen and been involved with, gives us the quick and dirty of VARA and its applications in a few scenarios, the basic rights artist retain over their work on the streets and as prints or originals, and touches upon how social media has become both a blessing and a curse for artists around the world.
Helpful links:
A Guide to the Visual Artists Rights Act, Cynthia Esworthy, NEA Office of General Counsel, JD Washington & Lee Law School 1997
-About 1xRUN-
Based in Detroit, Michigan, 1xRUN ("one-time run") is the world's leading publisher of fine art editions and online destination for original art. We pride our curation on showcasing limited edition prints, original artwork, books and exclusives from some of the best-known and emerging names in the new contemporary movement. With collectors in over 100 countries, we have published more than 1,300 editions since 2010. Every day, we drop a new batch of time-released, limited edition runs. Since we're always looking to the future, editions are only available for a limited time — when they are gone, they're gone! The artists we collaborate with never rest, and neither do we. 1xRUN is also host to Detroit's Inner State Gallery, a world-renowned exhibition space. Both 1xRUN's studio and Inner State Gallery are proud to call Detroit's historic Eastern Market district home.
Learn more here
-About Murals in the Market-
Murals in the Market continues to enhance the Eastern Market experience and the district’s transformation into a must-see destination for arts, as well as food, in Detroit. For the past six years, 1xRUN and the company’s fine art gallery, Inner State, have curated and produced over 100 murals in Eastern Market alone, and over 200 murals throughout the city of Detroit. With the creation of these murals, each area has seen a significant visual impact on the surrounding neighborhood as well as increased traffic, additional economic development, and increased safety.
In addition to creating new murals, Murals in the Market also hosts many events during the festival including panel discussions, artists dinners, meet and greet opportunities, site-specific installations, block parties, nightime events that coordinate with Eastern Market After Dark, and more! Murals in the Market is more than an international mural festival, it’s a creative platform that inspires and encourages community engagement using public art as a vessel.
Learn more here
As an artist, academic, and a cofounder to an art technology company called Monograph, Kevin McCoy brings a unique perspective to the idea of authorship & ownership in its application to the digital and internet art scene. Established in 2014, Monegraph aimed to solve issues of provenance and legitimacy artists and collectors face when selling and buying digital art works. In this episode, we speak with Kevin about how Monegraph was received in its initial years, why provenance matters in the art world, and what some of the hurdles are facing digital and new media artists today.
-About Kevin McCoy-
His artworks take many diverse forms including video sculpture and installation, photography, long-form film, curatorial practice and performance, kinetic sculpture and software-driven on-line projects. Thematically, his work explores changing conditions around social roles, categories, genres and forms of value. His primary research questions ask 'What counts as new,’ 'How is meaning established,' and 'How are cultural memories formed'. He has worked collaboratively with Jennifer McCoy for many years to try to answer what it means to speak together, often finding that experience outstrips available modes of presentation and discourse. To these ends their work has adopted many methodological approaches: exhaustive categorization, recreation and reenactment, automation, miniaturization, and most recently remote viewing and speculative modeling.
In New York City, his work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, P.S.1, Postmasters Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, and Smack Mellon. International exhibitions include projects at the Pompidou Center, the British Film Institute, ZKM, the Hanover Kunstverien, the Bonn Kunstverein, and F.A.C.T. (Liverpool, UK). Grants include a 2002 Creative Capital Grant for Emerging Fields, a 2005 Wired Rave Award, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. Articles about his work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, Art News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek. Residencies include work at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
His artwork is represented by in New York by Postmasters Gallery and in Geneva by Gallerie Guy Bartschi and can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and MUDAM in Luxembourg.
In 2014 he co-founded monegraph.com a platform that uses the technology underlying Bitcoin to provide a mechanism for validating, owning and trading digital media assets. The project was presented at The New Museum as part of Rhizome's seven on seven conference and at Tech Crunch Disrupt in New York.
His teaching engages both undergraduate and graduate students in studio art and related arts professions and addresses practical and theoretical uses of digital media technology together with surveys of related theoretical and philosophical texts. The current semester's coursework can be found at mccoyspace.com/nyu.
Learn more at:
auxillaryprojects.com
monegraph.com
corespace.com
New month means a new theme for State of the Art, and May will be filled with discussions centered around the value of art as dictated not only by who created it, but also, where it's been, and how it has transferred between different parties. We will also be looking at how we define "ownership"in the arts, specifically diving into new forms of ownership introduced by blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, as well as contemporary issues around street art--looking at you General Motors& Mercedes-Benz.
Join us for our first episode on Authorship & Ownership, dropping Thursday, May 9, 2019.
Artist duo Mary O'Brien & Daniel McCormick use "land as the palette" for the work they do. In this episode, the two explain their efforts to use land art as a restorative medium, bringing much needed life and balance back to struggling ecosystems. As we continue our exploration into "environmental art," O'Brien and McCormick explain why they refer to their work as "restorative art" rather than "eco-art," how they became involved in the land art movement, and who they bring into their artistic efforts to successfully rebuild the habitats they're involved with.
-About Watershed Sculpture-
The Art Practice of Daniel McCormick & Mary O’Brien
Daniel McCormick and Mary O’Brien collaborate on ecological art installations that have remedial qualities. Working in both urban and agricultural watersheds and riparian corridors, McCormick and O’Brien respond to environmental issues by moving away from an anthropocentric view of nature to create sculptures that work with natural systems. Their work is often ephemeral and temporal. When their interventions are completed and a restoration cycle is established, they intend to leave no evidence of a hand made object. For over 25 years, they have been using art to restore and affect a positive ecological balance in damaged environments.
McCormick & O’Brien both hold degrees from University of California, Berkeley. Daniel McCormick's experience as a multi-disciplinary artist in the fields of sculptural installation and environmental design brings both a public art and ecological trajectory to their work. Mary O'Brien is a sculptor and writer and initiates the community engagement plans enlisting the support of art organizations and government agencies.
Their collaborations reflect the artists’ concerns for the environment and community, but also their belief that art has a responsibility to do more than witness or document cultural changes. Their installation works can be found in watersheds across the United States.
Learn more at www.watershedsculpture.com
Follow them @watershedsculpture
This interview was recorded at The Headlands Center for the Arts; learn more here
Conceptual artist Antti Laitinen, uses natural elements and the environment he inhabits in rural Finland to create unexpected interruptions, installations, performances, and stunning photography. Although he and his work have been referred to as "environmental" due to his use of the Earth as his primary medium, Laitinen explains that these terms aren't at the forefront of his creations.
In this episode, we speak with Antti about his process and the reception of his pieces, why he chooses to use natural elements as his primary tools for creation, and what he thinks of "environmental art."
Learn more about Antti Laitinen here
Our Europe-based listeners can Fall and Rise at the following gallery exhibitions:
LUSTO – The Finnish Forest Museum
Myrskyasema – Storm Station
Lustontie 1, 58450 Punkaharju, Finland
26.4.2019 – 12.1.2020
Beijing Riverside Art Museum
Continuous Refle(a)ction
East Hongyan Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
26.5 – 28.8.2019
Tournay Solvay Parc
Chaussée de la Hulpe 201 – 1170 Watermael-Boitsfort, Brussels
4.7 – 29.9.2019
Continuing our exploration into the umbrella of environmental art, in this episode Andrew speaks with artist, Aviva Rahmani, who creates public, site-specific art to fight off land developers. Focusing on her series, Blued Trees Symphony, Aviva explains how her approach incorporates community, creativity and legal theory to protect natural landscapes. She also touches upon her belief of our community being in a time of "eco-suicide," and where she identifies her art in the umbrella of "environmental art."
-About Blued Trees Symphony-
The Blued Trees Symphony is an ongoing, site-specific land art project wherein Aviva Rahmani and collaborators convert threatened lands into art pieces. The hope is that by having them protected by the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), Aviva can the prevent the use of eminent domain to seize lands for pipeline construction where the artworks are situated.
The first iteration of Blued Trees Symphony emerged on, June 21, 2015 in Peekskill, New York. It is now installed over many miles of proposed pipeline expansions, and each 1/3 measure of those miles has been copyrighted for protection. Visually, Blued Trees Symphony presents stretches of trees painted with musical movements using an environmentally friendly ultramarine pigment. Together, these movements form a score which can be read and performed.
Learn more about Blued Trees Symphony here
-About Aviva Rahmani-
Aviva Rahmani began her career as a performance artist, founding and directing the American Ritual Theatre (1968-1971), performing throughout California. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts and received a PhD from Plymouth University, UK, Rahmani has presented workshops on her theoretical approach to environmental restoration and her transdisciplinary work has been exhibited internationally including in The Independent Museum of Contemporary Art (IMCA), Cyprus with the National Centres of Contemporary Art (NCCA), Ekaterinburg and Moscow, Russian Federation, KRICT, Daejeon, Korea, the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY, the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO. Her work has been discussed and covered in books, essays, and in art magazines such as Art in America, Art News, The Huffington Post and Leonardo. Rahmani’s video documentation Gulf to Gulf sessionshave been viewed on line from over eighty-five countries. “Trigger Points/ Tipping Points,” a precursor to Gulf to Gulf, premiered at the 2007 Venice Biennale. In 2002, her pioneering community action project, Blue Rocks, helped restore degraded wetlands on Vinalhaven Island, Maine a USDA investment of over $500,000. The Blued Trees Symphony (2015 - present) has received numerous awards and been extensively written about and exhibited internationally. A Mock Trial is scheduled for the project at the Cardozo Law School, NYC on April 25, 2018.
Learn more here
In this episode, Andrew Herman speaks with Miami-based artist, Franky Cruz, who works with butterflies to create unexpected art pieces. Initially a graffiti artist, Franky shifted away from conventional painting in search of a non-toxic means by which to express himself creatively. This environmentally conscious move led him to learn how to repair butterfly wings, rear caterpillars successfully through metamorphosis, and how to work with these creatures to produce large-scale paintings; all in an effort to raise awareness and empathy for an organism weighing less that 1/5 of an ounce.
-About Franky Cruz-
Follow Franky @toolooselautrec
Watch Franky's video on Vivarium Meconium here
Franky Cruz is represented by Spinello Projects
With Earth Day celebrations just around the corner, for the month of April, we will be dipping our toes into the vast spectrum of Environmental Art. SOTA host, Andrew Herman, returns to lead fascinating conversations with a 4 different artists, each using and/or collaborating with the environment in a variety of ways. Primarily, we will be looking at eco art, land art, earth art, and how each artist approaches and considers the implications of their work both as an art form and, potentially, as an act of activism. Join us in this pre-episode kick-off to learn more about the SOTA team's thoughts on where the month will take us and what we hope to learn along the way.
In this wrap up episode with SOTA hosts Andrew Herman and MegZany, the two discuss Meg's conversations around sex positivity in the arts and the different voices and opinions she brought onto the podcast as part of that exploration. Together they delve into Meg's experience as a guest host, what surprised her during the interviews, the most poignant conversations or topics she felt merged throughout the month, whether or not her opinions on feminism, sex object, and other terminology has changed, and what social media's role is in the display of female bodies.
Thank you MegZany for being our March 2019 guest host on State of the Art Podcast.
Guest hosting is a new project we're exploring on SOTA in 2019 as part of our initiative to be more inclusive, bring on diverse voices better suited to discuss certain topics, and to build community. If you are interested in guest hosting or have a theme suggestion, please comment on our Instagram @StateoftheArt.
Guest host, MegZany dives into the work of new media artist, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, who explores aspects of relationships and interactions through digital spaces and performances. Together, the two discuss Shawné's transition to offline work, her interest in power dynamics and how these are addressed in her pieces, the correlation between kink spaces and Shawné's artwork, and how she transfers aspects and sensations from sexual and "taboo" realms into art spaces to engage her audience, and so much more.
-About Shawné Michaelain Holloway-
Shawné Michaelain Holloway is a new media artist using sound, video, and performance to shape the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC, NY), Sorbus Galleria (Helsinki, Fi), The Kitchen (NYC, NY) Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL). Currently, Holloway teaches in the New Arts Journalism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Learn more about Shawné at http://www.shawnemichaelainholloway.com/
Follow her @cleogirl2525
Tweet her @cleogirl2525
Welcome to a world of explosive color and convoluted bodies, where pleasure-seekers come adorned with halos and bodies are shamelessly explored and shared. This is the art of Uncle Reezy aka Marissa Kelling.
In this episode, guest host MegZany speaks with self-taught artist, Kelling who goes by Uncle Reezy on Instagram. Reezy's drawings unabashedly depict individuals and groups engaged in various acts of pleasure from playfully making out to masturbation and threesomes. Together, they discuss toeing the line between sex positivity and objectification, the inspiration behind Reezy's work, and how Reezy came to champion sexuality in her illustrations.
Follow her @Uncle.Reezy
MegZany kicks-off her month-long exploration of sex positivity with Amanda Micallef, co-founder and president of Arsenic, a media group focused on embracing sexuality and empowering women in the industry. Together, they discuss Arsenic's mission, how they're championing sexuality, the affects social media has had on the movement, and the backlash sex positivity faces amongst both men and women.
Things to Note
The name "Billy" comes up in this conversation, referencing Billy Hawkins, co-founder at Arsenic.
-About Amanda Micallef-
Amanda Micallef was inspired to co-found Arsenic because of her strong sex-positive feminism beliefs. Arsenic began as a community of female models where Amanda put the editorial power in the hands of the women themselves. Arsenic, since expanded into music, fine art, events, television, and beyond. Before founding Arsenic, Amanda spent 12 years as a producer of over 20 films, music video, and commercial productions, where she was responsible for all aspects of projects from inception through distribution.
You can learn more about Arsenic here
Or Follow them:
On IG
@Arsenic
@ArsenicGallery
@ArsenicAudio
On Snap
@ArsenicTV
https://www.weareelemental.co/
This month we welcome guest host, MegZany who will be taking our mobile recording studio for a fierce ride bringing you a fantastic lineup of women artist's embracing sex positivity at the core of their work. Before we drop her first episode this Thursday (March 7, 2019), Andrew talks with Meg about her journey from corporate America to full-time street artist, feminism, and why she decided to focus on sex positivity this month as State of the Art's second guest host.
Guest hosting is a new project we're exploring on SOTA in 2019 as part of our initiative to be more inclusive, bring on diverse voices better suited to discuss certain topics, and to build community. Guest Hosts are invited to take full-ownership of their chosen theme, inviting artists, curators, collectors, influencers they believe will add a strong voice to the platform and their selected topic of discussion. If you are interested in guest hosting or have a theme suggestion, please comment on our Instagram @StateoftheArt.
-About MegZany-
From selling humans legally in the corporate world as a recruiter to installing art in the streets illegally, MegZany is leaving her mark on the world through street art.
MegZany is a Los Angeles-based street artist best known for her “Courage Has No Gender” campaign. Zany began putting up work in the streets in 2016 starting with her biplane + banner image and has quickly evolved her practice and expanded her reach from the streets of Los Angeles to cities including Brussles, Wynwood, Miami, Montreal, London, Kraków, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boise, Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, West Palm Beach, Orlando, Memphis, New Orleans, and Austin.The nature of Zany’s work is a celebration of contrasts, for instance, bold, assertive text paired with figures that connect with viewers on a different level, often evoking childhood nostalgia. Furthermore, an enthusiast herself from an early age, Zany celebrates the trope of flight and often utilizes images that depict aviation in her projects. One of Zany’s most iconic stencils is of Amelia Earhart paired with the mantra, “Courage Has No Gender” intended to generate awareness regarding societal gender disparity and encourage viewers to create an optimistic future. As a female street artist actively working in a male-dominated field, Zany herself is a modern iteration of Earhart as she fearlessly shares her hopeful message.
You can learn more about MegZany here
Or follow her @MegZany
State of the Art host, Andrew Herman, returns to the podcast to unpack February 2019's theme, "The Black Creative," explored and produced by guest host, Tre Borden. Together they discuss inclusivity on platforms, how we (SOTA) and others can improve our approach and expand that dialogue, Tre's takeaways and the moments he found most resonant in the interviews, and how each artist brought a different perspective and served as a reminder that, yes, these are all black experiences but they're all uniquely individual. Tre also shares how he became involved in the arts and the conversations he aims to inspire through his projections.
Thank you Tre for being our very first guest host on State of the Art Podcast.
Guest hosting is a new project we're exploring on SOTA in 2019 as part of our initiative to be more inclusive, bring on diverse voices better suited to discuss certain topics, and to build community. If you are interested in guest hosting or have a theme suggestion, please comment on our Instagram @StateoftheArt.
In this episode of The Black Creative, Tre speaks with multidisciplinary artist, Martin Alexander Spratlen Etem about his experiences growing up as a mixed-race person, his journey into embracing his full-name and his identity, his creative practice, and how he has navigated the fine art world.
-About Martin Alexander Spratlen Etem-
Martin Etem is a multidisciplinary artist using drawing, painting, and sculpture to survey modern society’s ideologies and sociology. Influenced by past experiences and imagination, Etem recontextualizes art history to create a visual language that embodies both a world view and personal narrative by calling attention to race, gender, value, and beauty.
Learn more at https://mase-studio.tumblr.com/
Or Follow him @Mase_Studio
In this episode, Tre Borden speaks with artist, Leila Weefur, whose discussion of black identity is at the center of her work and who is helping to build collectives and spaces in the Bay Area. Together, Tre and Leila ruminate on the complexities of black identity, how it is defined, for whom and by whom. This episode also dives into the double edged sword that is Black History month, and discusses Leila’s upcoming solo-show, Between Beauty & Horror, opening Friday, February 15, 2019 at Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland.
Things to Note
~22-27:30 - When discussing institutional representation and minoritarian artists, Leila Weefur quotes Gelare Khoshgozaran
Referenced Spaces & Literature:
- Wolfman Books
- Betti Ono Gallery
- Spirithaus Gallery
- The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman
-About Leila Weefur-
Leila Weefur (She/They/He) is an artist, writer, and curator who lives and works in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA from Mills College. Weefur tackles the complexities of phenomenological Blackness through video, installation, printmaking, and lecture-performances. Using materials and visual gestures to access the tactile memory, she explores the abject, the sensual and the nuances found in the social interactions and language with which our bodies have to negotiate space.
She is a recipient of the Hung Liu award, the Murphy & Cadogan award, and the Walter & Elise Haas Creative Work Fund. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including SFMOMA, Southern Exposure, The Wattis, and Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York. Weefur is the Audio/Video, Editor In Chief at Art Practical and a member of The Black Aesthetic.
Learn more about Leila Weefur by visiting www.leilaweefur.com
or Follow her @SpikeLeila
Guest host, Tre Borden, launches his four part series, The Black Creative, with artist Jessa Ciel. Together they discuss Jessa's definition of an artist, what a black artist’ role is in society, what it was like for Jessa to navigate Cranbrook, her experience of making art post MFA, and how her identity factors into her response to our current social and political moment.
The Black Creative theme aims to offer a glimpse into the art world from the viewpoint of a black person and offer some commentary on inclusivity and how one tries to navigate space as a black artist.
-About Jessa Ciel-
Jessa Ciel is a video and still artist, filmmaker, and creative director. Ciel is the creator/host of new podcast: Black Art School Graduates. She was the creative director and curator of the 10-week projection installation BEACON: Sacramento. Ciel has shown artwork at the Cranbrook Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI; the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, CA; and a number of galleries on the West and East Coasts. Her art works to trigger empathy in relation to womanhood, charged racial relations in America, land, and personal grief. She often incorporates text, audio, video, photography, and installation to create a mixed-media "setting."
Ciel is also a filmmaker who directed the short film, "Like Home" in 2018, and worked on the Oscar-nominated film LadyBird. She has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA from Cal State LA.
You can learn more about Jessa Ciel at www.iamciel.com
or follow her @ArtisCiel
As we continue to explore the various factions that have shaped the state of art as we know it today, a big goal at State of the Art Podcast is inclusivity. With this in mind, we welcome guest host Tre Borden, LA-based consultant and producer, to lead this month's discussion on "The Black Creative."
-About Tre Borden-
Tre Borden is a Los Angeles-based placemaking consultant and producer. Tre seeks out clients and collaborators looking to produce values-based creative products that activate communities.
Tre Borden/Co. works in the intersection of visual art, technology and community engagement and produces creative projects that push for progressive social change.
Past projects include Beacon: Sacramento, PORTAL, Bright Underbelly and The Golden Doors Project. Tre was raised in Sacramento and attended Yale University where he received his B.A in East Asian Studies and graduated with his MBA from UC Davis Graduate School of Management. Tre resides in DTLA, and in his spare time he is an avid cook, tennis player and consumer of Netflix.
You can follow Tre at @TreBorden
or Tweet him @TreBorden
Continuing our exploration into the world of "Selfie Palaces," in this episode we speak with Albie Hueston, Creative Director behind Refinery29's hugely popular installation, 29Rooms. 29Rooms first emerged in 2015 as an immersive story-telling experience intended to spark conversations addressing current events with the aim of disrupting pop-culture. As one of the original immersive art experiences--around long before The Museum of Ice Cream--we ask Albie how 29Rooms is different from other "selfie palaces" and whether or not this label has affected the way the Refinery29 team approaches the curation of these experiences. We also discuss:
- the artists and creatives responsible for bringing 29Rooms to life
- the roll social media plays in these experiences
- 29Rooms latest roll-out of "cellphone free" zones
- and where he sees the future of art experiences headed
Untitled Panel: Viewing Art in the Digital Age
Panelists: Lynn Hersman Leeson (artist), Dorothy Santos (artist & educator), and Erica Gangsei (SFMOMA)
As technology continues to evolve and permeate nearly every aspect of human life, it’s only natural that our markets and culture evolve alongside it, ushering in new concepts and questions. The art world, arguably moving at a slower pace than other markets, is a delicate ecosystem grappling with what the digital age means for the arts, from redefining what art is and how viewers consume it, to who and how one profits from it. Join panelists for a lively discussion on how technology has affected the way we experience contemporary art and what this means for the future of art making and collecting.
Museums, galleries, exhibitions, and art venues at large are catering more and more to the rise of social media and being “insta-worthy.” In fact, in 2017, participants in a study by Culture Track said they would much rather be entertained than educated, and that the majority prefer social interactions, as opposed to quiet reflection, when attending cultural events like exhibitions. This month we speak with the minds behind some of the most noteworthy, grammable exhibitions, museums and venues. One such space is OneDome, an interactive arts & entertainment venue in San Francisco. Bay Area residents may be familiar with OneDome’s “The Unreal Garden” or “LMNL,” two of their mixed-media experiences using adaptive technology to create immersive and engaging worlds for visitors to explore.
“The Unreal Garden” uses mixed-reality to create a surreal world overrun by lush vegetation, merging physical space, sound, projection mapping, and augmented reality. To fully experience “The Unreal Garden”, visitors must wear AR headsets; however these goggles do not impede with seeing others and interacting with fellow explorers. This allows visitors to share in the experience in real time, something OneDome prides itself on as shifting the “me” to the “we”. OneDome’s family-friendly “LMNL” is their newest exhibition offering 14 rooms of digital art which respond to and transform as visitors move through the space, allowing patrons to become a part of the artwork itself.
Experiential venues like OneDome are one of several spaces bundled into the category of “selfie palaces” by the media. Today, as part of our investigation into these new venues, we speak with Leila Amirsadeghi, Chief Marketing Officer at Onedome about:
- The rise of experiential venues and their place in the art world
- The fine line between arts and entertainment
- The audience OneDome is catering to
- The role of social media
- And how or why experiential venues are helping or hindering the art world
As we approach the end of the year, SOTA host, Andrew Herman, reflects on his favorite episodes from the podcast's first year in production. Today, we revisit Andrew's first episode as a host on State of the Art featuring Erica Gangsei, head of Interpretive Media at SFMOMA.
In a city where the tension between artists and techies is palpable, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has pushed exhibitions, programs and projects that bridge the two spheres, like their inventive video series ARTIST CRIBS, their seamless museum app, and their experimental PlaySFMOMA initiative. Erica Gangsei, head of Interpretive Media at SFMOMA and a working artist in her own right, shares her thoughts on tech's place in the museum and the "art world" at large.
-About Erica Gangsei-
As Head of Interpretive Media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Erica Gangsei leads a team of multimedia storytellers to create award winning digital resources such as audio tours, video interviews with artists, in-museum interpretive gallery spaces, games, and the podcast Raw Material. As a multidisciplinary artist, she is heavily involved in the Bay Area arts community, and has volunteered her time for organizations such as the Lab, Root Division, Headlands Center for the Arts and Adobe Books. Erica also has a passionate interest in games, and is the founder of the museum's PlaySFMOMA initiative, which presents pop-up arcades, game jams, lectures, workshops, and a game designer-in-residence series. She studied Philosophy and Fine Arts and Amherst College and Sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Follow Erica @ericagangsei
Tweet her @ericagangsei
As we approach the end of the year, SOTA host, Andrew Herman, reflects on his favorite episodes from the podcast's first year in production. Today, we revisit Andrew's first appearance on State of the Art as a guest. In 2014, Andrew Herman co-founded the mobile app French Girls. As the name of the app may reveal, Andrew doesn’t take himself too seriously; but he is serious about the app’s ability to introduce users to art appreciation and original art. In this episode, you'll hear SOTA founder and former host, Ethan Appleby, speak with Andrew about the process of making the French Girls app, the path to purchasing art, the cultural shifts needed to make art as popular as music, and Andrew's philosophy of not taking art "too seriously".
-About Andrew Herman-
Andrew Herman is co-founder of the mobile app French Girls. Now located in San Francisco, Andrew was a mechanical engineer by training from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He grew up an avid guitar enthusiast and closet art fan. In 2014, he launched Easyl, a marketplace for original art which then transpired into French girls, an app that enables users to discover and create digital art inspired by photos from the community. He is now responsible for technical oversight of the app.
Find Andrew on Twitter and Instagram.
-About French Girls-
Inspired by the famous Titanic line, “draw me like one of your French girls,” French Girls is a mobile app that allows anybody to transform their selfie into an original work of art. Heralded as the next Snapchat, French Girls allows users to commission artists to create works of art based on the photos they upload, and provides a unique introduction art appreciation and to the world of original art.
Draw like a French Girl at their website and on the App Store
As we approach the end of the year, SOTA host, Andrew Herman, reflects on his favorite episodes from the podcast's first year in production. In this episode, we revisit our very first panel, originally recorded live from the podcast stage at SXSW on March 15, 2018. Our panelists included Erica Gangsei, head of Interpretive Media @SFMoma, Nahema Mehta, Co-Founder and CEO of Absolut Art, and (now, current SOTA host) Andrew Herman, founder of French Girls & MiniCanvas. Our panelists got on like three peas in a pod and tackled some of the major questions we try to answer here at State of the Art. Like, how has technology democratized the art world? Has has the maturation of the art ecosystem changed the experience of buying art? And what's more important, sexy work, or un-sexy work?
-About Erica Gangsei-
Erica Gangsei, is Manager of Interpretive Media in the Education department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She researches, writes and co-produces educational multimedia materials such as audio tours, artist video interviews, podcasts, kiosk-based and online interactive features, and onsite educational spaces. Most recently, she curated ArtGameLab, an exhibition at SFMOMA of crowd-sourced game prototypes. Her professional research interests include crowd-sourced and assignment-based artwork, alternate reality games, institutional critique, and avant-garde culture as an engine of broader social and political change. She is also a sculptor, performer, conceptual artist and stop-motion animator, and have exhibited widely in the Bay Area and nationally. She is active in the Bay Area independent art community and recently concluded a term as co-President of Board of Directors of the Lab, an interdisciplinary experimental non-profit art space in San Francisco’s Mission district. I studied Philosophy and Fine Arts at Amherst College and Sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.
-About Nahema Mehta-
As cofounder and CEO of Absolut Art, Nahema spends every day bridging the gap between artists creating and people collecting by refining art buying through patented design. As a philanthropist, she work with passionate humans to empower over 100,000 young girls through education and healthcare.
She's lived and worked across 4 continents and benefited from an interdisciplinary career path, having worked for Chief Justice Roberts, Merrill Lynch, and Sotheby’s before founding and exiting her own startup, Art Remba.
She shares learnings along the way at conferences like Fast Company's 2017 Most Creative Minds and Innovate46 at the NASDAQ.
-About Andrew Herman-
Andrew Herman is co-founder of the mobile app French Girls. Now located in San Francisco, Andrew was a mechanical engineer by training from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He grew up an avid guitar enthusiast and closet art fan. In 2014, he launched Easyl, a marketplace for original art which then transpired into French girls, an app that enables users to discover and create digital art inspired by photos from the community. He is now responsible for technical oversight of the app.
Find Andrew on Twitter and Instagram.
State of the Art officially turns 1 today! As we approach the end of the year, current SOTA host, Andrew Herman, reflects on his favorite episodes from the podcast's first year of production. In this episode, we revisit our very first interview with Matty Mo, aka "The Most Famous Artist"
Recommended to us by former SOTA guest, Carla Gannis, SOTA is very excited to speak with conceptual artist, Rachel Ara, about her immersive installation, Transubstantiation of Knowledge. The holographic, mixed-reality journey, Transubstantiation of Knowledge, opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in September 2018 installed in the V&A’s Medieval and Renaissance Galleries. The piece takes the form of an audio guide and uses a Hololens allowing visitors to interact with and hear the stories of Franciscan nuns occupying the galleries. The piece is an example of Rachel's art-making approach which selects the medium and material based on the message she wishes to convey. In this episode, Rachel explains her use of tech in Transubstantiation of Knowledge, the inspiration behind the work as well as another piece,This Much I'm Worth, her dedicated trajectory into the art world, and her thoughts on the accessibility of the arts and what it is to be an artist.
-About Rachel Ara-
Conceptual and Data artist Rachel Ara graduated with a Fine Art BA from Goldsmiths College where she won the prestigious Burston award. In 2016 she won the International Aesthetica Art Prize for This Much I’m Worth [the self-evaluating artwork]. Pulling on her experiences as a computer system designer, the digital sculpture draws on data and complex algorithms to calculate its own value in real time.
Her work is nonconformist with a socio-political edge that often incorporates humour and irony with feminist & queer concerns.
Rachel is a Near Now Fellow, awarded to pioneering artists working in technology. She is also artist in residence at the V&A in London.
Learn more here
Tweet her @rachelara
Follow her @rachelara
-About Transubstantiation of Knowledge-
Informed by her research into the museum’s systems and data, Ara is creating a site specific mixed reality work investigating systems of knowledge and power by interweaving stories from Franciscan nuns, computer code and contemporary technologies.
Within the chapel the installation takes the form of an audio guide with a hololens. Using the Hololens the viewer will be able to see and interact with holographic nuns in the chapel. Behind the church are cases with "false" objects mixed into the real V&A collections that substantiate the story and add more intrigue. In the whispering galleries is a soundscape formed out of the voices of the women at the V&A which interact with a giant chestnut and fibre optic loom behind the Eucharist.
-About This Much I'm Worth-
This much I’m worth [The self-evaluating Artwork] is a digital art piece that continually displays its sale value through a series of complex algorithms called "the endorsers". It is constructed with materials that have a history loaded with association. Implicated in the history of neon is its use in the sex trade, its cultural significance today is more commonly a trope of contemporary art. It is both a functional object and spectacle seeking to question values, worth and algorithmic bias.
Paul Golding's extensive technical expertise coupled with his philosophical, problem-solving approach has enabled him to work on a variety of projects, with companies like Motorola, O2 UK, Acision, McLaren Applied Technologies, Navteq, Telefonica, Art.com Inc and Prosper Inc. A visionary with the know-how, skills, and respect to pickup any project, we ask Paul how he became interested in the arts. In this episode, Paul discusses his work in understanding and deconstructing people's aesthetic tastes, the challenges of selling art using e-commerce, and his take on the " “I’ll know it when I see it” approach many buyers take when selecting art for their space.
-About Paul Golding-
As a silicon-chip designer for Motorola, Paul invented (and patented) an AI computing technique that has been used in trillions of cellular calls. He was also a mobile software pioneer, building the world’s first wireless email system and writing several books about apps. His pioneering contribution to mobile led to the rare award of an unsponsored "genius" visa to work in Silicon Valley.
Paul’s recent work involves leading the AI and blockchain R&D efforts for a leading fintech company in San Francisco and previously the design of AI techniques to model human perception of art (to boost art sales). He also built an AI platform for visual collaboration. He has created numerous innovation labs in Europe and Silicon Valley. He is also an IEE prize winner.
Learn more about Paul here
Tweet him @pgolding
As 2018 draws to a close, the team at State of the Art is experimenting with broadening the scope of the podcast to include all aspects of the ever-evolving “art state.” Although our primary interest remains technologically inclined, we are dabbling in opening up our discussions to include elements and viewpoints on the art world beyond the niche of tech to address current events and trends. This new approach is something we plan to seriously pursue and develop in 2019.
To kick us off, we speak with Jon Burgerman, UK artist widely recognized as a professional “doodler” and considered the leading figure in the now popular Doodle art style. In this episode, Jon discusses how doodling became his signature style, what doodling is, why it seems to have resonated with so many, his use of social media as a creative tool to expand his practice, and his thoughts on the commercial versus the fine art world.
-About Jon Burgerman-
Jon Burgerman is a UK born, NYC based artist instigating improvisation and play through drawing and spectacle. He is a purveyor of doodles and is often credited and referenced as the leading figure in the popular 'Doodle' art style.
His work is placed between fine art, urban art and pop-culture, using humor to reference and question his contemporary milieu. His is a pervasive and instantly recognizable aesthetic that exists across a multitude of forms including canvases, large scale murals (indoor and outside), sculpture, toys, apparel, design, print and people (as tattoos and temporary drawings).
Burgerman studied Fine Art at The Nottingham Trent University, graduating in 2001 with First Class Honours.
Read more about Jon here
Follow him @JonBurgerman
Tweet him @JonBurgerman
This episode is near and dear to our hearts at State of the Art as we speak with Dorka Keehn, San Francisco Arts Commissioner who chairs the city's Visual Arts Committee in charge of the city's public art scene. An artist in her own right, and a serious mover and shaker in the community, Dorka explains how the arts is an economic driver in SF, what the city is doing to help artists stay in the city, and how the committee makes decisions about the projects they commission to elevate San Francisco's streets and neighborhoods.
-About Dorka Keehn-
Dorka Keehn is a major force for art in the public realm in the Bay Area. She is the Principal of Keehn On Art, an art consulting firm that specializes in working with city planners, developers and architects on their public art requirements. Projects include Salesforce Tower and the Golden State Warriors Arena. As a San Francisco Arts Commissioner, Dorka chairs the Visual Arts Committee that commission’s all of the city’s public artwork. Additionally, she is the co-founder of Sites Unseen, a project that is bringing arts programming to neglected alleys in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena neighborhood. Dorka also led the fundraising effort for The Bay Lights, the $12M 25,000 LED light installation by artist Leo Villareal for the Bay Bridge.
In this throwback episode, former host, Ethan Appleby, speaks with Travis Uhrig about co-founding Curio Cards, a platform for purchasing, collecting and trading cryptoart. Travis explains the concept behind Curio Cards and the growing medium of cryptoart, how it's beneficial to artists, and why buyers are interested in collecting these digital art pieces.
-About Travis Uhrig-
Travis Uhrig is the lead organizer for the San Francisco Bitcoin Social meetup group, the second largest bitcoin meetup group in the world and the longest-running one to date. He is the co-founder of Curio Cards, a platform for digital trading cards on the Ethereum blockchain.
Follow Travis @travisformayor
In our time exploring the intersection of art and tech on State of the Art podcast, we've spoken with a number of contemporary artists, curators, researchers and innovators incorporating new media in their practice. In this episode, we continue that exploration but take a step back with Joel Slayton, artist, curator, and educator, who has been in the scene since the 70s. Slayton's involvement in the world of art and tech for the past 40 years brings a unique point of view to SOTA, with insight into how tech as a creative medium has evolved over time and continues to do so. In this episode, we discuss what art and tech looked like in the 70s and its progression into the 21st century, Slayton's involvement in spearheading a variety of projects and programs, including Computers in Art, Design, Research, and Education at San Jose State University, and ZERO1, an art and tech network based out of Silicon Valley, and his thoughts on the art state today.
-About Joel Slayton-
Joel Slayton is a pioneering artist, researcher, and curator with over 35 years of experience involving art and technology. His work engages a wide range of practice including media, installation and performance and has been featured in over 100 exhibitions around the world. From 2008-2016 Joel was Executive Director of ZERO1, a Silicon Valley based arts organization where he was responsible for emerging the ZERO1 Biennial, an international exhibition program celebrating creativity and innovation in the arts. Joel is Professor Emeritus at San Jose State University where he was Founding Director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media. He is currently is a collaborator at the Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford University where he is establishing a new artists fellowship program. Joel will be curating the 5th L.A.S.T, Exhibition (Life, Art, Science, and Technology) in 2018 hosted by SLAC National Accelerator at Stanford University. Joel Slayton serves on the Board of Directors of LEONARDO/ISAST (International Society for Arts, Science, and Technology) where he was Editor-In-Chief for the Leonardo-MIT Press Book Series from 1999-2005. He served as Academic Chair for the 2006 International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) hosted by ZERO1. Joel Slayton is a Senior Fellow of the Silicon Valley American Leadership Forum.
Learn more about Joel here
In an age of rapidly evolving tech facilitating a number of things from daily tasks, to communication and research, some subjects trail behind, notably, art history. Replica aims to facilitate art historical research by using machine learning and modern image searching algorithms to help art historians navigate large iconographic collections. In short, Replica aims to go beyond the limitations of search terms and keywords and use images to enable researchers to identify visual information which may not been indexed--textual queries cannot, for example, show results for similar shapes, forms, or motifs. Replica could assist researchers in identifying visual links, pin-pointing when a specific type of iconography emerged and how it has evolved over time.
In this episode, we speak with Benoit Seguin, a computer scientist helping build the Replica search engine. Seguin explains how Replica works, what the mission is, who's involved, and how it can be immensely useful to those interested in art, art history, and visual culture.
-About Replica-
The Replica project led by the DHLAB aims to build the first search engine designed specifically for the search and exploration of artistic collections (including paintings, drawings, engravings, sculpture and photography). This employs the latest state-of-the art artificial intelligence techniques, such as Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks, for the search and display of information.
In partnership with the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice and Factum Arte in Madrid, the Replica project aims to digitize roughly one million artistic reproductions using these images to populate the new search engine and as the basis for new art historical inquiries.
-About Benoit Seguin-
Benoit Seguin is a PhD student at the Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLAB) at EPFL. His main interests lie in Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Image Processing. Benoit's thesis is based on the Replica Project where he implements machine learning and modern image searching algorithms to help art historians navigate large, iconographic collections. Benoit received a Master of Science from EPFL and a Diplôme d’Ingénieur from École Polytechnique.
Ashley Zelinskie uses mathematics as her primary medium, building sculptures and paintings out of numbers and code. Although visually striking to our human-eyes, these creations primarily serve to leave a record of humanity's creativity for a future where machines supplant humans. In this episode, we speak with Ashley about her mission to preserve our human heritage for an unknown future built on mathematics, why she believes math is the universal language, and what prompted her to take this mission upon herself.
-About Ashley Zelinskie-
Ashley Zelinskie is an artist based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her work blurs the lines between art and technology, and spans a variety of media from sculpture to computer programs. After receiving a degree in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design, Ashley began to experiment with the pairing of artistic media and technology. The work she creates now is designed to be appreciated by both human and computer.
This work is not for us. It is for the future. And robots. That is, each of these pieces takes for granted that computers will outlast their makers, that technology will supplant humanity, and that craft should follow suit. This is art for the Singularity. Today, rigorous science and pure math maintain unbridled influence over technology – as such, our digital heirs are slated to inherit nuanced programming and breathtaking technical specifications. Yet we would render a profound disservice by stopping at numeracy and wire: if the Earth need be handed over to machines, we must prepare them not only to be accurate and efficient, but also cultured. Robots need magic. With regard to information density, the mosaic of human social interaction and artistic endeavor is unrivaled in diversity, ambition and depth. We are bound by duty to pass culture forward yet remain constrained by limitations: how can we sufficiently communicate this history and dialog to unknown, unimaginable and unspecified replacements? This work is an attempt to answer that question and, in fact, to begin that process – the process of translating our vast artistic and social history, in familiar language and appropriate media, to machines. Using simple code, recursive structures, redundant patterns, and emergent media in novel combinations, this work transcribes humanity – for a future without it.
Learn more at http://www.ashleyzelinskie.com/
Tweet her @azelinskie
Follow her @azelinskie
Cover art by Graydon Speace
Transmedia artist, Carla Gannis, is perhaps best known for her reinterpretation of art historical masterpieces in contemporary lens, replacing elements with popular iconography--aka, emojis. These tableaus include her piece, Garden of Emoji Delights (2014), a contemporary take on Hieronymus Bosch's famous masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and, more recently, Portraits in Landscape (2018), which premiered in Times Square and is inspired by the sixteenth-century mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
In this episode, Carla tells us about her childhood growing up in the Appalachian mountains within a family that encouraged creative expression, her shift from traditional oil painting to digital media, her journey as an artist whose medium was initially received with bias and skepticism, and why innovations like the internet excite her.
-About Carla Gannis-
Carla Gannis, originally from Oxford, North Carolina, today lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA in painting from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In the late 1990s she began to incorporate digital technologies into her work, and in 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts. Currently she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute.
Gannis identifies as a visual storyteller. With the use of 21st Century representational technologies she narrates through a “digital looking glass” where reflections on power, sexuality, marginalization, and agency emerge. She is fascinated by digital semiotics and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of real and virtual.
Since 2003 Gannis’s work has appeared in over 20 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Her most recent solo exhibitions include “A Subject Self-Defined” at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; “The Garden of Earthly Delights” at The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY and at Kasia Kay Art Projects in Chicago, IL, 2014. In 2013 she collaborated with poet Justin Petropoulos on a transmedia book, installation and net art project entitled published byJaded Ibis Press, Seattle, WA and exhibited at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Recent group exhibitions include “Porn to Pizza – Domestic Clichés” at DAM Gallery, in Berlin Germany and “Beautiful Interfaces” at Reverse Gallery, New York, NY.
Features on her work have appeared in ARTnews, The Creators Project, The Huffington Post, Wired, Buzzfeed, FastCo, Hyperallergic, Art F City, Art Critical, Art Report, The Wallstreet Journal, The New York Timesand The LA Times, among others. Recently her speculative fiction was included in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press. Her recent speaking engagements include “Let’s Get Digital” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and “Cogency in the Imaginarium” at Cooper Union and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has participated in numerous panels on the intersections between art, technology, education and networked culture.
Follow her @carlagannis
Tweet her @carlagannis
Learn more at http://carlagannis.com/
Cover art by Graydon Speace
On July 2, 2018, Artnet published the article "Why Are Artists Poor? New Research Suggests It Could Be Hardwired Into Their Brain Chemistry" bringing our attention to the research of Dr. Roberto Goya-Maldonado and his team. In this episode, we ask Dr. Goya-Maldonado to explain how the study was conducted, the implications of their findings, where he plans on taking the study, and other artist-related correlations he is interested in investigating.
It's a 50th Episode Celebration!
Listen in while host Andrew Herman chats with former host and founder of the the State of the Art, Ethan Appleby about the future of the podcast. You'll hear an update on the vision of the podcast, some of the new rebranding of State of the Art, and what Ethan and Andrew have been up to in their personal lives, too!
Cover art by Graydon Speace
A look back with former host & founder Ethan Appleby featuring the sound bites from 2017, his thoughts on 2017 art trends and his predictions for 2018. Was he spot on?
Feral Horses is a relatively new online platform which, in 2017, launched a radical approach to democratizing art ownership. In response to the high cost of contemporary "fine art" and the subsequent alienation of potential collectors and patrons, Feral Horses proposes communal ownership of single artworks, essentially allowing users to purchase portions of the pieces they love for a fraction of the whole's price. In this episode we speak with Francesco Bellanca, CEO & Co-Founder of Feral Horses, about how the platform works, how it benefits artists and patrons, how Feral's wild team distinguishes between the democratization of ownership versus investment and, ultimately, if such a distinction should matter.
-About Francesco Bellanca-
Francesco Bellanca is the CEO and co-founder of the art and tech startup Feral Horses, he has a background in Data Science, holding an MA from King’s College on Big Data in culture and society, and project management. He is part of the new generation of art entrepreneurs and is an enthusiastic defender of transparency and inclusion in the art market. His vision is to heal the broken interaction between people and art and he is building a platform that uses art co-ownership as a tool to do so.
-About Feral Horses-
Feral Horses is an online trading platform enabling users to acquire and sell shares of artworks for investment purposes. Feral Horses aims at providing a very comprehensive service that brings both liquidity and transparency and facilitates access to the benefits of art in a responsible and sustainable way. The brand has three diverse targets: art enthusiasts, professional traders, and curious achievers. The company operates within the contemporary art investment field, which is overly elitist and underdeveloped. Therefore, the naming had to express the business vision of freeing art investment. The outcome of this reflection is "Feral Horses".
Learn more about Feral Horses here
Tweet them @FeralHorses
Follow them @FeralHorses
We were introduced to the fascinating work of Gabriel Barcia-Colombo when we stumbled across his TedTalk "Capturing memories in video art" in which Gabe discussed his memorialization of friends via virtual and cellular means. His piece, Animalia Chordata, reads like a cabinet of curiosity displaying people trapped in glass jars, individuals who seemingly respond to one's presence; others are a little less humorous and a tad unsettling, like his DNA Vending machine which grants patrons the opportunity to purchase actual DNA samples. In all of his projects, Gabe explores and plays with capturing memories, the role of technology in society, the virtual and physical identities we create across platforms, and so much more.
In this episode, we speak with Gabe about his mixed-media, interactive work, his personal trajectory from cinema to digital art, his projects with Soethby', the reception and role of tech art in the art world, and the future of art and ownership.
-About Gabriel Barcia-Colombo-
Gabriel Barcia-Colombo is a mixed media artist whose work focuses on collections, memorialization and the act of leaving one's digital imprint for the next generation. His work takes the form of video sculptures, immersive performances, large scale projections and vending machines that sell human DNA. His work plays upon this modern exigency in our culture to chronicle, preserve and wax nostalgic, an idea which Barcia-Colombo renders visually by “collecting” human portraits on video.
Gabriel was commissioned to be the first digital artist to show work at the New Fulton Terminal Stop with the MTA Arts & Design program in New York City. His work has been featured in the Volta, Scope, and Art Mrkt art fairs, Victoria & Albert Museum as well as Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library. He recently received an Art and Technology grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where he created "The Hereafter Institute," a company that questions the future of death rituals and memorials and their relationship to technology. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Gabriel served as a member of the artist advisory board at the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the education committee member at the Museum of Art and Design. In 2012 Gabriel gave a TED talk entitled "Capturing Memories in Video Art," and in 2014 he gave another entitled "My DNA Vending Machine" and was awarded a Senior TED fellowship.
In 2016 Gabe founded Bunker.nyc a pop up gallery showcasing emerging art made with technology. Bunker became the first pop up digital art gallery to open in the Sotheby's Auction House in New York Summer 2017. Gabe is a New York Foundation for the Arts grant awardee and faculty member at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
You can learn more about Gabriel Barcia-Colombo here
Follow Gabe @gabebc
Tweet him @gabebc
Cover art by Graydon Speace
From 1967 to 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) ran a revolutionary program which facilitated the partnering of emerging artists with tech and science companies of the time. Among the roster of artists who participated in the first iteration of LACMA's Art + Tech program are Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and James Turrell. Today, LACMA's Art + Tech Lab (est. in 2013) continues this spirit of cross-disciplinary collaboration, funding artist-led projects that wouldn't be achievable without the financial and advisory support offered through the Lab. In this episode, we speak with Joel Ferree, Art + Technology Lab Program Director, about the history of the Lab, the various projects and partnerships that have are offered, and LACMA's commitment to providing the time, space and resources to make possible these creative projects.
-About LACMA's Art + Tech Lab-
Inspired by the spirit of LACMA's original Art and Technology program (1967-1971), which paired artists with technology companies in Southern California, the Art + Technology Lab at LACMA supports artist experiments with emerging technology. Through our sponsors, the Lab provides grants, in-kind support, and facilities at the museum to develop new artist projects. To date, 20 artists from around the world, including Ghana, Ireland, Korea, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland, have received awards through the Art + Technology Lab.
Learn more about the Art + Tech Lab here
Cover art by Graydon Speace
Often times when we think of the convergence of fashion and tech, our minds go to fashionable wears and accessories that compliment or facilitate our mobile technology; in other words, wearable tech. But the Fashion Innovation Agency (FIA) at London College of Fashion asks student designers to think beyond how tech can be fashionable, and ask how tech can revolutionize and further empower how we experience the world of fashion.
In this episode, we speak with Matthew Drinkwater, head of FIA, about the diverse projects he and his students are pursuing, from using augmented and virtual reality to offer new ways of experiencing the runway, to how tech can facilitate the consumer experience.
-About Matthew Drinkwater-
Head of Fashion Innovation Agency (FIA) at London College of Fashion (LCF)
Matthew works at the crossroads of Fashion, Retail and Tech to head up LCF’s Fashion Innovation Agency; Partnering the most exciting designer talent in London with the very latest fashion-tech to create ground-breaking brand collaborations and consultancies across the fashion, retail, lifestyle, cultural and digital industries.
Matthew delivered the world’s first digital skirt for Nokia, wireless charging clothing for Microsoft, a 3D-printed bionic arm to help celebrate the launch of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and what Forbes described as ‘the first example of truly beautiful wearable tech’ for Disney. He was named in the 100 most influential in the world of Wearable Technology, amongst the ‘Top 15 people in UK tech’ by BBC3 and as a ‘fashion-tech trailblazer changing the course of retail’ by Drapers.
Tweet him @drinkmatt
-About the Fashion Innovation Agency-
The Fashion Innovation Agency (FIA) are experts in working with emerging technologies to help designers and brands change the way they make, sell or show their collections. FIA has delivered ground-breaking and award winning projects in wearable technology, AR/VR and Blockchain, and is currently working on major developments within Nanotechnology, IoT and Robotics.
Learn more here
Cover art by Graydon Speace
Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) connects artists and engineers to create innovative solutions for humanity's challenges. Together, artists and technologists at E.A.T. actualize projects that truly seem like science-fiction, often exploring human communication, including empathy and emotion transfer, and always aiming to break beyond the limitations of today’s technology. In this episode, we speak with Domhnaill Hernon, Head of E.A.T. at Nokia Bell Labs about Bell Labs legacy of innovation, the current projects under production, and the program's dedication to expand the role of the artist in contemporary society.
-About Domhnaill Hernon-
Domhnaill Hernon is Head of Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.) at Nokia Bell Labs. He graduated with a B.Eng in Aeronautical Engineering, a Ph.D in fundamental fluid mechanics from the University of Limerick and an Executive M.B.A. from Dublin City University, Ireland. He is passionate about turning research/ideas into reality and exploring the bounds of creativity to push the limits of technology. Domhnaill was previously responsible for turning Bell Labs disruptive research assets into proto-solutions that could be tested at scale in the market, and he established new methods to overcome the “Innovation Valley of Death”. He is currently responsible for Bell Labs global activities in E.A.T. where he collaborates with the artistic and creative community to push the limits of technology to solve the greatest human need challenges.
Learn more about Domhnaill here
Follow him @hernon.domhnaill
Tweet him @DHernonBellLabs
-About Nokia Bell Labs-
Nokia Bell Labs is a global collective of the world's brightest minds, creating the network of the future. Bell Labs has a legacy of developing game-changing technology with eight Nobel Prizes in physics and many other scientific accolades. Today, Bell Labs researchers are focused on new ways of compressing and sharing data while developing disruptive innovations for the next phase of human existence.
Learn more about Nokia Bell Labs here
Follow them @BellLabsNokia
Tweet them @BellLabs
-About Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T)-
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) program was founded in 1967 by Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and was a seminal event in the fusion of art and technology. E.A.T launched with the bringing together of ten New York artists with 30 engineers and scientists from the company. The project? To create collaborative performances that incorporated aspects of art and new technology.
Today, Nokia Bell Labs E.A.T continues to connect artists and engineers to build-out innovative solutions exploring human communication, including empathy and emotion transfer, and to push beyond the limitations of today’s technology. Nokia Bell Labs E.A.T’s projects expand the role of the artist in contemporary society by bringing them directly into the fold within a large technology company.
Learn more here
In this episode we speak with artist and medical professional, Dorothee Chabas, about her work as a neuroesthetician. With 25 years of medical experience under her belt, Dorothee uses neuroscience to explore and understand aesthetic experiences at the brain level. Why do certain colors attract us? What is it about art that moves us? What is going on when artists create artworks and how do viewers process them? These are the questions Dorothee's work as a neuroesthetician aims to answer and learn more about.
-About Dorothee Chabas-
Dorothee is a French-American painter and MD PhD (neurologist) based out of San Francisco. She shares her time between painting and neuroesthetics.
Dorothee has been drawing all her life. She practiced live model painting more formally in the nineties at the Ateliers des Beaux Arts de la Mairie de Paris, France, and then at the Sharon Art Studio, San Francisco, CA. More recently, she spent three years painting and drawing full time at the San Francisco Studio School.
Dorothee has practiced Neurology for many years, first in Paris, then at the University of California, San Francisco, where she co-founded the Regional Pediatric Multiple Sclerosis Center. Her research work on multiple sclerosis performed at Stanford University and UCSF has been internationally recognized.
Learn more here
András Szántó's consulting foundation assists with all aspects of building museums, cultural organizations, commercial brands, foundations, and educational institutions worldwide, at any point of their conception. From launching concepts from the ground up, to implementing new programming and marketing initiatives, Szántó's expertise in the industry has enabled several projects across the world with collaborators such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Absolut, Art Basel, BMW, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
In this episode, we discuss Szántó's background in sociology which allowed him to closely study the dynamics of the art world in the 1980s, his mentorship under art critic and philosopher, Arthur Danto--who famously coined the term "art world"--and his perspective on demystifying the arts.
-About András Szántó-
András Szántó, Ph.D. is writer, researcher, and consultant in the fields of art, media, and philanthropy. He is the former director of the National Arts Journalism Program and the NEA Arts Journalism Institute at Columbia University, a regular moderator of the Art Basel Conversations series, and oversees the annual Global Museum Leaders Colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Learn more about András Szántó here
Follow him @andrasszanto
We continue our discussion with speakers from CODAME's Art + Tech Festival, ARTOBOTS, held at The Midway in June. Part 2 features one-on-one, on-site conversations with robotics professor Amy LaViers, technologist and performer, Catie Cuan, and NPR correspondent, Laura Sydell.
In this episode, collaborators Amy LaViers and Catie Cuan from the Robotics, Automation, Dance (RAD) Lab at the University of Illinois discuss their research on incorporating natural movement into robots, how dance plays a role in this study, and their performance piece, Time to Compile. We conclude the episode with an amazing conversation with NPR Digital Culture correspondent, Laura Sydell, who shares insight on how and why artists and criminals will shape the future of technology.
Thank you CODAME for inviting us to cover this awesome event, and a special shoutout to Vanessa Chang, CODAME curator, for personally extending the invitation to us. You can listen to our interview with Vanessa Chang here.
-About Amy LaViers-
Assistant Professor, Mechanical Science and Engineering — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Amy develops high-level abstractions for expressive robotic systems and study human-machine interaction. She lead two interdisciplinary teams toward this end: her research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab, and her start up, AE Machines. Amy is also passionate about teaching engineers to write and roboticists to dance and about bringing artists into the design of technology. This work applies to manufacturing, national defense, personal robots, entertainment, engineering education, somatic practices, and art -- to name a few!
Tweet her @alaviers
Learn more about Amy here
-About Catie Cuan-
Catie Cuan is an artist and technologist based out of Brooklyn. As a performer she has worked with the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Lisa Bielawa/KCET, Katherine Helen Fisher, Clare Cook, NY Fashion Week, and CATAPULT Entertainment, as well as Broadway choreographer Peggy Hickey. Her own choreography has been presented at venues and festivals such as the Actors Fund Arts Center, DanceNOW Raw, the Brooklyn Dance Festival, Zellerbach (Berkeley), NY Theater Barn, New York Musical Festival, and The Tank, where she won the inaugural XYZNYC Choreography Competition. Her passion for technology is evidenced by her previous work experience at Google/YouTube and Bain & Company before joining Color + Information, a digital creative agency, as Vice President. She is currently a digital consultant and avid VR researcher. She graduated with High Honors from UC Berkeley with a dual degree in Business Administration and Dance and was a visiting student at the University of Oxford, New College.
Catie Cuan is also a 2018 TED Resident and ThoughtWorks Arts Resident.
Learn more about Catie here
Follow Catie @itscatie
-About Laura Sydell-
Laura Sydell fell in love with the intimate storytelling qualities of radio, which combined her passion for theatre and writing with her addiction to news. Over her career she has covered politics, arts, media, religion, and entrepreneurship. Currently Sydell is the Digital Culture Correspondent for NPR's All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and NPR.org.
Sydell's work focuses on the ways in which technology is transforming our culture and how we live. For example, she reported on robotic orchestras and independent musicians who find the Internet is a better friend than a record label as well as ways technology is changing human relationships.
Tweet her @Sydell
Learn more about her interest in artists & criminals here
-About CODAME-
Sparked by the network of creative coders, designers, and artists that Bruno Fonzi and Jordan Gray knew from around the world, CODAME was founded to celebrate their passion for art and technology. The CODAME brand of immersive, engaging, and out of the ordinary experiences was coined at the inaugural CODAME ART+TECH Festival in 2010 on a foggy rooftop in downtown San Francisco. CODAME builds ART+TECH projects and nonprofit events to inspire through experience.
Follow them @codame
Tweet them @codame
Learn more here
State of the Art Podcast was invited to attend and speak with participants in CODAME's Art + Tech Festival, ARTOBOTS at The Midway earlier this month. Part 1 features one-on-one on-site conversations with artists Alexander Reben and Meredith Tromble on art and AI. We conclude the episode with a fascinating conversation with UC Berkeley artist and professor, Ken Goldberg, on the "uncanny valley."
Thank you CODAME for inviting us to cover this awesome event, and a special shoutout to Vanessa Chang, CODAME curator, for personally extending the invitation to us. You can listen to our interview with Vanessa Chang here.
-About Alexander Reben-
Alexander Reben is an artist and roboticist who explores humanity through the lens of art and technology. His 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.
Projects referred to in this episode: Boxie, Headgasmatron, and Pulse Machine
Learn more at http://areben.com/
-About Meredith Tromble-
Meredith Tromble is a multimedia artist, writer, performer, and teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Learn more about Meredith at http://meredithtromble.net/
-About Ken Goldberg-
Ken Goldberg is an artist, inventor, and UC Berkeley Professor focusing on robotics. He was appointed the William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering and serves as Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. He has secondary appointments in EECS, Art Practice, the School of Information, and Radiation Oncology at the UCSF Medical School. Ken is Director of the CITRIS "People and Robots" Initiative and the UC Berkeley AUTOLAB where he and his students pursue research in machine learning for robotics and automation in warehouses, homes, and operating rooms. Ken developed the first provably complete algorithms for part feeding and part fixturing and the first robot on the Internet. Despite agonizingly slow progress, he persists in trying to make robots less clumsy. He has over 250 peer-reviewed publications and 8 U.S. Patents. He co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. Ken's artwork has appeared in 70 exhibits including the Whitney Biennial and films he has co-written have been selected for Sundance and nominated for an Emmy Award. Ken was awarded the NSF PECASE (Presidential Faculty Fellowship) from President Bill Clinton in 1995, elected IEEE Fellow in 2005 and selected by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for the George Saridis Leadership Award in 2016. He lives in the Bay Area and is madly in love with his wife, filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, and their two daughters.
Tweet him @Ken_Goldberg
-About CODAME-
Sparked by the network of creative coders, designers, and artists that Bruno Fonzi and Jordan Gray knew from around the world, CODAME was founded to celebrate their passion for art and technology. The CODAME brand of immersive, engaging, and out of the ordinary experiences was coined at the inaugural CODAME ART+TECH Festival in 2010 on a foggy rooftop in downtown San Francisco. CODAME builds ART+TECH projects and nonprofit events to inspire through experience.
Follow them @codame
Tweet them @codame
Learn more here
-About ARTOBOTS-
June 4-7, 2018 @ The Midway, San Francisco
The annual CODAME ART+TECH Festival is a four-day conference with workshops, talks and nightlife events with immersive, engaging, out of the ordinary experiences. The festival features gallery installations, screenings, and performances.
This year’s ART+TECH Festival, codenamed #ARTOBOTS, examines the sphere of robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence. Through art, discussion, play and performance, CODAME probes these potentials.
Vince Kadlubek pioneered the creative force that is Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe artist collective dedicated to building interactive and immersive experiences to transport visitors of all ages into fantastic realms ripe for exploration. In this episode we speak with Vince about how Meow Wolf achieve its impressive level of success, what Meow Wolf's ethos is, and where/how he sees tech is enabling the arts.
-About Vince Kadlubek-
Vince Kadlubek is the Co-founder and CEO of Meow Wolf, an arts collective that has transformed into a remarkable, award winning arts production company. After leading Meow Wolf to win the inaugural startup competition from Creative Startups Vince created the business plan for Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return. In the last year he has started 3 new thriving businesses. He is the chair of the Santa Fe, New Mexico planning commission. Vince is a native of Santa Fe and is deeply committed to supporting local growth as well as bringing unique, indescribable, immersive art experiences to the world. His unorthodox approach to business has helped pave the way to Meow Wolf’s unprecedented success.
Follow Vince @VinceKadlubek
Tweet him @VinceKadlubek
-About Meow Wolf-
Meow Wolf creates immersive, interactive experiences to transport audiences of all ages into fantastic realms of story and exploration. The group’s first permanent installation, launched in March 2016 with support from Game Of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin, showcases the THEA Award-winning House of Eternal Return, where guests discover a multidimensional mystery house with secret passages, portals to magical worlds, climbing apparatus, and surreal, maximalist & mesmerizing art exhibits along with a children’s learning center, top ten in the U.S. music venue and cafe area.
The company is composed of nearly 200 artists across all disciplines including architecture, sculpture, painting, photography and video production, virtual and augmented reality, music and audio engineering, narrative writing, costuming and performance, and more. Basically everything.
Follow Meow Wolf @meow_wolf
Tweet them @MeowWolf
Everyone is familiar with MIT and the university's reputation as a serious force in the world of science, tech, and research, but how many are aware of MIT's legacy in the arts? Did you know that MIT's founder had envisioned incorporating the arts from the very beginning?
In this episode we speak with Leila Kinney and Evan Ziporyn of MIT's Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) about MIT's culture of creativity and exploration, the institution's mission to humanize science and tech, and the exciting projects that have emerged from CAST, like Tomás Saraceno's Arachnid Orchestra.
-About Leila Kinney-
Leila W. Kinney is the Executive Director of Arts Initiatives and of the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), working with Associate Provost Philip S. Khoury, the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P), the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), the Creative Arts Council, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the MIT Museum, to advance the arts at MIT in the areas of strategic planning, cross-school collaborations, communications and resource development.
Kinney is an art historian with experience in both SA+P, where she was on the faculty in the History, Theory and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture (HTC) and SHASS, where she taught in the Program in Women’s Studies and in Comparative Media Studies. She specializes in modern art, with an emphasis on media in transition, arts institutions and artists’ engagement with mass culture. She is a member of the Executive Committee of a2ru (Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities) and of the Advisory Committees of the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the MIT Museum.
-About Evan Ziporyn-
Evan Ziporyn makes music at the crossroads between genres and cultures, and between East and West. He studied at the Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and UC Berkeley with Joseph Schwantner, Martin Bresnick, and Gerard Grisey. He first traveled to Bali in 1981, studying with Madé Lebah, Colin McPhee’s 1930s musical informant. He returned on a Fulbright in 1987.
Earlier that year, he performed a clarinet solo at the First Bang on a Can Marathon in New York. His involvement with Bang on a Can continued for twenty five years. In 1992, he co-founded the Bang on a Can All-stars (Musical America’s 2005 Ensemble of the Year), with whom he toured the globe and premiered over one hundred commissioned works, collaborating with Nik Bartsch, Iva Bittova, Don Byron, Ornette Coleman, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore, Terry Riley, and Tan Dun. He co-produced their seminal 1996 recording of Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports,” as well as their most recent CD, “Big Beautiful Dark & Scary” (2012).
Ziporyn joined the MIT faculty in 1990, founding Gamelan Galak Tika in 1993, and beginning a series of groundbreaking compositions for gamelan & Western instruments. These include three evening-length works, 2001’s “ShadowBang,” 2004’s “Oedipus Rex” (Robert Woodruff, director), and 2009’s “A House in Bali,” an opera which joins Western singers with Balinese traditional performers, and the Bang on a Can All-stars with a full gamelan. It received its world premiere in Bali that summer and its New York premiere at BAM Next Wave in October 2010.
As a clarinetist, Ziporyn recorded the definitive version of Steve Reich’s multi-clarinet “New York Counterpoint” in 1996, sharing in that ensemble’s Grammy in 1998. In 2001, his solo clarinet CD, “This is Not A Clarinet,” made Top Ten lists across the country. His compositions have been commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road, Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Maya Beiser, So Percussion, Wu Man, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with whom he recorded his most recent CD, “Big Grenadilla/Mumbai” (2012). His honors include awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2011); The Herb Alpert Foundation (2011); USA Artists Walker Fellowship (2007); MIT’s Gyorgy Kepes Prize (2006); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard Lieberson Fellowship (2004); as well as commissions from Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA and the Rockefeller MAP Fund. Recordings of his works have been been released on Cantaloupe, Sony Classical, New Albion, New World, Koch, Naxos, Innova, and CRI.
He is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT. He also serves as Head of Music and Theater Arts, and in 2012 was appointed inaugural Director of MIT’s Center for Art Science & Technology. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with Christine Southworth, and has two children, Leonardo (19) and Ava (12).
-About MIT CAST-
The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) creates new opportunities for art, science and technology to thrive as interrelated, mutually informing modes of exploration, knowledge and discovery. CAST’s multidisciplinary platform presents performing and visual arts programs, supports research projects for artists working with science and engineering labs, and sponsors symposia, classes, workshops, design studios, lectures and publications. The Center is funded in part by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The Museu do Amanhã, or The Museum of Tomorrow, looks like something that emerged from the unexplored depths of the ocean to grace the sunny shores of Brazil's Rio de Janeiro. Housed inside is an extraordinary overview of our history, from the cosmos and emergence of Earth to our present day and a variety of "tomorrows" as influenced by humans impact on the planet. The Museum uses digital media, art, tech, and data to create narratives that guide visitors on a powerful and informative journey though the ages and into the future, all the while addressing the need for change if humankind is to avoid extinction. In this episode we speak with the Museum's Exhibitions Manager, Leonardo Menezes about how and why The Museum of Tomorrow "combines the accuracy of science with the expressiveness of art" in its presentation, what their mission is, and where they see the future is headed.
-About The Museu do Amanhã (The Museum of Tomorrow)-
A new icon of the modernization of Rio de Janeiro’s harbor, the Museum of Tomorrow was born in the Praça Mauá as a science museum meant to explore, imagine, and conceive all the possibilities for constructing the future.
An experimental museum, where the content is presented through a narrative that combines the accuracy of science with the expressiveness of art, using technology as a support in interactive environments and audiovisual and gaming facilities created from scientific studies conducted by experts and data released all over the world.
Designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the building - whose organic shapes were inspired by the bromeliads of the Botanic Garden of the city - occupies an area of 15 thousand square meters, surrounded by reflecting pools, gardens, a bike lane, and a leisure area, all adding up to 34.6 thousand square meters of the Píer Mauá.
The Museum of Tomorrow is an initiative of the administration of the city of Rio de Janeiro, conceived and carried out along the Roberto Marinho Foundation, an institution associated with the Grupo Globo, and has the Santander bank as its main sponsor. It also has the support of Shell, the administration of the state of Rio de Janeiro (through the Environment Office), and the Federal Government (through FINEP, the Projects and Studies Financing). The institution is part of a museum network supported by the Local Cultural Office. The IDG (Institute of Development and Management), a cultural non-profit, is responsible for the administration of the museum.
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In addition to being a curator at CODAME, a community of innovators shaping the future through playful launches of art and tech projects, Vanessa Chang lectures at California College of the Arts and holds a PhD in “Modern Thought and Literature” from Stanford University. In this episode, Vanessa shares her background and interest in art and tech, insights into the projects CODAME is involved in, addresses the importance of play in art, and questions the general perception of what "tech" is. She also shares some sneakpeaks into CODAME's upcoming art and tech festival ARTOBOTS, opening June 4, 2018 at The Midway, 900 Marin St, San Francisco.
Follow Vanessa @allsfairinvanessy
-About CODAME-
Sparked by the network of creative coders, designers, and artists that Bruno Fonzi and Jordan Gray knew from around the world, CODAME was founded to celebrate their passion for art and technology. The CODAME brand of immersive, engaging, and out of the ordinary experiences was coined at the inaugural CODAME ART+TECH Festival in 2010 on a foggy rooftop in downtown San Francisco. CODAME builds ART+TECH projects and nonprofit events to inspire through experience.
Follow them @codame
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Learn more here
CODAME ART + TECH FESTIVAL: ARTOBOTS | June 4-7, 2018 @ The Midway, San Francisco
The annual CODAME ART+TECH Festival is a four-day conference with workshops, talks and nightlife events with immersive, engaging, out of the ordinary experiences. The festival features gallery installations, screenings, and performances.
This year’s ART+TECH Festival, codenamed #ARTOBOTS, examines the sphere of robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence. Through art, discussion, play and performance, CODAME probes these potentials.
Cover Art by Graydon Speace
In a city where the tension between artists and techies is palpable, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has pushed exhibitions, programs and projects that bridge the two spheres, like their inventive video series ARTIST CRIBS, their seamless museum app, and their experimental PlaySFMOMA initiative. Erica Gangsei, head of Interpretive Media at SFMOMA and a working artist in her own right, shares her thoughts on tech's place in the museum and the "art world" at large.
-About Erica Gangsei-
As Head of Interpretive Media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Erica Gangsei leads a team of multimedia storytellers to create award winning digital resources such as audio tours, video interviews with artists, in-museum interpretive gallery spaces, games, and the podcast Raw Material. As a multidisciplinary artist, she is heavily involved in the Bay Area arts community, and has volunteered her time for organizations such as the Lab, Root Division, Headlands Center for the Arts and Adobe Books. Erica also has a passionate interest in games, and is the founder of the museum's PlaySFMOMA initiative, which presents pop-up arcades, game jams, lectures, workshops, and a game designer-in-residence series. She studied Philosophy and Fine Arts and Amherst College and Sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Follow Erica @ericagangsei
Tweet her @ericagangsei
Cover Art by Graydon Speace
Nancy Cahill creates intensely fragmented forms pulsing with momentum that threaten to explode of their paper confines. Well, her creations did just that earlier this year when she partnered with a developer to create her augmented reality app, 4th Wall, which allows users to place her VR drawings within their own environment, anytime, anywhere. The app also allows users to virtually visit her LA studio, and to experience an AR hologram of her discussing the conceptual underpinnings of her work.
In this episode, we talk with Nancy about her journey from "traditional" art mediums to VR and AR projects, the disconnect between the art and tech worlds, and where she sees virtual reality is headed.
-About Nancy Baker Cahill-
Nancy Baker Cahill is a multi-disciplinary artist and founder of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) app which allows users to place art in 360 degrees anywhere in the world. She received her B.A. from Williams College. 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 also the recipient of an ARC Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation and will be a featured TEDx speaker in September 2018 in Pasadena.
Solo exhibition highlights include the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Ochi Projects, her Virtual Reality (VR) public art project on the IF (Innovation Foundation) sponsored Sunset Digital Billboards, and a VR/AR event at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in April 2018. She has been profiled by Forbes Magazine, Fast Company, The Smithsonian Magazine, The Art Newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, KCET’s award-winning “Artbound” series, Aesthetica, Good Magazine, LA Magazine, LA Weekly, Peripheral Vision Arts and on several podcasts, including Feminist Crush 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.
Follow Nancy @nancybakercahill or @4thwallapp
Learn more about Nancy here
What happens when you quantify art? Can breaking down art into data and stats help create a better collection and smarter collectors? Jason Bailey, self-identified artist turned analytics nerd, is the founder of the Artnome blog and creator of a massive online database of the world's best known artists which he says is “moneyball for art”, which he believes will revolutionize the way we engage with, understand, and purchase art.
-About Jason Bailey-
Jason is mission driven to use technology and data to improve the world's art historical record and to improve opportunities for artists from historically underserved or marginalized groups. He has an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. You can read more about Artnome here and catch Jason's podcast on blockchain art and cryptocurrency at Dank Rares.
For our international and globetrotting listeners, be sure to checkout Jason's panel discussion, "Blockchain in the Art World – Digital Art", at Christie's Art + Tech Summit, July 17, 2018.
-About Artnome-
Artnome explores art through data.
Artnome is the blog of Jason Bailey, an art nerd building the world's largest analytical database of known works across our most important artists. Think Zillow / Moneyball for art and artists.
Follow @artnome on Instagram or Twitter
Earlier this year, Google's Art & Culture app went viral for their selfie-matching tool which allowed users to discover their likeness in paintings across art institutions from around the world. In this episode, we chat with Suhair Kahn, project manager at Google Arts & Culture, where a team of creative engineers and cultural enthusiasts are making it their mission to connect everyone, everywhere with cultural content. Suhair shares why Google is invested in arts and culture, what the thinking was behind their selfie-project, how the Arts & Culture team uses tech to create engaging content, and gives insight into future projects they're currently working on and excited about.
-About Suhair Khan-
Suhair Khan is a culturally diverse globetrotter having grown up between Milan, London and South Asia. She is the lead on Google Arts & Culture projects and collaborations in multiple countries, including the UK, Australia, Indonesia, and Korea. Suhair works primarily out of Google's London Office.
Tweet her @SuhairK
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-About Google Arts & Culture-
Google Arts & Culture is a sector of Google's Cultural Institute, initiatives that emerged from Google's 20% project in which Googlers dedicate 20% of their time to programs that aren’t core to their role. The key goal of the Cultural Institute is to make the world's important art and cultural materials accessible to everyone, everywhere by preserving it for the future, online.
Twitter @googlearts
Insta @googleartsculture
We sat down with Hadi Eldebek, founder and CEO of Grantpa, a website that connects artists, dancers, musicians, and other creatives with grant money worldwide. A musician himself, Hadi wondered how many people apply for grants versus how many receive them, and, after canvasing among his friends and relatives, he learned that the majority did not even bother to apply because of the time investment and intimidation factor of submitting an application.
In this episode, Hadi discusses how Grantpa works for grant-seekers to make the application process as simple and time-saving as possible, what it’s like being a TED resident, and why the idea that “artists must be poor” is an expectation he is working towards breaking.
- About GrantPA -
GrantPA is a discoverability platform that matches individuals and organizations with grants they are eligible for. GrantPA saves you time by matching you with the grants relevant to you. Learn more about Grantpa here.
Julia Kaganskiy, Director of New Museum’s multidisciplinary development program, NEW INC, has had a fascinating journey into the world of art and tech with a number of amazing stops along the way. Her ambitions led her from a childhood dream of becoming an arts and culture editor, to a dream job that unifies all her interests in one melting pot bubbling with creative thinkers and innovators. In this episode, Julia shares how experiences as diverse as heading VICE's Creators Project to transforming the landscape of Coachella (before art was a given there), perfectly positioned her at the intersection of art and tech and informed her leadership at NEW INC.
Julia also delves into the value of creative thinking in tech, what artists bring to the table as divergent thinkers, and how NEW INC is putting the training artists receive to use in innovative ways outside of the traditional artist studio.
- About NEW INC -
NEW INC gives creative practitioners the tools they need to build sustainable practices and launch projects that impact, promote, and amplify culture by exploring new ideas at the intersection of art, technology, and design.
“Is Art for Everyone?”, a discussion about how tech is disrupting the traditional art world model originally recorded live at The Battery in San Francisco on April 11th, 2018.
Our panelists include Erica Gangsei, head of Interpretive Media @SFMoma, Jen Bekman, Founder of 20x200, and Andrew Herman, founder of French Girls & MiniCanvas.
These guest speakers offer a comprehensive and insightful overview of what “art for everyone” means, how tech is democratizing the arts, and what accessibility barriers artists and collectors face today. Together they answer questions like, how has technology democratized the art world? What roadblocks have they seen in their diverse fields? And, is “art for everyone” a concept that has or can be embraced by all?
Scott Belsky is like Batman: he’s not the hero we deserve, but he’s the one that we need. Creatives can be unorganized and idealistic. They tend to not be the most business oriented people. Scott has spent his entire career creating and improving tools, frameworks, and infrastructures that help make ideas happen. His work helps creators treat themselves more like businesses, and makes creative people and tools accessible to more businesses. His work is maybe best epitomized in the founding mission of Behance: connecting the best creative talent to the best opportunities.
This episode is nourishment for your creative soul.
- About Scott Belsky -
Scott Belsky is an executive, entrepreneur, author, and investor (and all-around product obsessive). He currently serves as Adobe's Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. Scott's passion is to make the creative world more productive, connected, and adaptive to new technologies. Scott co-founded Behance in 2006, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. Millions of people use Behance to display their portfolios, as well as track and find top talent across the creative industries. After Behance's acquisition, Scott helped reboot Adobe's mobile product strategy and led Behance until 2016, when he spent a few years as an investor and advisor to multiple businesses. Alongside his role at Adobe, Scott is a Venture Partner at Benchmark - a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, an early-stage investor, and is co-founder and Executive Chairman of Prefer, a referrals platform that empowers the careers of independent professionals (aka "Soloists").
You can follow Scott on Twitter or Instagram @scottbelsky.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
Before exiting her own start up (Art Remba) to co-found and become CEO of Absolut Art, Nahema Mehta did stints working for the Supreme Court, Merrill Lynch, and Sotheby’s. Her cross disciplinary life makes her the perfect person to run Absolut Art, a company dedicated to becoming the place people go to buy art, that also happens to be the little brother of that well known vodka company. In today’s episode Nahema and Ethan talk about Absolut’s incredible 30 year history supporting artists, why it’s important to tell artists’ stories, and how to create a seamless art experience, from discovery to display.
- About Nahema Mehta -
As co-founder and CEO of Absolut Art, Nahema spends every day bridging the gap between artists creating and people collecting by refining art buying through patented design. As a philanthropist, she works with passionate humans to empower over 100,000 young girls through education and healthcare.
She's lived and worked across 4 continents and benefited from an interdisciplinary career path, having worked for Chief Justice Roberts, Merrill Lynch, and Sotheby’s before founding and exiting her own startup, Art Remba.
She shares learnings along the way at conferences like Fast Company's 2017 Most Creative Minds and Innovate46 at the NASDAQ.
- About Absolut Art -
At Absolut Art, our goal is to inspire more people to live with contemporary art. We get that the scene can be intimidating, but we’re not. We personally trek across the globe with respected curators to scout trailblazing artists that are loved by locals and collected by museums like MoMA. Then we bring their incredible work straight to your walls - signed, numbered and professionally framed. Simple.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
We're excited to bring your our Art and Tech panel, originally recorded live from the podcast stage at SXSW March 15, 2018. Our panelists were Erica Gangsei, head of Interpretive Media @SFMoma, Nahema Mehta, Co-Founder and CEO of Absolut Art, and (State of the Art Alumni) Andrew Herman, founder of French Girls & MiniCanvas. Our panelists got on like three peas in a pod and tackled some of the major questions we try to answer here at State of the Art. Questions like, how has technology democratized the art world? Has has the maturation of the art ecosystem changed the experience of buying art? And what's more important, sexy work, or un-sexy work?
-About Erica Gangsei-
Erica Gangsei, is Manager of Interpretive Media in the Education department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She researches, writes and co-produces educational multimedia materials such as audio tours, artist video interviews, podcasts, kiosk-based and online interactive features, and onsite educational spaces. Most recently, she curated ArtGameLab, an exhibition at SFMOMA of crowd-sourced game prototypes. Her professional research interests include crowd-sourced and assignment-based artwork, alternate reality games, institutional critique, and avant-garde culture as an engine of broader social and political change. She is also a sculptor, performer, conceptual artist and stop-motion animator, and have exhibited widely in the Bay Area and nationally. She is active in the Bay Area independent art community and recently concluded a term as co-President of Board of Directors of the Lab, an interdisciplinary experimental non-profit art space in San Francisco’s Mission district. I studied Philosophy and Fine Arts at Amherst College and Sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.
-About Nahema Mehta-
As cofounder and CEO of Absolut Art, Nahema spends every day bridging the gap between artists creating and people collecting by refining art buying through patented design. As a philanthropist, she work with passionate humans to empower over 100,000 young girls through education and healthcare.
She's lived and worked across 4 continents and benefited from an interdisciplinary career path, having worked for Chief Justice Roberts, Merrill Lynch, and Sotheby’s before founding and exiting her own startup, Art Remba.
She shares learnings along the way at conferences like Fast Company's 2017 Most Creative Minds and Innovate46 at the NASDAQ.
-About Andrew Herman-
Andrew Herman is co-founder of the mobile app French Girls. Now located in San Francisco, Andrew was a mechanical engineer by training from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He grew up an avid guitar enthusiast and closet art fan. In 2014, he launched Easyl, a marketplace for original art which then transpired into French girls, an app that enables users to discover and create digital art inspired by photos from the community. He is now responsible for technical oversight of the app.
Find Andrew on Twitter and Instagram.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
In Jonathan T.D.Neil’s decades long career, he’s been an art critic, an art educator, an art consultant, an art historian, and even an architect. His diverse background makes him uniquely suited to comment on macro trends in the art world, and lead him to start a brand new interdisciplinary MA in Art Business, and Information Systems and Technology at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Los Angeles; where he is the Director, and Head of Global Business Development. In today’s episode, he and Ethan chat about what makes Sotheby’s different from other art schools, what his hopes are for graduates of his new MA program, and where he sees the art world going in the near future.
- About Jonathan T.D. Neil -
Jonathan T. D. Neil is head of Global Business Development for Sotheby’s Institute of Art and founding Director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art – Los Angeles, a partnership with Claremont Graduate University, the Getty Leadership Institute, the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management and CGU’s School of Arts and Humanities. He also serves as Associate Editor for ArtReviewmagazine.
From 2011-2015 he was editor of the Held Essays on Visual Art for The Brooklyn Rail, and from 2008 until 2014 he was Executive Editor at The Drawing Center in New York. In 2005 he co-founded Boyd Level LLC, a private curatorial firm and consultancy that specializes in contemporary art.
Jonathan has a PhD in 20th-century Art History from Columbia University and a B.Arch from Cornell University. He has taught courses on modern and contemporary art and architectural history, the international art market, critical writing, critical theory, and the history of photography at Columbia University, Parsons The New School for Design, and the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. He is a member of the New York Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).
Jonathan can be contacted directly at jonathan.neil@cgu.edu. You can follow him on Twitter or Instagram @jtdneil.
- About Sotheby’s Institute of Art -
Evolving from a small connoisseurship program begun by Sotheby's Auction House in 1969 Sotheby's Institute is now the leader in art business education and object based learning.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
In this episode Ethan chats with Christina Steinbrecher-Pfant, artistic director, of Viennacontemporary art fair. They touch on the hackathon hosted by Viennacontemporary and other art groups and startups as well as the future of tech at art fairs and how Viennacontemporary tries to help their attendees.
Viennacontemporary
Viennacontemporary is an international fair for contemporary art in Vienna, Austria. Since 2015, it takes place annually in the fourth week of September at the Marx Halle, located in St. Marx, a part of Vienna's third district. Besides its focus on Central- and Eastern Europe viennacontemporary presents international and Austrian galleries showcasing young and established contemporary artists.
You can find them at www.viennacontemporary.at/en/ or @vc_artfair on instagram and twitter.
About Vango Studio
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
Moenen Erbuer has founded not one, but two art tech startups. In this episode he shares his uncommon views about the art world: how it works, who it caters to, and if it is capable of change. He also shares what might be in store for the future for PRNCPL.
About Moenen Erbuer
Moenen is the co-founder of Curiator.com and PRNCPL. He is a visual designer, born and raised in Brussels, with extensive experience in the research, design and development of interfaces for a variety of products ranging from financial trading software to commercial web applications. Before starting Curiator, Moenen worked at AKQA, a digital innovation agency, where he was the creative lead on the Google account, and worked on a wide variety of clients like Lego, Coca-Cola, Thomson Reuters and Cinemax.
About PRNCPL
PRNCPL is a new technology platform for the art industry. The primary focus of PRNCPL is to help art fairs manage their data, and to create the best possible digital experience for its galleries, collectors and visitors.
PRNCPL is mostly a back-office platform only accessible to the art fair team, but during Art Düsseldorf in November 2017, we’ll be launching an important first public-facing extension of our platform. Find them at www.prncpl.com
About Vango Studio
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
Everybody knows Ello; but few people understand the roller coaster ride that brought Ello into the public eye and then took it back to the art world. In this episode Ethan talks with Ello Co-Founder and CEO, Todd Berger, about the turns Ello took over the course of its development, what the Ello community looks like now, and what is in store for the future of Ello.
About Todd Berger
Todd Berger is a cofounder and the CEO of Ello, The Creators Network. He has spent the past 19 years practicing contemporary graphic design, conceptual art and brand strategy. Along with his business partner, Lucian, their design studio, Berger & Föhr is internationally recognized and they have extensively exhibited and published around the world.
About Ello
Ello is The Creators Network, a publishing and collaboration platform connecting and supporting a global community of artists. Founded in 2013 by a collection of artists & designers, Ello re-imagines the future of creative work by providing a contemporary forum and virtual workplace for artists, brands, agencies, publishers, and their fans. Find them at Ello.co
About Vango Studio
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
Send Me SFMOMA is the perfect storm of genius in art and tech. It makes exploring art fun, interesting, and accessible. In this episode, Ethan talks with Jay Mollica, creative technologist at SFMOMA, about how the app came to be, what the response was, and what's next.
About Jay Mollica
Jay Mollica joined SFMOMA in July of 2015. As the museum's Creative Technologist, he pursues innovative and experimental digital initiatives while also maintaining and extending wonderful existing projects such as Open Space. One of his goals is to bring SFMOMA's collection to the public in new and perhaps unexpected ways, this manifests itself in projects like the viral texting service Send Me SFMOMA.
About Vango Studio
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
Art can save lives. And for both Brandolon Barnett and Messay Derebe art did save their lives. And art brought them together. Now they want to bring art to everyone by making it accessible and affordable to dip your toes into the art world. Hence goARTful was born. This startup allows individuals or companies to rent art from local artists and switch out the art as much as they want.
Brandolon Barnett, co-Founder and co-CEO
Brandolon has a love for music and the arts that comes from his time as a performer, his love of anime and photography, and graduate research into the importance of the arts for economic development.
Brandolon holds an MA in International Studies with a specialization in International Economics from the University of London SOAS. He brings to Artful a wide range of experience within the social enterprise and social impact space. He has successfully managed NGO programs in major US markets and on the ground in 5 countries, worked as as analytics manager for Frontstream/TRUiST, as a senior researcher with the Council on Foundations, and as a corporate social responsibility consultant with Global Impact.
He has also acted as the first Director and leader of Growfund (mygrowfund.org), shepherding a $1 million seed investment in the startup and bringing the platform from 160 to thousands of potential users in its first year. Brandolon is a respected speaker on topics related to diversity in philanthropy, impact measurement, impact investing, giving trends, and social innovation. He has been invited to speak at the 2014 Conference for Sustainable Cultural Heritage Management in Rome, the 2016 conference of the Association for Corporate Contributions Professionals (ACCProf), the 2016 Blackbaud Conference, 2017 SXSW, 2017 SOCAP, and other venues.
He is active as a volunteer, and loves his hometown NBA team the Dallas Mavericks.
Messay Derebe, co-Founder and co-CEO
Messay is a passionate believer in the transformative power of the arts having seen their impact on her own life. She has committed her career to expanding access to arts for all.
She is part of the Program team at the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation. Previous to this Messay worked and volunteer with several performing and visual arts organizations around the country in Pittsburgh, PA, Dallas, TX, and Washington, DC. This experience included work with the The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and Washington Performing Arts.
Messay began her career in finance working as an auditor with Ernst & Young but left that path to pursue her true passion of supporting artists and arts organizations. Messay holds a Masters in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her undergraduate degree from Southern Methodist University with majors in English Literature and Accounting. Messay also volunteers to support arts in her committee. She serves as a member of the steering committee for Emerging Arts Leaders DC and in other capacities. She is originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and calls Texas her adopted US state.
About Vango Studio
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
Patreon is a game changer for artists and creators. Their goal is to help people get paid while doing what they love. In this episode Carlos Cabrera, VP of Data Science and Operations at Patreon, talks about where Patreon started and where Patreon is going. He gives us some tips and insight on what works on Patreon and what doesn't. And he talks about the rationale behind last December's proposed fee changes, why users were so upset, and what is coming next.
About Carlos Cabrera
Carlos is the VP of Data Science and Operations at Patreon. He himself joined Patreon in May 2015 after completing an MBA at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. His professional experience includes statistical modeling of natural catastrophe risk, management at a music technology company, and strategy consulting. He also plays the drums for Pomplamoose, the band co-founded by Patreon's CEO Jack Conte.
About Patreon
For creators, Patreon is a way to get paid for creating the things you’re already creating (webcomics, videos, songs, whatevs). Fans pay a few bucks per month OR per post you release, and then you get paid every month, or every time you release something new. Learn more about becoming a creator on Patreon HERE.
For patrons, Patreon is a way to join your favorite creator's community and pay them for making the stuff you love. Instead of literally throwing money at your screen (trust us, that doesn’t work), you can now pay a few bucks per month or per post that a creator makes. For example, if you pay $2 per video, and the creator releases 3 videos in February, then your card gets charged a total of $6 that month. This means the creator gets paid regularly (every time she releases something new), and you become a bonafide, real-life patron of the arts. That’s right--Imagine you, in a long frilly white wig, painted on a 10-foot canvas on the wall of a Victorian mansion. And imagine your favorite creators making a living doing what they do best… because of you.
You can find Patreon on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @patreon.
About Vango Studio
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
She is an angel investor! She is an art collector! She is a podcast host, and a blogger, and a foodie, and a mom. How does Joanne Wilson do it all? Simple. With her super powers! In this episode Joanne tells us about how she got the name 'Gotham Gal', why she collects art, what she looks for in investment opportunities, and what she thinks is the biggest business opportunity in the art world today.
About Joanne Wilson
Joanne got her start in retail and wholesale. During the 1990s’ dot-com boom, she worked on the media side of the technology industry. She has chaired a few nonprofits and has sat on numerous boards in a variety of fields. She has been a-stay-at-home mom, she has been a working mom. A city dweller, a suburbanite (albeit briefly!).
These days she finds herself in a different career, another turn in the road. In 2007, she made her first angel investment. Since then, her portfolio has grown to include more than 90 companies. She has also focused her thesis on female entrepreneurs — a decision that is more practical than philanthropic. Women founders tend to be tenacious and thorough. They ask questions and listen. They are great leaders.
Her female founder thesis led her to create The Women’s Entrepreneurs Festival. This event is an incredible combination of inspiration, information and validation. Year after year, their goal has been to create an intimate setting and a spirited agenda designed for robust conversation and purposeful connections.
You can keep tabs on everything she is up to at gothamgal.com or on twitter @thegothamgal and be sure to check out her podcast Positively Gotham Gal on soundcloud.
About Vango Studio
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
Daniel Doubrovkine is currently CTO at Artsy. Daniel's experience with art is a far cry from what most of us have encountered. Growing up in the Soviet Union his father would use books to take care of the family's needs. In Daniel's life art has been his currency, his healthcare, his passion and now part of his career. In this episode, Ethan and Daniel talk about what art is going to be in the future, how artists are entrepreneurs, and how the experience around art will change.
About Artsy
Artsy’s mission is to make all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. We are a resource for art collecting and education. Artsy features the world’s leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions, all in one place. Our growing database of 800,000 images of art, architecture, and design by 80,000 artists spans historical, modern, and contemporary works, and includes the largest online database of contemporary art. Artsy is used by art lovers, museum-goers, patrons, collectors, students, and educators to discover, learn about, and collect art.
You can find Artsy at Artsy.net and on Instagram, twitter, and facebook @artsy
About Daniel Doubrouvkine
Daniel Doubrovkine (aka dB.) is a seasoned entrepreneur, technologist, CTO at Artsy.net in New York, the largest online fine art marketplace and publication. Daniel graduated from University of Geneva in late 90s with a degree in Computer Science, and founded and sold Vestris Inc., an early stage technology start-up right after college. He joined Microsoft as Development Lead, was Director at Visible Path, then Architect and Development Manager at Application Security. Daniel is the creator and maintainer of many popular open-source projects and a lifetime artist.
You can find Daniel at www.dblock.org or on twitter @dblockdotorg
About Vango Studio
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
Art.com is all about helping people get art they love on their walls. According to Art.com CEO Kira Wampler “blank walls are the enemy.” Kira has been at Art.com for just over a year. She brings experience from an impressive background in leadership at customer driven startups including Lyft, Trulia, and Lytro. In this episode she shares her thoughts about knowing your customer, tech adoption, trying out different kinds of art, and the future of the retail experience.
About Art.com
Art.com is the largest online retailer of art. Their main goal is to help people find the art they love so they can love their spaces more. They have a billion images to choose from including limited-edition prints and hand-painted originals. They also offer home accessories and framing options.
For more info visit art.com or find them on facebook, twitter, and instagram @artdotcom
About Kira Wampler
Kira Wampler has been CEO of Art.com for just over a year. She brings more than 20 years of marketing and product leadership experience from her previous work at Lyft, Trulia, Lytro, and Intuit. She is a self described OG social media user and her dog was recently named the most powerful puppy in tech.
You can find Kira on twitter and instagram @kirasw
About Vango Studio
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week. In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
In this episode, host Ethan Appleby pulls together some of the best sound bites from 2017 and then gives his thoughts on trends from 2017 and what to expect in 2018.
Robert is one of the most revered authorities on art & tech. Verisart is a company that uses blockchain technology to certify and verify artworks online, allowing buyers to access the provenance of a piece and artists to ensure the security of their work.
Ethan talks to Robert about
- how Verisart uses the bitcoin blockchain to tell the history of a work and where it’s been
- why blockchain is the best way to ensure an artwork’s authenticity
- And how he sees the role of technology in shaping the future of the art market
About Verisart
Verisart employs decentralized technologies to help artists certify, document, and enliven their artworks in a vibrant online community of collectors, galleries and dealers.
Find out more at verisart.com or follow them on twitter @verisart
About Robert Norton
Robert Norton has spent 20 years working in ecommerce, business development and Internet startups. I enjoy building business from the ground, finding new opportunities and creating new consumer experiences. He was the CEO and Founder of Saatchi Art and Sedition prior to starting Verisart. Before that he was at King.com
Follow Robert on Twitter @verisart
- About Vango -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, on Twitter @vangoart and visit www.vangoart.co
Vida is a San Francisco-based brand connecting artists with the means of production in order to create clothing and accessories adorned with the artists’ original designs. Vida CEO and Founder Umaimah Mendhro sat down with Ethan for this week’s episode to talk about using tech to disrupt the status quo, the importance of creating sustainable systems for business, fashion, and art, and the need for beautiful design.
-About Vida-
Vida is an online shop that allows artists to create fashion and accessories with their original designs. With over 490,000 original designs, Vida manufactures artwork-adorned pieces on demand. CEO Umaimah Mendhro founded Vida in order to create a sustainable system for affordable fashion that benefits the textile producers, the artists, and the global environment.The production teams, often in traditionally underprivileged regions, receive literacy training, and artists are able to see their works reach a broad global audience.
Find your unique accessory or that perfect last-minute gift at Vida
-About Umaimah Mendhro-
Umaimah Mendhro is founder of both Vida and The Dreamfly. Both of her efforts are global initiatives that connect and empower communities all over the world. A graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Business School, Umaimah grew up in rural Pakistan and originally wanted to study art.She has channeled her education and this affinity into
Find Umaimah on Twitter
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
State of the Art interviewed “The Art World’s Patron Satan” this week, provocative art collector Stefan Simchowitz. His style of “art flipping” goes against the establishment grain, and uses tech to disrupt the art market. In this week’s episode, Stefan and Ethan discuss what artists really need, how he’s disrupting the art establishment, and the “myth of the connoisseur.”
-About Stefan Simchowitz-
Stefan Simchowitz is a Los Angeles-based art collector, curator and mentor for emerging artists. He has garnered a controversial reputation for both supporting and creating markets for new artists, and for exploiting and then abandoning these same artists, all while causing turmoil in the established art market. He founded Simco’s Club, a membership subscription program for discovering and investing in emerging art. He has been featured by publications including the New York Times, artnet, and Vanity Fair.
Follow Stefan on Twitter @simcosclub and on instagram @stefansimchowitz and at Simco’s Club.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
Tags: #stefansimochowitz #simcosclub #simco #art #artandtech #sanfrancisco #fineart #gallery #artgallery #emergingart #sota #stateoftheart #screen #rotate #smartgallery #curate #collector #gallerist #patron #contemporary #contemporaryart #artmarket #artmarketplace
State of the Art interviewed “The Art World’s Patron Satan” this week, provocative art collector Stefan Simchowitz. His style of “art flipping” goes against the establishment grain, and uses tech to disrupt the art market. In this week’s episode, Stefan and Ethan discuss what artists really need, how he’s disrupting the art establishment, and the “myth of the connoisseur.”
-About Stefan Simchowitz-
Stefan Simchowitz is a Los Angeles-based art collector, curator and mentor for emerging artists. He has garnered a controversial reputation for both supporting and creating markets for new artists, and for exploiting and then abandoning these same artists, all while causing turmoil in the established art market. He founded Simco’s Club, a membership subscription program for discovering and investing in emerging art. He has been featured by publications including the New York Times, artnet, and Vanity Fair.
Follow Stefan on Twitter @simcosclub and on instagram @stefansimchowitz and at Simco’s Club.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
In 2014, Andrew Herman co-founded the mobile app French Girls. As the name of the app may reveal, Andrew doesn’t take himself too seriously, but is serious about the app’s ability to introduce users to art appreciation and original art. In this week’s episode, Ethan discusses the process of making the French Girls app, the path to purchasing art, the cultural shifts needed to make art as popular as music, and the importance of not taking all art too seriously with French Girls’ Andrew Herman.
-About Andrew Herman-
Andrew Herman is co-founder of the mobile app French Girls. Now located in San Francisco, Andrew was a mechanical engineer by training from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He grew up an avid guitar enthusiast and closet art fan. In 2014, he launched Easyl, a marketplace for original art which then transpired into French girls, an app that enables users to discover and create digital art inspired by photos from the community. He is now responsible for technical oversight of the app.
Find Andrew on Twitter and Instagram.
-About French Girls-
Inspired by the famous Titanic line, “draw me like one of your French girls,” French Girls is a mobile app that allows anybody to transform their selfie into an original work of art. Heralded as the next Snapchat, French Girls allows users to commission artists to create works of art based on the photos they upload, and provides a unique introduction art appreciation and to the world of original art.
Draw like a French Girl at their website and on the App Store
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
Ethan Appleby sites down with Susan Tynan, founder and CEO of Framebridge, to delve into the custom framing industry. Framebridge saves time and their technology allows customers to personalize their framing experience. What people chose to frame reveals what they care about keeping and displaying, and in this way Framebridge is able to see cultural shifts as they occur.
In this episode, State of the Art hears about why when launching a framing company Susan felt she had to go big from the beginning, how the definition of art is changing, and what advice her multifaceted experience enables her to give to burgeoning entrepreneurs.
-About Framebridge-
Framebridge is taking over the custom framing industry. CEO and Founder Susan Tynan founded Framebridge in 2014 after experiencing personal frustration with framing several prints, and has since grown Framebridge to over 150 employees between their office in Georgetown and two production facilities. Built to save both time and expense, while providing a custom, personal experience, Framebridge combines the best of the online and offline framing experience.
Find out more about framing your artwork at Framebridge.
-About Susan Tynan-
CEO Susan Tynan founded Frambridge in 2014 after being dissatisfied with her own custom framing experience. After receiving her MBA from Harvard, Susan worked with Accenture, Living Social, TaxiMagic, and the White House under President Obama. Her multifaceted career has been characterized by inspiring resilience and self-confidence. She has been featured in publications including Business Insider and Forbes.
Check out Susan Tynan on Twitter @susanrtynan
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
Tags: #custom #frame #framebridge #susantynan #framing #art #sota #stateoftheart #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #startup #artandtech #personalize #tech
Ethan met with COO Elisabeth Mouchy of Daylighted to learn how this fellow San Francisco startup is combining art and tech. Driven by the principle that art should be everywhere, Daylighted created SmartGallery, a technology that uses a screen that rotates selected artworks from an unlimited and ever-evolving gallery drawn from Daylighted’s partnerships with galleries and other art platforms.
In this episode,
-About Daylighted-
Daylighted is an online fine art gallery founded in 2013 by Elisabeth Mouchy and Alex Cammarano and headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Driven by the principle that art should be everywhere, Daylighted created SmartGallery, a technology that uses a screen that rotates selected artworks from an unlimited and ever-evolving gallery. The artwork is pulled from partnerships with galleries, museums, local artists, and other areas of the art ecosystem.
Find out more on Daylighted’s website and on Twitter @BeDaylighted.
-About Elisabeth Mouchy-
Daylighted Cofounder and COO Elisabeth Mouchy holds a Master of Science from ESSEC in her native France. With a focus on design and experience with international marketing and web strategy, Elisabeth seeks to bring art into people’s everyday worlds by blending it with cutting-edge technology.
Follow Elisabeth on Twitter @emouchy.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
Entering a museum, you’re often offered a clunky audio guide. Cuseum is a museum engagement platform that is transforming this awkward experience into a mobile app you can access and personalize on your phone. Founded in 2014 by CEO Brendan Ciecko, Cuseum has been featured by platforms including The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Cuseum has been hailed as the future of museums, and is now in over 100 cultural institutions worldwide.
Discover more about the future of museums at Cuseum.
-About Brendan Ciecko -
Brendan Ciecko is founder and CEO of Cuseum. A self-described hipster, art-lover, and museum techie, Brendan brought his design expertise and business acumen to bear on the project of transforming the way we engage with museums. Cited as one of America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs, Brendan has worked on numerous entrepreneurial projects including Ten Minute Media and serves on committees of several art institutions, namely the Boston Museum of Fine Art and Boston Center for the Arts.
Follow Brendan on Twitter @brendanciecko and instagram @brendanciecko and on his personal website, http://www.brendanciecko.com.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
State of the Art interviewed contemporary millennial artist Shane Miller to learn more about the favorite social media platform for contemporary artists: Instagram. Shane has become one of the best-selling artists on Instagram, and the epitomizes the ways that artists all over are leveraging social media platforms to grow and develop their art business. Sites like Instagram enable artists to make direct and instantaneous connections to art lovers and potential collectors, and have completely changed the game when it comes to selling art.
Ethan talked to Shane about the future of social media platforms, the changing art world and how a musician has become one of the bestselling artists on Instagram.
About Shane:
Shane Miller is a contemporary encaustic painter located in Nashville, Tennessee. Originally from Maryland, Shane has experimented with music and art to develop his artistic practice. With a previous career in physical therapy, Shane has dedicated himself to his art full-time since 2014. Shane has spent most days in his studio experimenting with new techniques and artistic visions, developing his complex process of layering oil and wax to create haunting landscapes. He is represented by Bennett Gallery, Mary Martin Gallery, and Beacon Estate, but now sells 40% of his art on Instagram, and has been featured by sites such as Forbes.
Learn more about Shane Miller on his Instagram @shane.artistry and website https://www.shaneartistry.com
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
In this week’s episode, I sit down with Artfinder CEO Jonas Almgren. Artfinder is an online art marketplace, but it’s not to be confused with an Ebay-style shopping experience. In fact, it’s far more the Tinder of the art world. This week we dig into the future of online art sales, how artificial intelligence could be your art advisor, and how Artfinder is more of a dating site than an Ebay-style marketplace.
-About Artfinder-
Used by over 850,000 artists and collectors, Artfinder is an online art marketplace that enables artists to sell their original work directly to collectors. Artfinder is an international platform, with artists from over 100 countries. The platform’s mission is simple: to allow artists to make a living from their art, and to allow art lovers to enjoy works in their home according to their budget.
Whether you’re buying or selling, you can find artfinder on their website https://www.artfinder.com/ and on Twitter @artfinder and Instagram @artfinder_com
-About Jonas Almgren-
CEO Jonas Almgren has been at the helm of Artfinder since 2012. A serial entrepreneur, he previously worked in Silicon Valley helping to scale and grow companies such as Epiphany. He is a passionate runner and art lover. Originally from Stockholm, he is now based in Cambridge, UK.
Find Jonas Almgren on Twitter @JonasAlmgren
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co
In this episode, Ethan talks to Shanna Tellerman, Founder & CEO of Modsy. Modsy is a culmination of Shanna’s background in art, design and technology: Using 3D and augmented reality (AR) renders of spaces, Modsy allows people to visualize design ideas in their own home.
Ethan and Shanna talk about how she came up with the idea for Modsy, why diversity in tech is so important, and how visualization technologies open possibilities for the art & design space.
- About Modsy-
At Modsy, 3D and AR technology is used to unlock the potential of visualization. Modsy allows people to visualize how things look in their own home, helping them to make design decisions while simultaneously broadening their understanding of design through stylistic recommendations.
Follow Modsy on Instagram @modsydesign and on Twitter @modsy, and visit www.modsy.com.
- About Shanna-
Having graduated with a degree in Fine Arts and later becoming Partner at GV, Shanna Tellerman is now the Founder and CEO at Modsy. At Modsy, Shanna combines her passion for design with technology, allowing people to visualise design ideas in their own home by offering 3D and augmented reality (AR) renders of spaces.
Follow Shanna on Twitter @ShannaWP.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
In this episode, we get past the velvet rope into the world of art auctions. As the software that’s taking auction houses online, Invaluable is white-labelling the biggest auction houses in the world. We speak with Invaluable CEO Rob Weisberg to find out how data is changing the game for new buyers, auctions growing exponentially, and being scared but doing it anyway.
- About Invaluable-
Recently called "one of the fastest growing e-commerce sites in the art world" by Blouin ArtInfo, Invaluable is the world's leading online marketplace for fine art, antiques and collectibles. Headquartered in Boston, Invaluable launched their online bidding platform in 2009 and has since gained over $10 billion in listed items, partnerships auction houses, and an international presence.
- About Rob Weisberg-
CEO Rob Weisberg has been at the helm of Invaluable since 2012.After revolutionizing the e-commerce of Domino’s pizza and Zipcar, award-winning entrepreneur Rob turned to Invaluable as a new challenge. With a focus on internet technology experience and consumer marketing, he has overseen the company’s rebranding and move toward increased online bidding.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
In this episode, Ethan talks to Vladimir Vukicevic, co-founder of Meural. Described as the ‘Netflix for Art’, Meural is a beautiful digital canvas that allows you to access thousands of works ranging from pieces by local emerging artists to the masters, to any images you may want to upload.
Ethan and Vlad talk about the differences between innovation in music and art, how Meural functions as a ‘gateway drug’ to buying art, and views on the future of galleries and the traditional art world.
- About Meural-
Founded in 2014, Meural has revolutionized what it means to purchase and own a piece of art. Developing a digital canvas that blends hardware, firmware, and software, Meural allows you to access thousands of works and display them in lifelike, textured forms. For those who might hesitate before committing to a single piece of art, or others with constantly changing tastes, Meural is a solution that enables you to experience new works of art in your own home at any given moment.
Follow Meural on Instagram and Twitter @meetmeural, and visit www.meural.com .
- About Vlad-
Previously the co-founder of RocketHub Inc and a Management consultant at PA consulting group, Vlad co-founded Meural in 2014. In addition, Vlad is known as someone who comes up with some of the best analogies out there.
Follow Vlad on Twitter @vukicevic.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
In this episode, Ethan talks to Brian Sharples, the CEO of Twyla. Twyla creates high-quality, limited edition prints that make exclusive artwork accessible without costing you an arm and a leg. As CEO of Twyla, Brian believes in the potential of technology to transform the online art market.
Ethan and Brian talk about how Twyla helps to remove the difficulty of selling art online, how they use technology to create an Apple-esque experience, and how big he thinks the market can be for the category between posters and Picasso’s.
- About Twyla-
At Twyla, cutting edge technology is used to scan the work of some of the most talked about artists in game, resulting in high-quality prints that do not cost a fortune. Creating limited-edition print versions of original pieces allows a greater audience to enjoy some of the best contemporary work out there, making fine art more accessible.
Follow Twyla on Instagram @Twyla and on Twitter @TwylaInc, and visit www.twyla.com .
- About Brian-
Brian Sharples co-founded Twyla in 2015, a startup that collaborates with the most talked about artists to create exclusive, high quality prints. Prior to Twyla, Brian was the CEO of Homeaway, which is one of the first and largest online vacation home rental companies. During his tenure as CEO, he drove online rentals from 5% to 95% of the market before selling to Expedia in 2015 for 3.9B.
Follow Brian on Twitter @Bryansharples.
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
In this episode, Ethan talks to Matty Mo, AKA The Most Famous Artist. If you spend any time at all on social media, you’ve probably seen one of his many creations. He’s done the ‘most instagrammable wall’, launched the ‘Museum of Fake Art’ and went viral for a project that involved him dragging a clear duffel bag filled with a million dollars of cash through an art fair.
Ethan and Matty talk about how he became The Most Famous Artist, what it means for tech to ‘democratize’ the art world, and the ways in which social media has changed what it means to be an artist.
- About Matty Mo / TMFA-
Matty Mo, a tech entrepreneur turned artist, explores how branding and social media can influence and transform someone’s perception of an individual as an artist. As TMFA, Mo creates street art according to social media trends, and had collaborated with LA Magazine, Amazon, and CBS Television Studios.
Follow Matty on Instagram @themostfamousartist, and visit www.themostfamousartist.com .
- About Vango Studio -
Vango Studio makes the entrepreneurial side of being an artist easy and efficient, saving artists an average of 4 hours per week.In addition to powering artists with an award winning marketplace, we offer artists the ability to create their own website with little to no maintenance, distribute work across platforms, and access detailed insights about their collectors and what is selling across platforms.
Follow Vango on Instagram @vango and @art, and visit www.vangoart.co .
Join host Ethan Appleby as he explores the intersections of Art & Technology.
Each episode will feature guests who are changing the way we interact with art, ranging from the most tech-forward artists to the CEOs of big companies like Art.com. We’ll take a deep dive into how technology is making art more accessible, whether it's improving the experience of buying and selling art, and why it’s one of the last industries to go online. Finally, we’ll turn to other creative industries like fashion and music to see how technology has facilitated radical change.
So, whether you’re a casual browser on Instagram, a famous artist or just someone looking to sound smart at your next dinner party, subscribe to State of the Art on iTunes today.'
See you on Nov 16th!