CURATORIAL
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2017
Curator & Head of Artistic Research
Stavanger
Screen City Moving Image Biennial
Screen City is dedicated to presenting moving images in public spaces. It explores the relation between moving image, sound and architecture. Screen City presents artistic formats seeking to expand the borders of the cinematic experience. It was established in 2013 in Stavanger, Norway, by Daniela Arriado. From 2017 it will be presented as a Moving Image Biennial in close collaboration with local art institutions, international artists and organizations. Curated for public space, and in collaboration with indoor screening venues and galleries, the Screen City Biennial presents, explores and expands the moving “image” as radical temporal art form along established and experimental artistic orientations and in critical dialogue with the current urban sphere and context in Stavanger.
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May 2016
Jury member for the open call
ISEA2016 Hong Kong in partnership with the Open Sky Project
ISEA2016 Hong Kong
Open Sky Project
ISEA Hong Kong
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June 3-7, 2015
Curating
The White Factory, Copenhagen
HERE ALL ALONE
HERE ALL ALONE is a total installation of sound and video art by Swedish artist Anders Weberg. It takes up the entire area of ‘the white factory’ at Nørrebro, the old enzymes factory of Novozymes. The exhibition unfolds through large-scale responsive sound and video installations, and other media installations involving push notifications and surveillance cameras. Walking through the factory, the audience will experience various embodied encounters with the installations that mirror how we engage with the world in a mediated reality increasingly conditioned by surveillance, feedback from invisible computing and overlays of virtual realities.
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2015 –
International Curatorial Board Member
ICC Tower, Hong Kong
OPEN SKY GALLERY
Invited on the International Curatorial Board for the Open Sky Gallery on the facade of the ICC Tower in Hong Kong. The gallery is curated and initiated by Maurice Benayoun. This project aims to open up new opportunities for emerging media artists to produce context specific artworks for display on the ICC’s 77,000 square meter screen, allowing artists to collectively contribute to Hong Kong’s public life and artistic culture.
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January 2015
Curating
Scandinavia House, New York City
VOYAGE TO THE VIRTUAL
Voyage to the Virtual takes the metaphor of “the voyage” as a starting point for an exploration into the ways contemporary artists are expanding on the human perceptual experience. Combining video, animation, sculpture, light, and interactive media, the exhibition invites viewers on expeditions to the far north, travels through time and space, and perceptual journeys into the realm of the virtual. Including artworks by Katja Aglert, Elina Brotherus, A K Dolven, Olafur Eliasson, Jette Gejl Kristensen, Petra Lindholm, Ann Lislegaard, Per Platou, Jacob Tækker, and Anders Weberg.
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November 2014
Co-curating
SESI Digital Gallery, São Paulo
DIGITAL AFTERIMAGE
Third SP Urban Digital Festival
The festival theme considers the larger questions relating to the future of urban digital art, its civic and social values, its architectural opportunities, and how it informs our human behavior. It considers how the current visions of urban digital art will inform future practices and contribute to its future reason of existence. The festival includes artworks by Andar7, Thiago Hersan & Radamés Anja, Lucas Bambozzi, The Constitute, Eduardo Kac, Yucef Merhi, Suse Miessner, and Marina Zurkov.
spurban.com.br
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June 2014
Curatorial Advising / Co-curating
SESI Digital Gallery, São Paulo
PERFORMANCE: DIGITAL EXPRESSIONS
The exhibition rethinks performance as a concept of self expression and the relations it evokes between historical heritage in performance culture and contemporary digital culture, and between a psychological level and a level of expressive self representation. From the origin of the carnival tradition to VJ culture and self-portraits in social media, performative culture is an integral part of our cultural identity. Performative culture is underlying our everyday personal expressions, increasingly acted out in digital environments in which performative acts inform our social being and visual, digital language. The show unfolds between ‘performance’ with actual performed spectacles and ‘the performative’ as the construction of identity and reality through acts and actions. The artworks unfold in an unbounded, participatory exhibition context of the street – the site for our everyday performances where people’s expressions are articulated.
Galeria de Arte Digital do SESI
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April 2014
Curatorial Advising / Co-curating
SESI Digital Gallery, São Paulo
PLAY! 2014
The exhibition, which was the second edition of Play! on the SESI gallery in São Paulo, revisited the potential of the game before the rules of play were commercialized and the pixels dissolved to out blur our ability to see through its politics. It questioned the notion of “game” as cultural transformer, inviting six commissioned artworks to reimagine the rules of play and push the concept of “game” to what we want it to be in the future, in the hand of the user/audience.
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2013-2014
Curating
New York City and the Nordic Region
Nordic Outbreak was a traveling moving image exhibition project presented by Streaming Museum. The exhibition of over thirty moving image artworks by Nordic artists took a methodological starting point in the logics and shifting hierarchies of the Internet and reflected the changing stances of spectatorship in relation to urban screens. It unfolded in various public and semi-public spaces in New York City, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Reykjavik, Stavanger, Nuuk and Umeå in sub-curated programs. Accompanied by a public program of symposiums, seminars, curator and artist talks, the exhibition investigated current digital dynamics in the contemporary moving image of the Nordic art scene and modes of curating the digital image in urban public space.
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January/February 2014
Curating
Umeaa Cultural Capital of Europe
NORDIC OUTBREAK – UMEAA
Nordic Outbreak ended its Nordic tour visiting Umeå in northern Sweden, for the Inauguration of the city of Umeå as European Capital of Culture 2014, January 31-February 2, 2014. A selection from the Nordic Outbreak program was projected on temporary canvases installed as a cube in the City Hall Park and integrated with the winter landscape.
Nordicoutbreak.streamingmuseum.org/umea
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December 2013
Curating
Katuaq the Cultural Centre of Nuuk
NORDIC OUTBREAK – Nuuk
Nordic Outbreak opened in Nuuk at Katuaq the Cultural Centre of Greenland December 10-22, 2p13, with the theme Measuring Peripheries. The theme reflects perspectives on what defines the periphery and it’s meaning – how we “measure” it. The artworks were installed in the striking foyer of Katuaq and could be seen indoors and from the street through large window facades while there reflection in the windows projected them onto the snow outside.
Nordicoutbreak.streamingmuseum.org/nuuk
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November 2013
Co-Curating
SESI Digital Gallery, São Paulo
DIGITAL CITIZEN
Second SP Urban Digital Festival
Together with Marilia Pasculli/Verve Cultural I co-curated the second edition of the largest digital art festival in South America. Under the theme DIGITAL CITIZEN, exploring with how the digital reality of contemporary affect every aspect of our urban reality and our agency as citizens, the exhibition presented video-based and interactive artworks by the artists: Pablo Ena, Reza Safavi, Sergio Galán; Anaisa Franco, James George, Rune Madsen, Leandro Mendes/VJ Vigas, Paloma Oliviera and Mateus Knielsen, Julian Opie, Karolina Sobecka, and United VJ’s.
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October 2013
Curating – new commission
Danish Architecture Centre, Copenhagen
NORDIC OUTBREAK
Egill Sæbjörnsson, Brick Is The Key (2013)
A a site-specific video-mapping installation with sound commissioned by Streaming Museum and Danish Architecture Center for the Nordic Outbreak opening in Copenhagen. The piece was shown on the facade of DAC on October 10-11.
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October 2013
Curating
Screen City Festival, Stavanger
NORDIC OUTBREAK – STAVANGER
In Stavanger, Nordic Outbreak visited Screen City Festival: Shaping Public Space. Moving cityscapes on October 26, 2013. The Festival was dedicated to the moving image presented in public spaces, on the city’s facades, shop windows and urban venues enlightening and changing the vision of the urban context of Stavanger.
Nordicoutbreak.streamingmuseum.org/stavanger
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October 2013
Curating
Reykjavik Art Museum
NORDIC OUTBREAK – REYKJAVIK
Animated bodies and modified realities
Nordic Outbreak visited Reykjavik Art Museum between October 25-27, 2013, exploring the theme animated bodies and modified realities. The exhibition program included a screening in the RAM Multispace and a window installation on the facade of RAM to be seen by audience and passersby from the street.
Nordicoutbreak.streamingmuseum.org/reykjavik
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August 2013
Curating
KIASMA and Media Facades Festival, Helsinki
NORDIC OUTBREAK – HELSINKI
A selection from the Nordic Outbreak exhibition with accompanying public programs was be presented at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and Media Facades Festival Helsinki between August 21 – September 1, 2013. The Nordic Outbreak program in explored the theme PERFORMING ANTINARRATIVES, concerning how our lives are built around narratives, real and imagined. The exhibition included both an outdoor screen installation in Kallio by the Sörnäinen metro station between August 22-25, which coincided with the Media Facades Festival Helsinki.
Nordicoutbreak.streamingmuseum.org/helsinki
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March 2013
Curating
Times Square, New York City
NORDIC OUTBREAK
Björk and Andrew Thomas Huang, Mutual Core
We launched Nordic Outbreak in New York City with a one month installation in Times Square’s Midnight Moment. The piece was shown across 15 screens simultaneously three minutes to midnight every night. Installed in the epicenter of the Spectacle, Times Square in New York City, which is plastered with signs, noise and commercial content, the work comes to confront the visual meaning system of this highly problematic and seductive urban environment.
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March-April 2013
Co-curating with Marília Pasculli
SESI Digital Gallery, São Paulo
PLAY!
The exhibition “Play!” addressed the cultural value of video and interactive games as an art form and proposes the notion of play as a vehicle for enhancing citizen experience and for stimulating better uses of public space. The building façade of the SESI Gallery presented five artworks by contemporary game artists whose works critically engage with social and cultural issues and offer situations of critical reflection and engagement with São Paulo’s urban spaces. Artists included: Alberto Zanella, Andrei Thomaz, Les Liens Invisibles (image), Lummo, Mark Essen, Suzete Venturelli and team Midialab-UnB.
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August 22-26, 2012
Co-Curating
Node Center for Curatorial Studies, Berlin
LETTERS FROM THE FIELD
Letters from the Field was a collective exhibition produced by the residents at the Node Center for Curatorial Studies, was on view at Atelierhof Kreuzberg in Berlin. It presented artists who responded to six contemporary topics addressing histories, futures, and fictions. The form of the artists’ responses ranged from written content to video, painting, sculpture and performance. Functioning as a conceptual framework to the exhibition, a publication contains artists’ contributions and essays by curators in a series of eight chapters.
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March 2011
Curating
Big Screen Plaza, New York City
CYBORG ALARM
When Technology, Imagination and Body Collide
An exhibition with artwork by 2011 NYFA Fellows and Finalists: Sophie Kahn, caraballo-farman, Jason Bernagozzi, Michael Greathouse, James Case-Leal, and Karolina Sobecka. The artworks explored the digital persona as it transcends the human body in representational situations of the contemporary world where norms and behavior are reformulated.
Exhibited at Big Screen Plaza, New York; Perth Cultural Plaza, Perth; Sky Screen, Berlin (2011).
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November 2012
Curating
Momentum Sky Screen, Berlin
CYBORG ALARM
on Sky Screen
Presented by Streaming Museum and Momentum Worldwide.
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January – March 2012
Co-curating
Big Screen Plaza, New York City
MAURICE BENAYOUN
solo exhibition
Shown on the Big Screen Plaza in New York City, this exhibition of the French media artist Maurice Benayoun was his first solo exhibition in the US, and the US premiere of his real-time artworks Emotion Forecast (2010) and Occupy Wall Screens (2011). The exhibition was co-curated with Nina Colosi and presented by Streaming Museum.
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February 2012
Assisting Curating
Big Screen Plaza, New York City
A JOHN CAGE CENTENNIAL TRIBUTE
This Tribute is a collection of stories and visual and sound artworks by international contemporary artists who have been inspired by John Cage, presented by Streaming Museum on Big Screen Plaza. I assisted Nina Colosi in curating the tribute, including artists: ADACHI Tomomi, Steve Antosca, Kyong Mee Choi, Phil Dadson, Lesley Flanigan, Richard Garet, Loris Gréaud, Martha Mooke, Marcin Ramocki, Phillip Stearns, Marty St. James, Susana Sulic, Stephen Vitiello, Monica Weiss.
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SPEAKING
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Sep 29 – Oct 1, 2016
Speaker
Media Architecture Summit, Toronto
Media Architecture Summit 2016
MAS 2016 explores the role of urban screens, interactive media façades, and large-scale public projections in architecture, public art, civic engagement and urban renewal. Beyond mere decoration, civic spectacle and city branding, Media Architecture can help to shape our collective identity through digital place-making, 24-hour architecture, and reanimating public space. Held for the first time in North America, MAS 2016 features artists and designers, architects, scholars, and representatives from the cultural sector and industry presenting a range of projects including context aware illuminated spaces, architectural projection, animated building façades, and interactive installations inviting spontaneous public performance.
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June 7, 2016
Keynote
Live The City, Bangkok
Live The City – Urban Media Project
Keynote title: What Urban Media Art Can Do
Co-organized by Connecting Cities, Goethe Institut Thailand, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, and Siam Center.
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June 4, 2016
Panel moderator
MAB16, Sydney
What Urban Media Art Can Do
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May 22, 2016
Panel moderator
Chi K11 Art Space, Hong Kong
What Urban Media Art Can Do
Panel speakers: Christa Sommerer, Maurice Benayoun, Sampson Wong
Moderated by Susa Pop and Tanya Toft
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May 21, 2016
Book launch panel
1a Space, Cattle Depot, Hong Kong
Turning the City into a media
– stories of media arts city
Presentation of publication What Urban Media Art Can Do: Why When Where & How? by Susa Pop and Tanya Toft, moderated by Shannon Walsh
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March 11, 2016
Panel moderator
Connecting Cities Symposium
From In/Visible City to Open Source City
Panelists: Loraine Furter, Nerea Calvillo and Darko Fritz
This Connecting Cities Symposium offers an overview of the previous activities dedicated to the curatorial topics of the Networked City 2013, the Participatory City 2014 and the In/Visible City 2015 that have been explored by artists and curators during the Connecting Cities project. This symposium will focus on the past, present and future of media art environments in the public space, as well as the variety of forms they can assume, using Connecting Cities projects as practical examples.
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October 30, 2015
Keynote
City Link 2015: Reimagining the City
The Urgent Urban Place of (Digital) Art
City Link 2015 contains talks and debates, workshops, exhibitions, dinner and pop-up concerts. It explores new ways of thinking about creativity and social communities, and is focused on gaining new insights and perspectives on how we can work towards better solutions in our cities through best practice examples.
From the point of departure in the interactive sound and video installation Here All Alone, exhibited in a closed-down factory in Copenhagen in June 2015, the keynote points at the urgent role of art and creative practices – in particular digital – in affecting the urban environment. As more than decoration and entertainment to fill up empty space, these aesthetic inquiries provide access points to understanding and interrogating the near-future directions in which our cultures and societies are heading.
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September 26, 2015
Symposium speaker
HAUT Scene, Copenhagen
TRANSFORMATION
TRANSFORMATION is an interactive digital performance exhibition curated by No Image, Rebekka Elisabeth Anker-Møller and Anne Mai Slot Vilmann. The exhibition explores audience experience when digital technology is integral to an artwork. The artworks included involve physical performance, installations, video art and virtual reality.
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June 12, 2015
Symposium organizer/moderator
The Royal Danish Art Academy, Copenhagen
CRITICAL AESTHETICS IN URBAN DIGITAL ART
After a decade of practices critically oriented towards the screen and new modes of expanded cinema, artistic and curatorial practices with urban digital art is redefining critical aesthetics in a contemporary technological urban context. The symposium follows the exhibition and predeceasing research for HERE ALL ALONE as a continued conversation on the current critical potential of urban digital art.
With Maurice Benayoun, Kassandra Wellendorf, and Anders Weberg with NULEINN.
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November 2014
Conference paper
Academia Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon
SHADOW AFFECT IN URBAN DIGITAL (POST SCREEN) ART
The paper considers a symptom of the post screen as expressed in recent urban digital artworks, one that awakes a behavioral reaction in the audience. Occurring in the aftermath of postmodern thought, relational aesthetics and early theories of the post media condition, urban digital artworks with behavioral affect seem to be leaving behind the medium and its technological specificity, towards pursuits of experiences-in-space that question our being as humans in a technological age.
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November 2014
Conference paper
Aarhus
SITUATIONS OF PRESENCE: RECLAIMING PUBLIC SPACE IN THE URBAN DIGITAL GALLERY
Paper presentation: The paper proposes the urban digital gallery as an opportunity to explore the relationship between ‘human’ and ‘technology,’ through the programming of media architecture. It takes a curatorial perspective when proposing an ontological shift from considering media facades as visual spectacles to consider how they may act as emotional and affective constitutes and interventions in the urban environment.
Workshop participation: World Cultural Producers Workshop
Media Architecture Biennial 2014, Aarhus
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April 2014
Talk / Conversation
Tofiq House, São Paulo
TOFIQ HOUSE ART SALON
The talk at Tofiq House in São Paulo addressed current directions of curatorial practice with digital art in public space and in particular considered the critical aspects that artists and curators working in this realm are confronted with today, which mainly depart from the ever complex relationship between humans and technology.
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January 2014
Talk
Public Art Lab, Berlin
URBAN MEDIA KITCHEN
Presentation at Public Art Lab in Berlin, invited by Susa Pop, for the Transmediale Vorspiel program. Public Art Lab opened its doors in a kitchen-like atmosphere to bring together Berlin based and international urban media initiatives.
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December 2013
Talk & organizer
475 Kent Avenue, New York City
LISA SALON
Organized a guest salon for Leaders in Software and Art with Isabel Walcott Draves, as part of my curatorial research project Urban Media Aesthetics. Four artists who work with software art and public space were invited to reflect on the notion of ‘spectacle’ in relation to their artistic practice; how their practice responds to the city and its seemingly underlying expectations to (and contestation of) the spectacular and an underlying expectation to an element of “entertainment”. The presentations focused on how the works embody and exercise a form of criticality, in public space.
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December 2013
Organizer & moderator
Harvestworks, New York City
ELECTRIC SIGNS
In conversation with Alice Arnold after screening her documentary Electric Signs, on spectacle, politics and future critical engagements of urban screens. ELECTRIC SIGNS is a poetic and timely documentary about signs, screens and the urban environment. The film’s narrator, a city observer modeled on the critic Walter Benjamin, takes us on a journey thru a variety of urban landscapes, examining public spaces and making connections between light, perception and the culture of attractions in today’s consumer society.
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October 26, 2013
Panel organizer
Reykjavik Art Museum
NORDIC OUTBREAK PUBLIC PROGRAM:
Video Art – Then & Now
Nordic Outbreak was presented at the Reykjavik Art Museum during the first historical exhibition of Icelandic video art shown in Reykjavik. The panel was organized in a collaboration between between Nordic Outbreak and the exhibition Icelandic Video Art from 1975-1990 on display at the Reykjavik Art Museum, curated by Margrét Elisabet Ólafsdóttir. The panel raised questions about the role of local histories and their relevance in regard to contemporary video art practices.
The speakers included Jacob Lillemose (curator), Jonathan Habib Engqvist (curator), Hlynur Helgason (assistant professor at the University of Iceland) and Dodda Maggý (artist). The panel was moderated by Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir (independant researcher at The Reykjavík Academy).
Nordicoutbreak.streamingmuseum.org/reykjavik
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August 21, 2013
Panel organizer and moderator
KIASMA, Helsinki
NORDIC OUTBREAK PUBLIC PROGRAM:
Moving Image – Performing in public space
A Seminar on August 21: Moving Image – Performing in public space held at the Kiasma included presentations and perspectives by Tanya Toft, curator of Nordic Outbreak; Minna Tarkka, director of Media Facades Festival Helsinki; Hanna Maria Anttila, director of AV-arkki and artists Hannu Karjalainen and Mar Canet & Varvara Guljajeva, introduced by Kati Kivinen, curator at the Kiasma.
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October 2013
Symposium chair & organizer
Danish Architecture Centre, Copenhagen
NORDIC OUTBREAK PUBLIC PROGRAM:
Digitally Disturbed – Talk&Debate
Accompanying the exhibition, the Nordic Outbreak: Digitally Disturbed Talk & Debate took place October 10 at DAC. Following my introduction to Nordic Outbreak, presentations were given by a strong line-up of artists, architects and urban scholars from the Danish art and architecture scene – Rune Nielsen, Mogens Jacobsen, Martin Brynskov, Kristoffer Ørum, Anders Bojen og Kaspar Bonnén (Radiant Copenhagen), and Kristine Samson – about the “disturbance” of digital aesthetics in practices of architecture and urban planning
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October 2013
Talk & panel
Screen City Festival, Stavanger
NORDIC OUTBREAK PUBLIC PROGRAM:
SCREEN CITY SYMPOSIUM
At the Screen City Symposium: Spaces, Images, Communication: Improving New Urban Models, I presented Nordic Outbreak and spoke about methods and approaches to curating digital artworks and developing exhibition schemes for architecture and urban environments. This was followed by a panel discussion with curators of Screen City Festival,Daniela Arriado and Mirjam Struppek.
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April 2013
Symposium chair and organizer
Scandinavia House, New York City
NORDIC OUTBREAK PUBLIC PROGRAM:
OPENING SYMPOSIUM
The Nordic Outbreak Symposium took place in New York City on April 6, 2011. It presented a program of artists, curators and theorists for a full day of presentations and discussion at Scandinavia House, kicked off by a keynote by UCLA Professor, theorist and curator Erkki Huhtamo. The Symposium shedded light on contemporary dynamics in the Nordic art scene(s) for moving image in the light of how these artworks respond to the digital age. How do the issues and themes conveyed in the moving image respond to current issues and conditions in Nordic societies, and in which ways do they reflect international realities and conditions in the digital age? What are the myths that are being confronted in these art works, and how does the artist or curator consider them their contemporary significance? The contemporary explosion of media facades – urban screens, architectural walls, mobile displays – and the role of moving image on these exhibition displays, as an alternative to the white cube was also a topic of discussion.
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January 2013
Talk
Galleri Box, Gothenburg
Samtal at Galleri Box
I presented the then upcoming exhibition ´Nordic Outbreak´ and discussed the research on Nordic digital art as well as curatorial strategies of showing digital art works in public spaces.
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March 2012
Panel organizer & moderator
Eventi Hotel, New York City
CYBORG ALARM
CYBORG ALARM: When Technology, Imagination and Body Collide was a panel and exhibition with artwork by 2011 NYFA Fellows and Finalists: Sophie Kahn, caraballo-farman, Jason Bernagozzi, Michael Greathouse, James Case-Leal, and Karolina Sobecka. The panel discussion with the participating artists addressed the timely topic of being human in a world in which digital technology and the body are colliding and giving us new experiences, ideas and capabilities for inventing and imagining our physical and virtual identities. The discussion also addressed the attributes that make art accessible to a global public in open spaces and online.
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October 2011
Conference paper
Istanbul
ISEA CONFERENCE
This paper explores a conceptualization of locative new media art in a contextual framework of revitalization of urban spaces. The intersection of urban and new media studies has opened up a dynamic field of practice and research. The paper asks: How can we consider the “program” of the locative media art project as facilitating socio-spatial relationships in a way that cultivates a site and the activities in it?
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December 2011
Talk
The New School, New York City
Media and the Urban Environment
Guest lecturer.
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Conference presentation
AGLSP Conference, 2010
Dallas
Presentation at the AGLSP Conference: The Transformation of the 21st Century City, Dallas – 2010
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+ OTHER
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2017
Author
PhD Dissertation
Contemporary Urban Media Art – Images of Urgency
A Curatorial Inquiry
The dissertation examines from a combined academic and curatorial perspective how urban media art – media aesthetic art forms situated in the urban context – may be considered contemporary in the understanding of art that departs from, responds to and co-exists with ‘time’ and temporal experience. Under the themes ‘intensity’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘immersion’ the dissertation examines some of the ways in which our experience is affected by ubiquitous technological mediation, especially in hi-tech urban contexts, and simultaneously how artistic interventions work towards a critical understanding and exploitation of this new condition in our technological reality. I suggest that urban media art – as sensible constructions of temporal images of urgency situated in the urban environment – potentially interfere with the temporal experiences we are offered in our communicative context. Based on this, we can consider urban media art as contemporary especially because of its temporal qualities, as a form of radical temporal art.
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May 2016
Publication
Public Art Lab – Berlin / av edition
What Urban Media Art Can Do – Why When Where & How?
Edited by Susa Pop, Tanya Toft, Nerea Calvillo, Mark Wright
Urban media art is one of the most significant trends currently unfolding in contemporary art. It enables artists to develop new participative and interactive forms of art. The wealth of examples in this volume show how these scenarios are reflected in an urban context, including themes such as urban activism, telepresence, placemaking, sensing and ecology.
The book is based on the cultural project “Connecting Cities” sponsored by the EU, which studies the effects of urban media art on urban culture and its environment, architecture and participative urban development. The aim is an expanding worldwide network of media façades, urban screens and projection surfaces within the urban space.
More
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Spring 2015
Teaching
Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University
CRITICAL CURATING: URBAN DIGITAL ART
The course will introduce students to the emerging territory of urban digital art through the lens of curatorial practice, as found in initiatives with for example video art in public space, urban screens, context-specific screenings, architectural projection mapping, media architecture, nuit blanche festivals, new media connectivity projects and permanent urban digital galleries. It will provide students with an overview of the methodologies, philosophies and practices that have guided this territory, from the early initiatives with expanded cinema in the public domain in the late 1960s to contemporary installations with urban software art. The course will discuss the aesthetics of urban digital art; consider the contextualization of these artistic practices within “the media city” and related urban theories; discuss the renewed role of the curator in relation to established ideas of the curatorial; and consider the dispositif of the exhibition while problematizing concepts of ‘site specificity’, ‘temporality,’ ‘immateriality,’ ‘event,’ ‘spectacle,’ ‘participation,’ ‘embodiment’ and ‘subjectivity’.
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February-June 2015
Curatorial research
Copenhagen University
CRITICAL CURATING: URBAN DIGITAL ART
Curatorial research project
The total installation HERE ALL ALONE was developed on the basis of an academic research project at Copenhagen University. Five obstructions were formulated as critical premises for the becoming of the exhibition, based on research into aesthetic and curatorial discourses that have informed the domain of urban digital art since the 1960s. The research project was conducted together with the students of the graduate course Critical Curating: Urban Digital Art in spring 2015.
Hereallalone.dk/#CURATORIAL RESEARCH
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June 2015
Interview
INTERVIEW / UNPLACE PROJECT
Museums without a Place: Essays, Manifestos and Online Dialogues
Interview for the e-book Museus sem Lugar: Ensaios, Manifestos e Diálogos em Rede [Museums without a Place: Essays, Manifestos and Online Dialogues], edited by Helena Barranha, Susana S. Martins and António Pinto Ribeiro.
Unplace Project (a museum without a space)
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January 23, 2015
Interview
INTERVIEW / THE CREATORS PROJECT
10 Nordic Artists Journey into New Dimensions in Group Show ‘Voyage to the Virtual’
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January 5, 2015
Interview
INTERVIEW / GOOD MAGAZINE
“The Beautiful Melancholi of Nordic Digital Art”
Read in Good Magazine
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January 23, 2015
Interview
INTERVIEW / ANTI-UTOPIAS
Voyage to the Virtual at Scandinavia Hous
Read at Anti-Utopias
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2014-
Curatorial Advisor
SESI Digital Gallery, São Paulo
VERVE CULTURAL
Founded in 2011 by Marilia Pasculli and Joao Frugiuele, Verve Cultural is dedicated to performing musical events, installations and exhibitions of contemporary and digital art. Verve Cultural promotes the interchange of national and international artists, seeking for the experimentation of cultural practices that explore the particularities of urban intervention through multimedia resources.
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April 2014
Article
SCREEN PRACTICE IN CURATING: THE MEDIUM PARADOX – May 2014
This article addresses “the screen” as a curatorial focal point and consider “screen culture” in contemporary curating as an opportunity to confront the established viewing positions in our urban visual culture. It will address how our spectator positions, informed by our urban visual culture, are stuck in a discourse of the screen as broadcast channel. Through the lens of Nordic Outbreak, a nomadic moving image exhibition project that reflects some of the recent modes and directions in screen culture in contemporary curating and which is situated in a conceptual logic of the Internet as a distribution and circulation network, I question this position.
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2013
Curatorial Research
Online
URBAN MEDIA AESTHETICS
Urban Media Aesthetics is a platform without a physical location of its own, a platform for research, dissemination, critical discussion and experimentation with urban media aesthetics. Its ongoing research is conducted through interviews with curators, artists, architects, cultural planners and artistic producers who, through their practices, have contributed to the shaping of a territory. The platform facilitates a series of writing responses by scholars from various corners of the territory – Mark Amerika, Simone Arcagni, Christiane Paul, Ulrik Ekman, and Lev Manovich – and a growing resources database that collects titles and references that have gone into the research for this platform.
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October 2013
Interview
INTERVIEW / GALILEU Magazine, Brazil
In relation to the second SP Urban Digital Festival in Sao Paulo. In print.
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October 2013
Interview
INTERVIEW / GALILEU Magazine, Brazil
In relation to the second SP Urban Digital Festival in Sao Paulo. In print.
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September 2013
Essay
The Dogma of New Media Art in Stockholm
An essay looking into the state of “new media art” in the institutional art scene of Stockholm – which was once at the forefront of the new media art paradigm. This was at a time when the phrase “new media” actually made sense, acknowledging the development of then-new technologies that could bring visual messages to the masses.
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March 2013
Interview
INTERVIEW / HUFFINGTON POST
Nordic Outbreak: Curator Tanya Toft on How Nordic Art Extends Far Beyond Björk
Read at Huffington Post
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March 2013
Interview
INTERVIEW / ARTERRITORY
Nordic Outbreak in New York City
Read at Arterritory
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April 2013
Interview
INTERVIEW / INTERVIEW MAGAZINE
Nordic Invasion
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August 2012
Essay
Renewing Destruction as Critical Engagement
Article for publication ‘Letters from the Field’, produced by the summer residents at The Node Center for Curatorial Studies. Functioning as a conceptual framework to the exhibition, the publication contains artists’ contributions and essays by curators in a series of eight chapters. The book is presented in a malleable format that can be edited by the viewer, with a chapter left partially blank for additional responses. These assembled elements attempt to reveal the process of the production of ideas and critical methodologies. Through collaboration and correspondence, Letters from the Field is an experiment in exposing what our present is.
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November 2014
Essay
DIGITAL AFTERIMAGE
In a few decades from now – after the Kinect camera is considered an old device, after the sensation of scale has ceased, after interactivity has become intuitive, and after the hype of real-time is over – todays urban digital art will resonate for a new generation of contemporary artists, as afterimages of a period influenced by particular artistic ideas, urban visions, aesthetic challenges and technological curiosity. DIGITAL AFTERIMAGE, the third SP Urban Digital Festival origins from the urgency to question: What is the “reason of existence” of urban digital art? How does digital art contribute to the local urban environment, how does it contribute to building and enhancing a public social sphere, and how does it pave the way for future digital art interventions? In sum: What do we want from urban digital art and its role in the urban context and public discourse?
Curatorial essay for the third SP Urban Digital Festival, November 2014, Sao Paulo
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November 2013
Essay
DIGITAL CITIZEN
Curatorial essay for the second SP Urban Digital Festival, São Paulo
The theme for the second SP_Urban Digital Festival addresses our participation as citizens in this digital reality. It considers how we, while living in a digital culture, engage in society by virtue of the Internet and digital communications tools; how digital culture affects how we live and act among each other; and how we imagine ourselves and our human capacities. It reflects an urban reality that is augmented with data and digital aesthetics; a social reality in which our lives are monitored and our relationships are simulated and structured by online networks; an existential reality in which our self-portraits, self-images, and sense of identity are manipulated by digital aesthetics turning us into characters of real-world avatars; and a political reality in which new digital platforms and technologies allow for new means of knowledge production and participation in public discourse.
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November, 2013
Workshop
SESI, São Paulo
DIGITAL CITIZEN – CRITICAL ARTIST
Together with software artist Rune Madsen, I organized this workshop for the second SP_Urban Digital Festival 2013 in Sao Paulo at SESI-SP, designed to confront the tendency of avowal and affirmation of technology in artistic production and awake a critical response in artistic practices. It emphasizes the cultural dimension of software art and its application in urban space and interrogates the expectations that artists have toward technology in terms of what it can do for their artistic practice. Through presentations, discussion and experiments, the workshop raised the overall question: How can digital artworks confront our urban experience and push the boundaries of our understanding of what it means to be citizens in a digital age?
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March 2013
Essay
PLAY! – Curatorial essay
A consideration of how games are entering our cultural mainstream and becoming part of civic life. While video games are about the organization of play through space, what does the notion of “play” offer to our public spaces? What can gaming narratives convey to our cultural condition? The article addresses how the artworks presented in Play! at the SESI Gallery / media facade explores relationships between issues that pervade the game artworks and current social issues, and relate to our use of and being in public space.
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March 2011
Interview for Streaming Museum
New York City
Interview with MICHAEL NAJJAR
In this interview, recorded in the area around the United Nations’ building uptown Manhattan, German media artist, Michael Najjar and I talk about his 2013 space flight on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Produced by Streaming Museum.
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January 2012
Interview for Streaming Museum
New York City
Interview with MAURICE BENAYOUN
In this interview, Forecasting Through the Open Window, I ask French media artist Maurice Benayoun about his artistic practice, about the postdigital and the future of the museum, as we walk down Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, the World Trade Center, Trinity Church and St. Pauls in New York City’s Financial District. In the collection of the National Heritage through the National Audiovisual Institute Institut national de l’audiovisuel and can be viewed at the Bibliothèque de France.
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October 2011
Article
Social Media as Strategic Media Tools for Local Community Development
in MediaCity: Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena, article submission for MediaCity Conference, Bauhaus Universitat Weimar, 2010.
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Conference article
October 2010
Bauhaus University, Weimar
MEDIA CITY CONFERENCE
Interaction of Architecture, Media and Social Phenomena
The paper considers how online social media platforms create digital ‘places’ where people “meet”, and facilitate a networked sense of spatiality. It explores the possibilities for re-developing a local sense of place through the kinds of social practices we customarily employ online, in order to create a connected, local sense of spatiality.
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2011-2012
Research
New York City / Copenhagen / Berlin
URLAB
Fridbjorg Architect’s URLAB (Urban Research LAB), which I co-developed, produced and organized, was a space of inspiration and initiative that investigated architecture’s sustainable value creation for the lives of people in urban spaces. URLAB’s research and dissemination aimed at influencing the public discourse about architecture and urbanity with a greater emphasis on the meaning of architecture to people’s living conditions and social relations, referred to as Human Architecture.
(no longer online)
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2011
Archival research
New-York Historical Society, the Creative Time Archive, New York Public Library, and Artstor, New York City
ELECTRICAL CURRENTS archival research
From an approach of urban media archaeology, this research looks into archival material of photographs; into how electrical currents – environments that are organized by light in a literal or hybrid sense – have allowed for subjects to position themselves, and their sense of citizenship, in different ways in urban spaces. This research was conducted for my MA thesis at Copenhagen University.
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