Women in Media Arts
Future of Inclusion Lab
Rashin Fahandej (US)
American Arts Incubator is a creative exchange program that utilizes community-driven digital and new media art projects to instigate dialogue, build communities, bolster local economies, and further social innovation while addressing a local social or environmental challenge. This year’s iteration in Austria was led by artist Rashin Fahandej, who ran the “Future of Inclusion Lab,” a series of co-creation workshops that provided technology and resource access to Austria-based creatives.
[Alien] Star Dust: Signal to Noise – guided networked meditation
Victoria Vesna with Paul Geluso, Rhiannon Catalyst, John Brumley, Ivana Dama, Clinton Van Arman
[Alien] refers to looking up into outer space for star dust and then turning our gaze back down to earth, extending the idea that everything is interconnected, flowing, flying, and mixing around our planet and beyond.
Key Note: Neri Oxman
A multi-disciplinary designer, Oxman founded The Mediated Matter Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 where she established and pioneered the field of Material Ecology, fusing technology and biology to deliver designs that align with principles of ecological sustainability. Oxman became a tenured professor at MIT in 2017.
Electronic Theatre @ Online
Since 1987, the Electronic Theatre has compiled a large number of submissions from all over the world, providing an up-to-the-minute survey of animation art in the context of technology and society. It impressively illustrates the dynamic development of artistic computer animation over the past three decades as well as the expansive growth of various fringe areas. A glance at the works selected this year shows a broad range, from animation in the context of performance and installations to real-time animation and multifaceted, subject-based discussions.
Acquired Immunity. Beyond Cultivamos Cultura
Virtual tours of the natural and social landscape around Cultivamos Cultura.
Visionary Pioneer of Feminist Media Art
What began as a technological revolution has long since become part of our culture and our social reality. There are visionary pioneers who not only anticipated these changes with their artistic work but have also been seminal in laying the foundations for media art as we know it today.
Key Note: Lorena Jaume Palasì
Founder of The Ethical Tech Society. Her research focuses on the ethics of digitalization and automation and, in this context, on questions of legal philosophy. 2017 Appointed by the Government of Spain in the Council of Eminent Persons on Artificial Intelligence. Former member of the High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence of the EU Commission. 2018 Theodor Heuss Medal "for their contribution to a differentiated consideration of algorithms and their mechanisms of action" with the AlgorithmWatch initiative.
Key Note: Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson (US)
For over fifty years, Hershman Leeson’s practice mines the intersections of technology and the self. She is known for her groundbreaking contributions to media art from Artificial Intelligence to DNA programming, often anticipating the impact of technological developments in society.
DARV_ Abandoned Land
Lee Jung In (KR/AT) Mihaela Kavdanska (BG/RO/AT) Violeta Ivanova (BG/AT) Florian Weinrich (AT)
DARV_ Abandoned Land is an intermedia dance performance which sprouts connections between analog and digital. The performers interact with large-scale objects and video projections, resembling the endless migration from one world to another in search for the better. The DARV team and eight dancers perform in various locations in Austria, South Korea and Bulgaria, guiding the audience through dystopian realities and abandoned sites. Drained-off utopias, failed social mechanisms and ideologies are embodied, explored and ultimately abandoned.
Key Note: Joanna Bryson
Joanna Bryson
Joanna Bryson is Prof. of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School. Her research focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation, and AI/ICT governance. From 2002-2019 she was on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Bath. She has also been affiliated with the Dpt. of Psychology at Harvard University, the Dpt. of Anthropology at the University of Oxford, the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
Breaking up the gameplay – a talk about feminism and experiencing the abolished private
Rebecca Merlic (HR)
Artist Talk about the feminist aspects of The City as a House, an interactive visual novel, an experiment of a white European 30-year-old heterosexual human, living in Tokyo without inhabiting a private apartment over a period of time.
The City as a House – A speculative exploration of the possibilities of abolishing known forms of habitation
Rebecca Merlic (HR)
Vast amounts of pictures, sounds, videos and 3D scans are organized as environments in Rebecca Merlic’s The City as a House, in form of an interactive visual novel. A work about the experiment of a white European 30-year-old heterosexual human living in Tokyo without inhabiting a private apartment over a period of time. A speculative exploration of the possibilities of abolishing known forms of habitation.
Rio Verde
Cherish Marquez (US)
Rio Verde is a socially conscious video game by Cherish Marquez that explores the healing powers of the desert, as well as themes such as Latinx iconography and mental wellness.
Women in Art, Science and Technology
Marta de Menezes (PT), Dalila Honorato (GR/PT), Ebru Yetiskin (TR), Ionat Zurr (AU), Jo Wei, Kathy High (US), Laura Beloff (FI), María Antonia González Valerio (MX), Victoria Vesna (US)
The panel On Roots and Fruits is a collection of talks from some of the founding members of FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science and Technology on the impact of its conferences and other community activities, and their perspective on the future development of women in art, science and technology. FEMeeting aims to disseminate projects carried out by individuals who identify as women to contribute to (a) the development of research methodologies in art and science and (b) the development of collaboration strategies that can increase knowledge-sharing and bring communities together.
The Women in Media Art: Telematic Performance
Ximena Alarcón (UK/CO), Anat Ben David (UK/IL), Alex Murray-Lesley (ES/NO/AU), Tina Frank (AT), Claudia Schnugg (AT)
This panel will investigate approaches in telematic collaborative art production and telematic art reception through the voices of four artists and researchers experienced in the cutting/edge production of telematic performances and collaborative music production.
Women in Media Arts
Ars Electronica (AT)
In 2016, Ars Electronica launched one of the largest online databases for women in media arts. This database, first dedicated to the women pioneers of Ars Electronica, was then opened to all female artists working with digital means as a tool for artistic expression. A whole program focus was thus established and will be presented this year in two panels.
An Atlas of Absence - Online meeting performance
Summer Mei Ling Lee and Laura Boles Faw
Technology was supposed to connect us. The dominant modality for communication and connection during this pandemic era is the digital screen. In this work, collaborators Laura Boles Faw and Summer Mei Ling Lee continue their ongoing series addressing distance and longing that increasingly figures into this heightened moment.
Falling Up Exhibition
re.riddle, California, San Francisco (US)
Amidst riots and racial tensions, divisive political rhetoric and a global pandemic, the past half year has been a time of turbulent uncertainty. These acute ruptures and moments of pain, conflict and unknowingness have inadvertently led to a mode of seeing our former and current realities anew, which may more or less best be described as “surreal”.
‘site inspection’ – Virtual cocktail party & FM4 Radio Show in VR
sound:frame / Eva Fischer (AT), Marijn Bril (NL), Angie Pohl (AT)
For this year’s Ars Electronica, sound:frame and Pausanio invite the audience to join an exclusive virtual cocktail party in the Area for Virtual Art’s mozilla hub space. Together we will teleport from one artist’s space to another and have a virtual toast.
'site inspection' - Virtual exhibition tour
sound:frame / Eva Fischer (AT), Marijn Bril (NL), Angie Pohl (AT)
The sound:frame curators Eva Fischer and Marijn Bril will guide through the Area for Virtual Art and talk with the exhibiting artists and some of the Area’s team members, about their approaches to virtuality and digitality.
