Margin Release

So! Now that we have discussed, viewed, listened, and participated, and now that we have had the experience of meeting and hearing all of our esteemed visitors, let’s ask one final time:
WHAT DOES IT MEAN: “NEW MEDIA???”

(BTW: the above image is the first image that comes up in a google image search for “what is new media.”)

This has been an awesome journey, thanks to all of you for your great thinking and working.

There will be more!

The margin has been released.

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Paper Rad is a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania/Providence, Rhode Island American art collective that makes comics zines, video art, net art, MIDI files, paintings, installations, and are in a variety of bands. The three primary members are Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci, and Ben Jones.

Although they continue to publish their own zines, music, and online content, they are represented by Foxy Production gallery in New York and have shown at several major galleries including Pace Wildenstein, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Deitch Projects. They also published a book, Paper Rad, BJ and da Dogsin late-2005 as well a DVD on Load Records in 2006 (Trash Talking).

http://www.paperrad.org/

On Thursday night, April 24, the Margin Release class threw a spectacular, FABULOUS dinner party in Julia’s backyard. Everyone made magnificent, fabulous meals…sweet potato pizza, muffins made out of everyone’s state foods, finger foods served in monitors and on floppy disks, balloons to pop with candy inside, a fifteen layer cake, roast beef sandwiches, peach cobbler served by a southern gentleman, even a carton of cream cheese from Zabar’s to top off the feast––just to name a few! Amazing work everyone! Nao and Fufu were so impressed with the culinary talents and warm hospitality of the Oberlin crew. A wonderful celebration of spring, community, and new media(tion) of course! Pictures below. 

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance and video artist originating from the San Joaquin Valley of California. Her (often precarious) work encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation and video. Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. Her work has been exhibited, among other locales at, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. Most recently she was one of four winners of the Chase Legacy Film Challenge grant in partnership with HBO and Kodak, presented at the Sundance Film Festival 08.

Currently Bustamante is on sabbatical as a visiting scholar at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. She holds the position as Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

http://www.naobustamante.com/

Post your blog here about the reading!

Paul DeMarinis has been working as an electronic media artist since 1971 and has created numerous performance works, sound and computer installations and interactive electronic inventions. He has performed internationally, at The Kitchen, Festival d’Automne a Paris, Het Apollohuis in Holland and at Ars Electronica in Linz and created music for Merce Cunningham Dance Co. His interactive audio artworks have been shown at the I.C.C. in Tokyo, Bravin Post Lee Gallery in New York and The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at The Exploratorium and at Xerox PARC and has received major awards and fellowships in both Visual Arts and Music from The National Endowment for the Arts, N.Y.F.A., N.Y.S.C.A., the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Award and the D.A.A.D. Berlin Artist Fellowship.

Much of his work involves speech processed and synthesized by computers, available on the Lovely Music Ltd. compact disc “Music as a Second Language”, and the Apollohuis CD “A Listener’s Companion” Major installation works include “The Edison Effect” that uses optics and computers to make new sounds by scanning ancient phonograph records with lasers, “Gray Matter” that uses the interaction of body and electricity to make music, and “The Messenger” and “Firebirds” that examine the myths of electrical communication.

Public artworks include large scale interactive installations at Park Tower Hall in Tokyo, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and Expo 1998 in Lisbon and an interactive audio environment at the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport in 2003.

DeMarinis is Associate Professor of in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

http://www.well.com/~demarini/

STRANGE CULTURE:
A film by Lynn Hershman Leeson starring Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan and Peter Coyote. 2007, 75 minutes.
7PM IN CRAIG LECTURE HALL
SCREENING WITH STEVE KURTZ

Everything changed for conceptual artist Steve Kurtz on the morning of May 11, 2004, when he awoke to discover that his 45-year-old wife, Hope, had died in her sleep. A domestic tragedy turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare after the paramedics he summoned, alarmed by the Petri dishes, scientific equipment and books in his house, reported him to the FBI as a suspected bio-terrorist. The founders of the Critical Art Ensemble, Kurtz and his wife had been working on an installation about the emergence of biotechnology for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The live cultures they were using were as harmless as yogurt, but a Hazmat team from Quantico descended on their home, arrested Kurtz, carried away his equipment, computers and papers, and seized his wife’s body from the coroner. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s unconventional documentary, which features Kurtz himself and actors Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote, Thomas Jay Ryan (Fay Grim, also screening at this year’s Festival) and Josh Kornbluth, combines reenactments and interviews to tell a tale of government overreaction that would be comic if it weren’t appalling and still unresolved nearly three years later. Though cleared of bio-terrorism, Kurtz still faces federal indictments that could result in a long prison term. Strange Culture is a story not only of post-9/11 paranoia but also of the clash between the “strange culture” of art and dissent and a Justice Department unwilling to admit it has made a mistake.

—Pamela Troy
San Francisco International Film Festival

Steve Kurtz is a founding member of the award-winning art and theater collective, Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Since its formation in 1987, CAE has been frequently invited to exhibit and perform projects examining issues surrounding information, communications and bio-technologies by museums and other cultural institutions. These include The Whitney Museum and The New Museum in NYC; The Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C.; The ICA, London; The MCA, Chicago; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and The London Museum of Natural History.

The collective has written 6 books, and its writings have been translated into 18 languages. Its work has been covered by art journals, including Artforum, Kunstforum, and The Drama Review.

Critical Art Ensemble is the recipient of awards, including the 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, the 2004 John Lansdown Award for Multimedia, and the 2004 Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation.

http://www.critical-art.net/

PIZZA WILL BE SERVED!

Michael Trigilio gave a public lecture about his life and times at the Cat in the Cream @ noon on Monday, Feb 25. The friendly Cat staff oversaw the tech, and the awesome Margin Releasers did an amazing job with PR and production. We had an audience 75 strong who partook in Michael’s wisdom, while happily consuming pizza. Earlier in the day, the TRANSMISSIONS class interviewed Michael live on the radio, WOBC 91.5FM. Logan Takahashi, a Margin Releaser, was kind enough to host us on his show, Space Jamz (Monday @ 11!).

Media to come…

On Sunday, February 24 @ 2PM, we held an event at the Art Building of Oberlin College called FMemory. For this event, students from the TRANSMISSIONS class installed their newly built FM transmitters throughout the building. Students from the Margin Release class, as well as the Transmissions class, recorded themselves interpreting memories from throughout their lives. These memories manifested as songs, experimental sounds, readings, and dramatizations. All in all, about 50 audio tracks of memories were transmitted on radio transmitters throughout the art building. Over 100 students showed up for the event, most of them with radios in hand. Participants strolled throughout the building tuning their radios to the frequencies floating throughout the air, revealing our memories on the radio.

Click here to see more pictures.