Digital Memory Prosthetics: all video, selfies, instagrams, tweets, Facebook posts, digital calendars, map directions, all instances recorded on our phones, computers, tablets, by ourselves or by others, which become deeply instrumental to us in a way that extends and/or stands in for the functionality of the mind.

On Sunday June 5th we hosted a conversation about autobiographical memory and its relationship to digital media with Taeyoon Choi, Jade Davis, Nathan Jurgenson, Luka Lucic, Lorie Novak, and Chris Romero.

The discussion was streamed and documented via a google doc edited live through out the event, noting in-the-moment seemingly relevant points made, and googling topics and references, which arose in the conversation. You can find the final version of this document here and watch the full conversation in the following video.

DIGITAL MEMORY (PROSTHETICS) is a collaboration between Artistic Research for Memory Prosthetics members neuroscientist Sonja Blum and VR maker/artist Sarah Rothberg, and REVERSE curator/artist Andrea Wolf.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Taeyoon Choi is an artist, educator, and curator based in New York and Seoul. His art practice involves performance, electronics, drawings, and storytelling that often leads to intervention in public spaces. Recently, Taeyoon was an artist in residence at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Taeyoon cofounded the School for poetic computation in 2013 where he continues to organize and teach, and he is currently working on a book of drawings about computation.

Jade E. Davis is the Associate Director of Digital Learning Projects in the Center for Teaching and Learning at LaGuardia Community College CUNY. Her research looks at how digital media affects how society makes, understands, and accepts knowledge and culture. More specifically, she is interested in spaces that make digital information into knowledge and culture and the ethics and ownership of the data traces that are left behind. You can find some of her work on her website and can follow her on twitter @jadedid.

Nathan Jurgenson is a sociologist and social media theorist. Nathan is co-founder and chair of the Theorizing the Web conference, a contributing editor of The New Inquiry, and a researcher at Snapchat.

Luka Lucić is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. Luka is a developmental psychologist whose research explores socio-cognitive development among young people who experienced abrupt changes of context as a consequence of migration, war, and urban destruction. His most recent publication titled Changing Landscapes, Changing Narratives (Pedagogy, Culture & Society) describes the effects of new media technologies on the psychological development of today’s young migrants.

Lorie Novak is an artist and Professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University Tisch School of Arts and the founder and director of the department’s Future Imagemakers/Community Collaborations. Lorie uses various technologies of representation to explore issues of memory and transmission, identity and loss, presence and absence, shifting cultural meanings of photographs, and the relationship between the intimate and the public. Her Collected Visions project, 1996-present, exploring how family photographs shape our memory, was one of the earliest interactive storytelling websites.

Chris Romero is a curator interested in media art, photography, animation, the Internet, and digital culture. In September 2015 he organized the first Internet Yami-Ichi in New York with Japanese Internet art collective IDPW. His exhibitions have been featured throughout New York and highlighted in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and Hyperallergic. His academic and professional experiences express a passion for the curation, research, and preservation of media art.

SUNDAY, JUNE 5TH, 5PM LIVESTREAMED FROM REVERSE

What were you doing on this day last year? Facebook can remind you. What was the name of that pizza place? Google can remind you. What are you doing Sunday 6/5 at 5pm? Mark it, so your device can remind you, DIGITAL MEMORY (PROSTHETICS): a conversation.

Join us virtually via 360 livestream, while we talk about autobiographical memory and its relationship to digital media with Taeyoon Choi, Jade Davis, Nathan Jurgenson, Luka Lucic, Lorie Novak, and Chris Romero.

*To have the full VR experience with your headset, download the youtube app and watch the live stream there.

**You can also participate in the conversation through this google doc that we will be updating through out the event.

Digital Memory Prosthetics: all video, selfies, instagrams, tweets, Facebook posts, digital calendars, map directions, all instances recorded on our phones, computers, tablets, by ourselves or by others, which become deeply instrumental to us in a way that extends and/or stands in for the functionality of the mind.

The conversation will converge on the following themes:

• Historical relationships between memory and media
• The role of the algorithm in mechanisms of remembering
• Vulnerability (as a consequence of digital prosthetics?)
• Sociopolitical implications in changing memory
• Imagining future memory

Hosted by Artistic Research for Memory Prosthetics members neuroscientist Sonja Blum and VR maker/artist Sarah Rothberg, and REVERSE curator/artist Andrea Wolf.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Taeyoon Choi is an artist, educator, and curator based in New York and Seoul. His art practice involves performance, electronics, drawings, and storytelling that often leads to intervention in public spaces. Recently, Taeyoon was an artist in residence at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Taeyoon cofounded the School for poetic computation in 2013 where he continues to organize and teach, and he is currently working on a book of drawings about computation.

Jade E. Davis is the Associate Director of Digital Learning Projects in the Center for Teaching and Learning at LaGuardia Community College CUNY. Her research looks at how digital media affects how society makes, understands, and accepts knowledge and culture. More specifically, she is interested in spaces that make digital information into knowledge and culture and the ethics and ownership of the data traces that are left behind. You can find some of her work on her website and can follow her on twitter @jadedid.

Nathan Jurgenson is a sociologist and social media theorist. Nathan is co-founder and chair of the Theorizing the Web conference, a contributing editor of The New Inquiry, and a researcher at Snapchat.

Luka Lucić is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. Luka is a developmental psychologist whose research explores socio-cognitive development among young people who experienced abrupt changes of context as a consequence of migration, war, and urban destruction. His most recent publication titled Changing Landscapes, Changing Narratives (Pedagogy, Culture & Society) describes the effects of new media technologies on the psychological development of today’s young migrants.

Lorie Novak is an artist and Professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University Tisch School of Arts and the founder and director of the department’s Future Imagemakers/Community Collaborations. Lorie uses various technologies of representation to explore issues of memory and transmission, identity and loss, presence and absence, shifting cultural meanings of photographs, and the relationship between the intimate and the public. Her Collected Visions project, 1996-present, exploring how family photographs shape our memory, was one of the earliest interactive storytelling websites.

Chris Romero is a curator interested in media art, photography, animation, the Internet, and digital culture. In September 2015 he organized the first Internet Yami-Ichi in New York with Japanese Internet art collective IDPW. His exhibitions have been featured throughout New York and highlighted in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and Hyperallergic. His academic and professional experiences express a passion for the curation, research, and preservation of media art.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19TH, 7PM

On Thursday, November 19th Collective XX will host a discussion at REVERSE with Lauren Lyons Cole, a nationally recognized financial expert, speaker, and educator. The seminar will center on negotiations, a topic relevant to all aspects of life and work, not to mention especially important for freelancers, artists, and anyone who makes a living by their own hand.

Collective XX is a newly established, New York City-based organization of professional women working in varied industries–art, design, music, food, beverage, wellness, and more; established and emerging, alike. Collective XX holds monthly events of varying themes that seek to elevate and advance the strength and intellectual growth of members, as well as womankind by and large.

Utopian Response to Ecocrises?
SATURDAY, MARCH 14TH, 1:30PM – 3:30PM

A central focus of this workshop is the relationship between ecosystems and social systems and how it is being re-imagined by folks in the collective housing community. Through multi-media presentation and facilitated discussion, we will explore our own relationships to the ecosystems that support us and all life on the planet in juxtaposition to alternative eco-social relationships theorized by permaculture and specific strains of anarchism. You will leave this presentation with new ideas on how humans could or should relate to each other, to other species, and to ecosystems in an age of impending eco-crises. Dialogue, questions and commentary will follow.

Architectures of Desire: Seasteads and Nomadic Flows
SATURDAY, MARCH 21ST, 1:30PM – 3:30PM

Let us consider the term “utopian architecture” for a moment.  Does it sound like an oxymoron?  Must it?  How might we change the rules of architecture without throwing away its productive aspects?   Like goldfish, we grow to fit our containers.  Can we imagine an architecture that increases liberty, propagates communalism, stokes mutual aid, and embraces interdependence? What would such an architecture – a desiring architecture – look like, and what might it want from us? Picking up on the work of visionary architect Lebbeus Woods, Architectures of Desire will explore expanded conditions of a built environment beyond those intended by an ideologically-driven definition of urbanism. 

Crisis As Calling Talk Series

Anita Glesta

REVERSE and Designcircuit are pleased to present a series of talks in conjunction with the Crisis As Calling competition, which solicits innovative, design-based solutions to situations or conditions caused by crisis.  Judged by a panel of renowned experts, innovators and artists, the competition is open to the public. A select group of applicants will be given stipends to create physical models of their proposals, which will be featured in an exhibition at REVERSE, an art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and included in a publication by Van Alen Books, which is New York City’s only book emporium and gathering place devoted to architecture and design publications.

Our first talk in the series will take place at REVERSE Art Space on April 4th and will feature Anita Glesta, a Brooklyn-based artist, who teaches at SAV, and member of the jury panel for Crisis is Calling. 

Anita Glesta’s work has been exhibited extensively in New York City, beginning in 1984 with a solo show at White Columns Gallery. Her work was shown at the Sculpture Center, the Queens Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and many New York galleries before she moved to Sydney in 1994. Since her return to New York in 2000, Glesta has created site-specific works in New York, Europe, and Australia. In 2004, Glesta was commissioned by the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program to create a permanent seven-acre landscape intervention for the Census Bureau Headquarters Building in Suitland, Maryland. In 2007, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council produced Glesta’s “Gernika/Guernica,” a multimedia site-specific public art project, which commemorated the 70th anniversary of the tragic bombing of the Basque town Gernika by Nazi Germany.  Most recently, Glesta’s work features video installation as medium for exploring themes of environment, site and community.

“The constant thread in all my work is the participatory component,” Glesta writes, “which attempts to transform artwork as object into a place where one can physically engage. As an artist, it is essential for me to give back to the community and by creating work in the public, I feel that I am able to do this.”

Glesta’s public installation, Watershed, will premiere at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge in May 2013 and will travel to waterfront cities internationally. Conceived before Hurricane Sandy devastated the city, Watershed will draw a connection between New York’s history as an island of water and the world’s current condition in light of climate change.

Read more about Anita Glesta work http://www.anitaglesta.com

For more information about Crisis as Calling and how to apply visit: crisisascalling.com
Submission DEADLINE: Monday,  April 22 2013

The Impossible Project will present and discuss the conceptions of creative minds in a casual, open forum. We believe that a public presentation of any project can be an influential part of the creative process and can act as an opportunity for these ideas to grow.

The Impossible Project talk series seeks to promote dialogue, exchange, and interaction between artists and general public. We encourage everyone to participate and bring their ideas into the table.

On successive Tuesdays: July 10, 17 and 24 at 7pm we will be presenting the projects of two different artists at REVERSE art space on 28 Frost Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Curated by Renzo Ortega and Andrea Wolf

PROGRAM

July 10 — Beyond

Boris Oicherman
Sun Transmitters: art as problem solving

An unrealized project that provides a straightforward illustration of how an artistic intervention, driven by sensibility that is characteristic for an artist more than for any other profession, can solve a real, tangible problem in the artwork’s environment

James Leonard
The Pulsar Listening Garden

The Pulsar Listening Garden would render audible in real time the sounds of distant stars detectable only in the range of radio waves via a dipole radio antenna array. This antenna array would double as a pergola like structure, defining the public space. Additionally, wind chimes would be installed locally throughout the garden and allowed to intermingle with the sounds from the pulsars.

July 17 — Art, Architecture, and Urbanism

Matthias Neumann
Public Office for Architecture

A mobile office for architecture has a nomadic existence in a variety of rural and urban settings. The residents are invited to come with their design questions, establishing a service relationship between the office and the clients. The design and consulting services are at no cost to the client, however all projects taken on by the office are expanded in scope to include a public component into the design.

Avery McCarthy
The Rust Collection

An exploration of the photographic collaboration between Avery McCarthy and Matt Gliva, cataloguing a selection of rusted industrial detritus from the streets of Brooklyn.

July 24 — AESTHETICS: gender and sexuality

Sarah Butler
Balls

This is a project to present and discuss the nature of search results related to male beauty that may be said to address a female spectator. What makes this impossible is the resolute bias of any artist, or even statistical group of researchers to accurately document notions of beauty. Indeed, my search results may reveal as much about my computer as they do about any statistical truth on the entry for balls. Is it possible to rebalance the voice of desire?

Jamie Knowles
“…” [Dot Dot Dot]

“…” [Dot Dot Dot] incorporates stock imagery and experience from American cultures past and present to layer meaning through recognized objects and sounds from the public sphere, referencing sex toys, handsaws, and jewelry. Knowles’ recent work ventures into the grotesque and sinister nature of a naïveté at odds with formative generational experience, comparing nostalgia for mid-century wholesomeness with contemporary youth culture fetishes.

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