FEBRUARY 2016 ARRAYLIST THEME: Performance [experimental, durational, networked]

We are happy to announce the upcoming ArrayList discussion theme:
Performance [experimental, durational, networked]
starts February 1, 2016

ArrayList series details here: http://arrayproject.com/content/discussion

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The purpose of the ArrayList year-long series is to connect new media artists, designers, educators, theorists, producers, activists, and organizers while facilitating critical discussion about foundation level new media pedagogy and context (both inside and outside traditional academic structures). For those new to the listserv format, a listserv is an archived asynchronous thread of email conversation. Subscribe to the listserv so that you can read [fly-on-the-wall is a-ok AKA lurking] and/or respond to the written activity, and read the archives. As always we hope to engage a wide range of critical perspectives so please chime in with thoughts and questions. Sincerely, j.duran, Adam Trowbridge, Jessica Parris Westbrook, ARRAY[ ] founders

Performance [experimental, durational, networked]:
with guest thread leaders: Thomas Albrech, Amy Alexander, L[3]^2 (Lee Blalock), Ricardo Dominguez, Kirsten Leenaars, Ellen Mueller, Heather Warren-Crow, Jorge Rojas, Angela Washko

Thomas Albrecht (State University of New York at New Paltz)
Thomas Albrecht’s performance projects have explored ritual and language in public spaces, galleries, and museums, prodding cultural beliefs and individual doubts. Current interests involve duration and elements of Absurdist Theatre, laying bare contingency in human constructions and slippage between truth and fiction. Albrecht has performed throughout the United States and internationally, notably at Grace Exhibition Space, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Dimanche Rouge Paris, the Queens Museum, and during festivals such as the Brooklyn International Performing Arts Festival, Month of Performance Art Berlin, and Performatorio, IV Muestra de Arte Duracional in the Dominican Republic. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale University where he served as the Menil Scholar in residence, and his MFA from the University of Washington. He serves as Assistant Dean in the School of Fine & Performing Arts, and Associate Professor in the Art Department at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Amy Alexander (University of California, San Diego)
Amy Alexander is a digital media, audiovisual and performance artist who has also worked in film, video, music, tactical media and information technology. She has been making films since 1990 and creating art through programming since 1994. Much of Alexander’s work is performance-based, often working at intersections of cinema, performing arts, humor, politics, and popular culture. Her current research and practice focuses on expanded approaches to the moving image that reflect contemporary cultural and technological shifts. Alexander has performed and exhibited internationally in clubs and on the street as well as in festivals, museums and on the Internet. She has written and lectured on software art, software as culture, and audiovisual performance, and she has served as a reviewer for festivals and commissions for digital media art, video, and computer music. She was a founding organizer of the runme.org software repository, and she has done residencies at The Media Centre in Huddersfield, UK, and the iota Center in Los Angeles. She is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. More information at: http://amy-alexander.com

L[3]^2 (Lee Blalock) (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
Lee Blalock is an artist who considers what it may mean to live in a future somewhere between here and nowhere. Her research began when she was a kid and would visit her father at his job as a computer programmer / operator. Rules and systems are inherent to her process, while her imagination leans toward the N3w Hum4n. Lee uses her work to create new origin stories, visual or written, which are influenced by a life long interest in speculative fiction and science fiction. Having moved fluidly from an undergraduate STEM education to a career in design and production, she eventually found that all of her conceptual and technical interests converge in the fine arts. The artist makes work using text, performance, computational video and sound, electronics and drawing. Many ideas behind Lee’s work attempts to describe the future human, replacing the failed language around identity with the self-constructed and amplified self. This new body (or “NeueBody”) often takes the form of abstraction and presents a mix of algorithmic and heuristic behavior. In all cases, Lee’s work represents the physical, computational, or behavioral body and uses repetition as a strategy to move past the automatic and into something transformative. As an arts educator, Lee’s research is specific to topics referring to the posthuman, systems and cybernetics. She received her Bachelor of Science (Chemistry and Math) from Spelman College and an Associates of Arts (Design) from Bauder College. In 2011, Lee received her Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute, where she currently teaches in multiple departments. Lee writes and performs under the alphanumeric moniker of L[e]^2. She can be found walking a tightrope in the center of a holographic sphere.

Ricardo Dominguez (University of California, San Diego)
Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project ( http://bang.transreal.org/) with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM, Germany (2013), as well as a number of other national and international venues. The project was also under investigation by the US Congress in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. Dominguez is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 and the Performative Nano-Robotics Lab at SME, UCSD. He also is co-founder of *particle group*, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, whose art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* has been presented at the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, Spain (2009), Nanosférica, NYU (2010), and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico (2012): http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/particle-group-intro.

Kirsten Leenaars (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
Kirsten Leenaars’ creates participatory video and performance based work. In her practice Leenaars engages with specific people and communities. Her work oscillates between fiction and documentation, reinterprets personal stories and reimagines everyday realities through staging, improvisation and iteration. She examines the very nature of our own constructed realities, the stories we tell our selves and the ones we identify with and explores the way we relate to others. Recent projects include producing a series of 3 performances Notes on Empty Chairs, about loss, community and empathy for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; creating the video #thisistomorrow with Washington DC based performers in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner; and producing the science fiction film: The Invasion of the Hairy Blobs, currently edited at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, amongst others at: Museo Universitaro del Chopo, Mexico City, DCAC, Washington DC, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Glass Curtain Gallery, Threewalls, Gallery 400, 6018 North, and Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Detroit, Printed Matter, New York, the Wexner Center, Columbus, and at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Kunst Fabrik, Munchen, and Bethanien Haus, Berlin. She has been rewarded grants from the Mondrian Foundation, The Propeller Fund, the department of Culturall Affairs, Chicago, the Dutch Art Foundation and multiple cultural grants from the Dutch Consulate in New York.

Ellen Mueller (West Virginia Wesleyan College)
Exhibiting works nationally and internationally, Ellen Mueller explores hyperactive news media and corporate management systems via work in a variety of media including, but not limited to, performance, 3D printing, and drawing. Recent residencies include Ox-Bow, Virginia Center for Creative Art where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow, Nes Artist Residency (Iceland), Coast Time (May 2016), and Signal Culture (August 2016). Mueller currently lives and works in Buckhannon WV as an Assistant Professor of Art at West Virginia Wesleyan College. She received her MFA in Studio Art from University of South Florida. She completed a BA in Theatre and Art, and a BS in Design Technology from Bemidji State University. Additionally, she has obtained performance training at Dell’Arte International and the Brave New Institute (now known as the Brave New Workshop Student Union). Mueller is contracted with Oxford University Press to publish a foundational art textbook entitled “Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design”, due out February 2016.

Heather Warren-Crow (Texas Tech University)
Heather Warren-Crow, assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts and affiliated faculty in women’s studies, is a scholar of media and performance as well as an artist. Her interdisciplinary scholarship centers on the aesthetics of subjectivity in the 19th-21st centuries. She has given sustained attention to the body in analog and digital animation, discourses of adolescence in fine art and popular media, the art of affective labor, and the agency of objects, images, and sounds. Dr. Warren-Crow’s first book, Girlhood and the Plastic Image, was recently published by Dartmouth College Press. Dr. Warren-Crow’s teaching interests span music, theatre, dance, film, and visual art. She has areas of expertise in intermedia (especially performance art, sound art, and screendance); puppetry, movement-based, and multimedia performance; theatrical design; video and internet art; photography theory; performance studies; cinema and media studies; girlhood studies; gender studies; and vocal aesthetics.

Jorge Rojas (Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City)
Born in Morelos, Mexico, Jorge Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and art educator. He studied Art at the University of Utah and at Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. His work and curatorial projects have been exhibited across the US and internationally, including Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum of Art, White Box, and Grace Exhibition Space in New York; Museum of Latin American Art, The Mexican Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and MACLA in California; Project Row Houses and New World Museum in Houston; Diaspora Vibe Gallery in Miami; Utah Museum of Fine Arts and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City; Ex Convento del Carmen in Guadalajara; and FOFA Gallery in Montreal. He has received grants and fellowships from National Performance Network, Experimental Television Center, and Vermont Studio Center. He is the Founding Director of Low Lives, an international, multi-venue live streaming performance festival that was founded in 2009. Rojas is director of education and engagement at the UMFA in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Angela Washko (Carnegie Mellon University)
Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in the spaces most hostile toward it. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2012, Washko has operated as The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft – an ongoing intervention on communal language formation inside the most popular massively multi-player online role playing game of all time. A recent recipient of The Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, a Creative Time Report commission, a Rhizome Internet Art Microgrant, a Danish International Visiting Artist Grant and the Terminal Award, Washko’s practice has been highlighted in Art in America, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian (UK), ArtForum, ARTnews, VICE, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, the New York Times, The Creator’s Project, Dazed and Confused Magazine, Digicult, ArtInfo, Bad At Sports and more. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki, Finland), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Moving Image Art Fair (London and NYC), the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Institute for Contemporary Art Boston and Bitforms Gallery in NYC. Washko’s work is featured in the recently published book “Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century” from The New Museum and MIT Press.