Panic Hits HomeBlue Like MeUndisclosed RecipientsSelected WorksDigital Art and Gaming SalonMicrocinema Ambient Media on Plasma
Panic Hits Home
A New Media Installation
Handwerker Gallery
New media artist Renate Ferro premieres her new installation Panic Hits Home for the 2007 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. In this project, Ferro questions what happens when the federal political bureaucracy maps out messages of panic via the media in a way that disrupts the balances of the boundaries between interior/exterior, psychic/social, and private/public. Experiencing the Cold War panic of the early sixties as a child, she was struck by the eerie similarity of the urgency for ordinary citizens to be prepared for impending doom that Washington promulgated in light of the tragic events of 9/11.
The impetus of Panic Hits Home was inspired by Ferro’s childhood memories of her mother stockpiling food and water in their family’s fruit cellar during the Cuban Missile Crisis and her own unexpected paranoia of the terror stemming from 9/11. Playing on the retrospective confusions between trauma then and now, Ferro juxtaposes original sixties television footage and public service announcements promoting duck and cover and bomb-shelter protection with the high-tech television and web directives of our contemporary Department of Homeland Security. Combining and connecting the analog with the digital forges digital pulses or pauses that allow the viewer to maneuver through the digital data to contemplate, reflect, and formulate new discourses of panic. From collecting water jugs and food supplies to applying duct tape and plastic insulation to prevent airborne toxins from infiltrating the private space of the home, recommendations from educational public service announcements lay the foundation states of urgency and panic in Ferro’s installation.
Central to the project are a series of videotaped interviews of cross-generational subjects who recount stories about their personal responses to the panic of both time periods. There is an ironic similarity to the tone and content of these interviews, retelling anecdotes from each period. Whether regarding security and protection from the fallout of impending nuclear warheads or the possibility of additional terrorist attacks 40 years later, the installation becomes a catalyst for the confusing intermix of fright and anxiety, both present and past. In the installation space, the viewer’s body traverses the material space to discover digital realms of vision and narration that uncover the layers of the dialectical paradigms that these personal accounts reveal, whether they are from memories from 40 years ago or fleeting recollections from just yesterday.
A special commission by the 26th Anniversary of Women Direct and the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.
Blue Like Me
Recent Work by Siona Benjamin
March 1-April 7, 2007
Handwerker Gallery
I am currently working on a series of paintings entitled Finding Home. In this work, I raise questions about what and where is home, while evoking issues such as identity, immigration, motherhood, and the role of art in social change. I am a Sephardic Jew from India (my ancestors came to India from the Middle East and perhaps also Spain centuries ago). My family has gradually dispersed (again), mostly to Israel and America, but my parents remained in India. I am now also an American. With such a background, the desire to find home, spiritually and literally, has always preoccupied me. The feeling I have of never being able to set deep roots no matter where I am is unnerving, but on the other hand, there is something seductive about the spiritual borderland in which I seem to find myself.
My paintings also explore female energy and power, as I am inspired by Tantric art of ancient India. The work is informed as well by Indian miniature paintings, Byzantine icons, and Jewish religious art from my childhood. To date, I have completed 40 paintings on paper in gouache and gold leaf for this project.
I am still trying to reconcile the conflicts I experienced in my own upbringing as a Jew who attended Catholic and Zoroastrian schools while growing up in predominantly Hindu and Muslim India. For a long time, I did not know what to do with my hybrid background and experiences. This work emphasizes women’s issues and raises questions about identity. The forms may appear unconventional and exotic to some. In this multicultural society, I would ask viewers to transcend this apparent exoticness and absorb the core message—tolerance of diversity.
Undisclosed Recipients
A Digital Art Exhibition
Curated by Dale Hudson and Sharon Lin Tay
Honored to have been selected to curate Undisclosed Recipients, we derived in the curatorial process further pleasure from the opportunity to experience the richness, texture, and variety of online digital artworks. Contrary to associations of the Internet with eBay, MySpace, and Microsoft, the Internet-based works we received prompt critical dialogues on the oppressive aspects of globalization by deploying Internet technologies and computer mediated communications as potentially progressive aspects of cultural and political economy.
Undisclosed Recipients aims to deploy potentially progressive aspects of globalization, such as Internet technologies and computer mediated communication, as a means to prompt critical dialogues on the oppressive aspects of globalization, including the rapidly accelerating disparity among populations in terms of wealth, power, and access to basic human rights. The exhibition aims to bring works of new media that are artistically innovative, socially engaged, and politically urgent to a larger audience of “undisclosed recipients.” Despite the Internet’s facilitation of communication, locating artists whose works engage with global issues is not as simple as posting on artistic or political websites. It was especially difficult to find artists from the global South in part due to reasons that not all conceptions of art are compatible with western ideas of aesthetics. The open source potentiality of the Internet, fueled by digital code, prompts reflection on the historical and cultural assumptions that determine and manage meaning for the very term art in the global North. Theorists and practitioners have extended Walter Benjamin’s early 20th-century essay on the work of art in an age of mechanical reproducibility in relation to new digital technologies. Just like conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, digital art continues some of the radical rethinking of object-based, artist-produced notions of art that was initiated most publicly by Marcel Duchamp, whose famous Fountain questioned why the value of art hinged upon Western aesthetic principles of originality and uniqueness in the scatological traditions of Rabelais. Internet art adds interactivity.
Like other cultural phenomena associated with new media, computer mediated communication, and post-Cold War globalization, Internet art emerged, exploded, and virtually disappeared within the span of a few years. Most visible were the tactical media known under the rubric of net.art, a politicized moment in Internet art that emerged in response to political crises in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1990s. More generally, Internet art followed in the traditions of avant-garde movements, such as Dada and Fluxus, to shift definitions of art from object to activity. Some of our exhibits, such as Flag Metamorphoses, Permanent Transit, and The Network of No_des are, or are part of, ongoing artistic or activist projects. The Internet offers artists, intellectuals, and activists; programmers and coders; culture poachers and jammers; and users in general a new medium for expression, one that is interactive and participatory, and offers simultaneous access to users across territorial boundaries. This is especially true with the celebration of web 2.0 as the maturation of the Internet, transforming its function from that of publication to participation and conversation, its databases from taxonomic organization (search engines) to “folksonomy” (tagging), its centers of control from webmasters to users, and its proprietary concerns to the sensibilities of hacking and remixing.
Internet art (and its successors) thus adopted different permutations of these forms from e-mail projects, websites that utilized primarily hypertext, and blogs to networked installations, streamed audio or video, webcam and live journal projects. With the accelerated development of new technologies and concurrent hastened antiquation of older new technologies, Internet art is subsumed under larger rubrics of new media art, digital art, and electronic art; and it refashions itself as browser art, software art, spam art, click environments, code poetry, generative art, and art “hactivism.” The corpus we selected for this exhibition is but a drop in the digitized ocean, but they epitomize the extraordinary evolution and variety of online digital works. In particular, they participate in the politics, ethics, and activism that the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival espouses and inspires. Much as new media theorists like to note the separation between mind and body that the Internet exacerbates, the Samaras Project is an example of activist use of the Internet as a platform that realizes its ethical project on the level of the real and the local. Many of the exhibits here, such as Surreal Scania, Anima, Trustfiles, and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004], interrogate the interface between the virtual and the real in their own ways; together, they add to a complex and multivalent conversation about mediation.
The mid-1990s euphoria of the Internet’s democratic potentiality was challenged by the demarcation of digital haves and have-nots, notably differentiated along class and racial lines, as well as by the greater awareness of state and industrial measures to control the Internet. Added to these challenges is the increasing capacity of new media technologies for surveillance, and our seeming complicity in the willingness to live a version of our lives virtually, whether via blogs, social networking sites, or exposing our obsessions via Google searches. While pondering on these implications for our increasingly mediated lives, we hope to have presented a sample of artistically innovative, socially engaged, and politically urgent works of online digital arts to a larger audience of undisclosed recipients in line with UNESCO’s recent (December 18, 2006) ratification of the policy to promote and protect cultural diversity.
A New Media Installation
Handwerker Gallery
New media artist Renate Ferro premieres her new installation Panic Hits Home for the 2007 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. In this project, Ferro questions what happens when the federal political bureaucracy maps out messages of panic via the media in a way that disrupts the balances of the boundaries between interior/exterior, psychic/social, and private/public. Experiencing the Cold War panic of the early sixties as a child, she was struck by the eerie similarity of the urgency for ordinary citizens to be prepared for impending doom that Washington promulgated in light of the tragic events of 9/11.
The impetus of Panic Hits Home was inspired by Ferro’s childhood memories of her mother stockpiling food and water in their family’s fruit cellar during the Cuban Missile Crisis and her own unexpected paranoia of the terror stemming from 9/11. Playing on the retrospective confusions between trauma then and now, Ferro juxtaposes original sixties television footage and public service announcements promoting duck and cover and bomb-shelter protection with the high-tech television and web directives of our contemporary Department of Homeland Security. Combining and connecting the analog with the digital forges digital pulses or pauses that allow the viewer to maneuver through the digital data to contemplate, reflect, and formulate new discourses of panic. From collecting water jugs and food supplies to applying duct tape and plastic insulation to prevent airborne toxins from infiltrating the private space of the home, recommendations from educational public service announcements lay the foundation states of urgency and panic in Ferro’s installation.
Central to the project are a series of videotaped interviews of cross-generational subjects who recount stories about their personal responses to the panic of both time periods. There is an ironic similarity to the tone and content of these interviews, retelling anecdotes from each period. Whether regarding security and protection from the fallout of impending nuclear warheads or the possibility of additional terrorist attacks 40 years later, the installation becomes a catalyst for the confusing intermix of fright and anxiety, both present and past. In the installation space, the viewer’s body traverses the material space to discover digital realms of vision and narration that uncover the layers of the dialectical paradigms that these personal accounts reveal, whether they are from memories from 40 years ago or fleeting recollections from just yesterday.
A special commission by the 26th Anniversary of Women Direct and the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.
Blue Like Me
Recent Work by Siona Benjamin
March 1-April 7, 2007
Handwerker Gallery
I am currently working on a series of paintings entitled Finding Home. In this work, I raise questions about what and where is home, while evoking issues such as identity, immigration, motherhood, and the role of art in social change. I am a Sephardic Jew from India (my ancestors came to India from the Middle East and perhaps also Spain centuries ago). My family has gradually dispersed (again), mostly to Israel and America, but my parents remained in India. I am now also an American. With such a background, the desire to find home, spiritually and literally, has always preoccupied me. The feeling I have of never being able to set deep roots no matter where I am is unnerving, but on the other hand, there is something seductive about the spiritual borderland in which I seem to find myself.
My paintings also explore female energy and power, as I am inspired by Tantric art of ancient India. The work is informed as well by Indian miniature paintings, Byzantine icons, and Jewish religious art from my childhood. To date, I have completed 40 paintings on paper in gouache and gold leaf for this project.
I am still trying to reconcile the conflicts I experienced in my own upbringing as a Jew who attended Catholic and Zoroastrian schools while growing up in predominantly Hindu and Muslim India. For a long time, I did not know what to do with my hybrid background and experiences. This work emphasizes women’s issues and raises questions about identity. The forms may appear unconventional and exotic to some. In this multicultural society, I would ask viewers to transcend this apparent exoticness and absorb the core message—tolerance of diversity.
Undisclosed Recipients
A Digital Art Exhibition
Curated by Dale Hudson and Sharon Lin Tay
Honored to have been selected to curate Undisclosed Recipients, we derived in the curatorial process further pleasure from the opportunity to experience the richness, texture, and variety of online digital artworks. Contrary to associations of the Internet with eBay, MySpace, and Microsoft, the Internet-based works we received prompt critical dialogues on the oppressive aspects of globalization by deploying Internet technologies and computer mediated communications as potentially progressive aspects of cultural and political economy.
Undisclosed Recipients aims to deploy potentially progressive aspects of globalization, such as Internet technologies and computer mediated communication, as a means to prompt critical dialogues on the oppressive aspects of globalization, including the rapidly accelerating disparity among populations in terms of wealth, power, and access to basic human rights. The exhibition aims to bring works of new media that are artistically innovative, socially engaged, and politically urgent to a larger audience of “undisclosed recipients.” Despite the Internet’s facilitation of communication, locating artists whose works engage with global issues is not as simple as posting on artistic or political websites. It was especially difficult to find artists from the global South in part due to reasons that not all conceptions of art are compatible with western ideas of aesthetics. The open source potentiality of the Internet, fueled by digital code, prompts reflection on the historical and cultural assumptions that determine and manage meaning for the very term art in the global North. Theorists and practitioners have extended Walter Benjamin’s early 20th-century essay on the work of art in an age of mechanical reproducibility in relation to new digital technologies. Just like conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, digital art continues some of the radical rethinking of object-based, artist-produced notions of art that was initiated most publicly by Marcel Duchamp, whose famous Fountain questioned why the value of art hinged upon Western aesthetic principles of originality and uniqueness in the scatological traditions of Rabelais. Internet art adds interactivity.
Like other cultural phenomena associated with new media, computer mediated communication, and post-Cold War globalization, Internet art emerged, exploded, and virtually disappeared within the span of a few years. Most visible were the tactical media known under the rubric of net.art, a politicized moment in Internet art that emerged in response to political crises in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1990s. More generally, Internet art followed in the traditions of avant-garde movements, such as Dada and Fluxus, to shift definitions of art from object to activity. Some of our exhibits, such as Flag Metamorphoses, Permanent Transit, and The Network of No_des are, or are part of, ongoing artistic or activist projects. The Internet offers artists, intellectuals, and activists; programmers and coders; culture poachers and jammers; and users in general a new medium for expression, one that is interactive and participatory, and offers simultaneous access to users across territorial boundaries. This is especially true with the celebration of web 2.0 as the maturation of the Internet, transforming its function from that of publication to participation and conversation, its databases from taxonomic organization (search engines) to “folksonomy” (tagging), its centers of control from webmasters to users, and its proprietary concerns to the sensibilities of hacking and remixing.
Internet art (and its successors) thus adopted different permutations of these forms from e-mail projects, websites that utilized primarily hypertext, and blogs to networked installations, streamed audio or video, webcam and live journal projects. With the accelerated development of new technologies and concurrent hastened antiquation of older new technologies, Internet art is subsumed under larger rubrics of new media art, digital art, and electronic art; and it refashions itself as browser art, software art, spam art, click environments, code poetry, generative art, and art “hactivism.” The corpus we selected for this exhibition is but a drop in the digitized ocean, but they epitomize the extraordinary evolution and variety of online digital works. In particular, they participate in the politics, ethics, and activism that the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival espouses and inspires. Much as new media theorists like to note the separation between mind and body that the Internet exacerbates, the Samaras Project is an example of activist use of the Internet as a platform that realizes its ethical project on the level of the real and the local. Many of the exhibits here, such as Surreal Scania, Anima, Trustfiles, and [FALLUJAH. IRAQ. 31/03/2004], interrogate the interface between the virtual and the real in their own ways; together, they add to a complex and multivalent conversation about mediation.
The mid-1990s euphoria of the Internet’s democratic potentiality was challenged by the demarcation of digital haves and have-nots, notably differentiated along class and racial lines, as well as by the greater awareness of state and industrial measures to control the Internet. Added to these challenges is the increasing capacity of new media technologies for surveillance, and our seeming complicity in the willingness to live a version of our lives virtually, whether via blogs, social networking sites, or exposing our obsessions via Google searches. While pondering on these implications for our increasingly mediated lives, we hope to have presented a sample of artistically innovative, socially engaged, and politically urgent works of online digital arts to a larger audience of undisclosed recipients in line with UNESCO’s recent (December 18, 2006) ratification of the policy to promote and protect cultural diversity.
