Intractable Pavilion_

Ahmed Kamel

https://ahmed-kamel.com/spiral/
https://ahmed-kamel.com/monologue/ password: about

Ahmed Kamel (born 1981 in Cairo) is an Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist. He deals with the self-image and its visual representation on an individual and group level, as well as the encounter between different communities. Between observation and recontextualization, the artist uses various media such as photography, video, drawing, and installation.

He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the Middle East and Europe, including exhibitions at Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo, Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Brandts Museum for Photo Art in Odense, East Wing in Doha, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg and Folkwang Museum in Essen. He was artist in residency at The Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs in Berlin, Mediamatic in Amsterdam, ProHelvetia in Bern, Kunststiftung NRW in Düsseldorf, and Amongst Neighbours in Istanbul. He lives and works in Berlin and Cairo.

Caitlin & Misha

https://caitlinandmisha.com/

Artist duo Caitlin & Misha find inspiration in naturally occurring systems such as rhizomatic networks of mycelium, the microbiome ecology, and emergent pink noise for the shared experiences they construct in their collaborative art practice. Among other things they create installations, games, data visualizations, and happenings. They aim to create artworks that provide unique opportunities for shared experiences, thought experiments, and group-based rejuvenation, such as sweating, meditating, humming, jumping, and worrying together.

Caitlin Foley and Misha Rabinovich began working collaboratively in 2010 and are full time faculty in the Department of Art & Design at UMass Lowell where Caitlin is a Visiting Faculty Lecturer in Foundations and Misha is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media. They are recipients of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Immersive Scholar Award, NEFA Creative City Grant, and exhibited at such venues as the Science Gallery (London), EFA Project Space (NYC), the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival (NYC), Boston Cyberarts (Boston), Montserrat College of Art (Beverley, MA), Machine Project (LA), Torrance Art Museum in (LA). They have held residencies at places such as Flux Factory, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark, and Andrea Zittell’s Wagon Station Encampment which have helped shape their creative network and interest in social practice. They were recently commissioned by King’s College in London to create a series of participatory workshops and an animated film for the Fecal Microbiota Transplantation PROMISE study. 

Dorothy Santos

https://soundcloud.com/dee-50/remembering-the-pulse 

Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.

Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, 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 is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation. She is also an advisory board member for POWRPLNT and slash arts.

Grayson Earle 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbXiVb1Uv8c

why don’t the cops fight each other?

why don’t the cops fight each other? is a desktop documentary about an attempt to modify the relationships between police officers in Grand Theft Auto V. This work engages the “modding” scene for GTA, a community of people and tools that enable modifications to the game world. While these mods are almost limitless in scope, Earle discovers one property that is completely immutable: the police officers in the game will never fight each other. Through an exhaustive forensic analysis of the game’s source code and engagement with mod developers, the artist shows the extent to which the cultural imaginary concerning the police is projected into the game space.
—
Grayson Earle is a new media artist and educator. He has worked as a professor at Oberlin College, the New School, and the City University of New York. He is the co-creator of Bail Bloc (along with fellow pavilion artist Sam Lavigne) and a member of The Illuminator art collective.

His work uses the context of art to materialize ideas and forms surrounding the role that digital technologies and networks can play in protest and political agency. He exhibits inside and outside of traditional art spaces, working with guerrilla video projection, cryptocurrency, machine learning, simulation, sculpture, and the internet.

Earle has held fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude, ZK/U, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, and Pioneer Works. He has presented his work and research at The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, Radical Networks, the Magnum Foundation, and Open Engagement. Recent exhibitions include the Brooklyn Museum (USA), Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico), Kate Vass Galerie (Switzerland), and The Red House (Taiwan).

Heesoo Kwon

1. Leymusoom Universe (2021)

www.leymusoom.com 

Leymusoom Universe (LU), a digital library that attempts to queer and decentralize concepts of time, familial relations, trauma, and boundaries of past, present, and utopic dreams. In 2017 I initiated an autobiographical feminist religion, Leymusoom, as an ever-evolving exploration of my family histories and feminist liberation. Through this, I produced 3D animated videos and interactive games of real and imagined worlds, populated by avatars of my female ancestors, living in 3D environments from actual locations or spaces from my life and family history.

Serving as a digital archive and a feminist utopia, Leymusoom Universe reincarnates my female ancestors’ lives and Leymusoom communal spaces without constraints of time and space. The audience is guided through symbolic locations within the Leymusoom world such as the Catholic church in South Korea where my parents got married, the Leymusoom church on the UC Berkeley campus which functioned as an open space for the Leymusoom community 2018-2019, and my previous bedroom in Oakland accompanied by video works entitled “02/28/2020-05/26/2020”. The digitized places where me and my family’s memories are embedded become portals for hyperspace travel, inviting the users to explore my memories and the utopian world that I am envisioning.  For me, the use of technology, and in particular building a digital feminist utopia, is a ritualistic practice and a shamanistic tool; the act of manifesting a shared digital feminist sanctuary and actualizing liberation is an extremely powerful form of resistance.

2. Leymusoom Digital Shrine (2021)

https://newart.city/show/leymusoom-digital-shrine

This is a prototype of Leymusoom Metaverse which I am partnering with the Asian Art Museum and Chinese Culture Center. The project will be launched later this year or early next year.  I built this project with the support of New Art City as their artist in residency.

Dejan Grba + Philippe Kocher 

Study 7/0 (2018-ongoing)

Project website: http://dejangrba.org/art-projects/en/2018-study-7-0/index.html

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/407036239

Dejan Grba is an artist, researcher and scholar who explores the cognitive, technical, poetic, and relational aspects of generative systems. He has exhibited in Europe, Asia, Australia, North and South America, and published papers in journals, conference proceedings, and books worldwide. He has served as a Co-founding Associate Professor with Digital Art Program at Interdisciplinary Graduate Center, University of the Arts in Belgrade since 2005, and as a Founding Chair and Associate Professor at New Media Department, Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1998 to 2020. In 2019 and 2020, Dejan was a Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Art Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. http://dejangrba.org/dejan-grba/en/index.php

Philippe Kocher is a musician, composer and researcher. He studied piano, electroacoustic music, music theory, composition and musicology in Zurich, Basel, London and Bern. His artistic and scientific work encompasses instrumental and electroacoustic music, sound installation, algorithmic composition and computer-generated music. Philippe is a professor of music theory, composition, and computer music at the Zurich University of the Arts, and a research associate and software developer at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST) in Zurich. http://philippekocher.ch

Jack Stenner

https://vimeo.com/jackstenner/violentdelights
https://jackstenner.com/project/violent-delights

Jack Stenner (US) synthesizes culture, hardware, and software to create conceptual work taking forms such as networked installation and experimental cinema. His work explores how ideology, power, and material conditions coalesce through technology to produce tangible effects on our lives. Social and economic inequality, climate change, racism, war, and hunger are symptomatic of the failure of ideological and material power structures inadequate to our contemporary needs. To enact change we must question our core assumptions and create new institutions that support well-being and a just society.

He is Associate Professor of Art + Technology at the University of Florida. He holds a Ph.D in Architecture with emphasis in Computer Visualization from Texas A&M University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, at venues including Siggraph, ACM Multimedia, International Society of Electronic Artists (ISEA), ZeroOne Biennial, Alternative Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Toluca, Mexico, The High Museum, Polk Museum of Art, Tampa Museum of Art, Orlando Museum of Art and many others.

Jennifer Gradecki + Derek Curry 

https://www.boogaloo-bias.art/ 

Placeholder video: https://vimeo.com/602049307 

Jennifer Gradecki (US) is an artist-theorist who investigates secretive and specialized socio-technical systems. Her artistic research has focused on social science techniques, financial instruments, dataveillance technologies, intelligence analysis, artificial intelligence, and social media misinformation. https://jennifergradecki.com/  

Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work critiques and addresses spaces for intervention in automated decision-making systems. His work has addressed automated stock trading systems, Open Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT), and algorithmic classification systems. His artworks have replicated aspects of social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. https://derekcurry.com/   

Curry and Gradecki have presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), New Media Gallery (Zadar), NeMe (Cypress), Media Art History (Krems), ADAF (Athens), and the Centro Cultural de España (México). Their research has been published in Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Their artwork has been funded by Science Gallery Dublin and the NEoN Digital Arts Festival. 

Description: Boogaloo Bias in an interactive artwork and research project that highlights some of the known problems with law enforcement agencies’ use of facial recognition technologies, including the practice of ‘brute forcing’ where, in the absence of high-quality images of a suspect, agents have been known to substitute images of celebrities the suspect is reported to resemble. The Boogaloo Bias facial recognition algorithm is trained on faces of characters from the 1984 movie Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. The film is the namesake for the Boogaloo Bois, an anti-law enforcement militia that emerged from 4chan meme culture and has been present at protests since January 2020. The system uses movie character faces to brute force the generation of leads to find members of the Boogaloo Bois in live video feeds and videos of protest footage. All matches made by the system are false positives.

Kamau Patton 

https://tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions/235-opener-32-tel-_

Kamau Patton is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories, and sites. Patton’s projects are dialogic and take form as expanded field conversations. Patton received his MFA from Stanford University in 2007 and received a degree in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. His work was shown in 2012 as part of Pacific Standard Time and in 2013 as part of the Machine Project Field guide to LA Architecture. Patton has completed projects in soundscape studies through support provided by the State University of New York at Buffalo, the Mellon Elemental Arts Initiative, and the Tang Teaching Museum. He presented research in 2016 at the ABF house in Stockholm, Sweden, as a part of The Shape of Co- to- Come symposium and exhibition. Patton participated in a series of performances as part of Projects 107: Lone Wolf Recital Corps at the Museum of Modern Art in August 2017. In September 2017, he installed an iteration of his ongoing project, Tel, at the Tang Museum. In 2019, Patton’s public art commission with the Bowman Montessori School in Palo Alto, CA, was open to the public. In 2020 Patton was an artist in residence at Coaxial Arts Foundation in Los Angeles. Utilizing recordings from the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection, Patton created “The Past & Other Dreams”, a double cassette produced by the artist in collaboration with the Creative Audio Archive at ESS. A box set LP of Patton’s arrangements of Terry Adkins’s Lone Wolf Recital Corps Recitals, Second Mind and Alto Age, will be released in partnership with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2021.

Negativland 

https://www.youtube.comf/watch?v=StFY_SG9wlk

Negativland is an American experimental music band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s.[1] They took their name from a Neu! track,[2] while their record label (Seeland Records) is named after another Neu! track. The core of the band consists of Mark Hosler, David Wills (aka “The Weatherman”), Peter Conheim and Jon Leidecker (aka “Wobbly”).[3]

Negativland has released a number of albums ranging from pure sound collage to more musical expositions. These have mostly been released on their own label, Seeland Records. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they produced several recordings for SST Records, most notably Escape from Noise, Helter Stupid and U2. Negativland were sued by the band U2‘s record label, Island Records, and by SST Records, which brought them widespread publicity and notoriety. The band is also part of the Church of the SubGenius parody religion.

Ryan J Rasmussen

https://vimeo.com/609805008

Ryan Rasmussen is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator whose work spans practices in sculpture, installation, kinetic/electronic works, and video. Ryan currently resides in North Carolina where he is Assistant Professor of Intermedia at Elon University. Ryan’s work has been shown in places such as New York, Chicago, Doha, Seoul, Minsk, and Istanbul.

Sam Lavigne

https://vimeo.com/448718266

Sam Lavigne is an artist and programmer whose work explores issues around data, surveillance, policing and automation. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues like the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, the New Museum, Ars Electronica, and IDFA Doclab. He was formerly a Magic Grant fellow at the Brown Institute at Columbia University and Special Projects editor at the New Inquiry Magazine.

Zbigniew Bzymek 

Wild Things One Scan (2019)

https://vimeo.com/347411422

Zbigniew Bzymek (born January 21, 1976) is a filmmaker, experimental theatre and music video artist who lives and works in New York City. He is best known for his film Utopians, which premiered at The 61st Berlin International Film Festival and for winning the Grand Prix at the 31st Rencontres Henri Langlois. He has been called “a young filmmaker to follow” by Stéphane Delorme in the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma.[1] In theatre, he has worked with Krystian Lupa and Elizabeth LeCompte and has been a longtime member of The Wooster Group. 

3D wireframe scan of Andy Maillet singing his song “Wild Things.” Andy wears a square mirror around his neck reflecting his hands on the keyboard. The slo mo at the end of this one-take video is caused by processor lag – the motion ends just in time for Andy to finish his song.

3D cinematography: Marcin Kosakowski
Lyrics and Music: Andy Maillet

Xiaowei Wang

Witch Fever (2021)

https://www.xiaoweiwang.com/witchfever (placeholder URL, still finishing the project website!)

Witch Fever examines the relationships between empire, art and materiality. Using neural style transfer, the project combines the patterns of British artist, designer and socialist William Morris (1834-1896) with photographs of Britain’s colonial reach to produce a new set of 20 patterns. Working during the Industrial Revolution, Morris’s romanticism gave rise to the Arts & Crafts movement, pushing against industrial production. At the same time, Morris’s original patterns drew from the botanical harvests of the British Empire — oranges, pomegranates and more, taken from the British colonial plantations. The wallpapers of Morris & Co were financially and materially buttressed by the materials of empire and industrialization, with Morris’s family fortune derived from arsenic mines. Morris’s wallpapers themselves were printed with arsenic, to achieve a luminous green. When these wallpapers started to cause arsenic poisoning, Morris dismissed these concerns as “witch fever”. In using a neural style transfer to create seemingly hand drawn patterns, Witch Fever provokes a parallel to the use of computation in art today.

Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer and coder. Their collaborative project FLOAT Beijing created air quality-sensing kites to challenge censorship and was an Index Design Awards finalist. Other projects have been featured by the New York Times, BBC, CNN, VICE and elsewhere. Their most recent project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award and their work has shown at Taipei Design City, Haus de Kulturen Welt Berlin and Headlands Center for the Arts. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China’s Countryside and one of the lead facilitators of Logic School, an organizing community for tech workers.

Tra Bouscaren – Curator, Intractable Pavilion

Tra Bouscaren is a neo-cave painter. He serves as an Assistant Professor of Critical Art Practices, and Co-Director of the Expanded Media Lab at Florida State University. Fall 2021 Bouscaren will Collections Artist-in-Residence at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin. Bouscaren’s work has been featured at venues including the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (Seoul), Palácio da Cultura Ildo Lobo (Praia), Vittorio Manalese & Fils (Berlin), Victor I Fils Gallery (Madrid), the National Museum of Art (Addis Ababa), Greenleaf Gallery (Los Angeles), Fort Mason Center for Art and Culture (San Francisco), San Diego Art Institute, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Orlando Museum of Art, Hallwalls (Buffalo), Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), and Lincoln Center (New York). 

Lucas von Hollen – Techno Wizard

Lucas von Hollen is a digital abomination and modern-day mad scientist. His creations range from full-size robots, to 3D scan guns, to arm-mounted fireball launchers. He has worked a range of roles spanning from a clown in the circus to a government systems engineer and is currently an instructor at Florida State University. He created this website in the span of a single paint-fume-induced fever dream and has little to no recollection of its inception.