SPRING 2013 LECTURE SERIES
Department of Digital Art Spring 2013 Lecture Series
5 Wednesdays from 12:45pm – 1:45pm in Myrtle Hall – Lecture Rm 4E-3, 4th Floor
200 Willoughby Ave Brooklyn, NY | ddals@pratt.edu | 718.636.3411
Jan 30 Carter Hodgkin | Feb 27 Chico MacMurtrie | Mar 6 Lisa LaBracio | Apr 6 Andrea Ackerman | Apr 17 Signe Baumane
Signe Baumane
Wednesday, April 17
Signe was born in Latvia and educated in Moscow. She has a BA degree in Philosophy. Although she had been a published writer since age 14, philosophy inspired Signe to turn to an animated approach to story telling. After school she began to work at Riga’s Animated Film Studio in the lowest possible position – cell painter. In a few years she gained enough experience to write, direct, and design 3 animated shorts, produced at the studio and supported by government grants. The films were recognized throughout the international festival circle and Signe gained respect as a new Lativan animation director. Longing for more challenges and in a bigger pond, Signe left Riga in 1995 and moved to New York City where she began to work at independent animation star Bill Plympton’s studio, once again in the lowest possible position – cell painter. In a few years she gained enough experience in the wild capitalistic economy of America to begin producing film on her own and in 2002 she left Plympton’s studio to start her own independent animation studio. Since her arrival in New York she has produced and co-produced, written, directed and designed more than 14 independent animated shorts. Signe has also continued her collaboration with Latvia’s leading animation studio – Rija Films. With Rija she has directed 2 of her own stories. Her most successful films “Teat Beat of Sex” and “Birth” were produced by Pierre Poire Productions.
Andrea Ackerman
Wednesday, April 6
Andrea Ackerman is an artist and theorist based in New York. Her artworks sensuously mediate our relationship to the synthetic. Rose Breathing, a 3D computer animation of a synthetic rose in human-like respiration has been shown internationally and is in the collection of the San Jose Museum of Art. Ackerman’s recent paper, published in Leonardo Electronic Almanac proposes a new aesthetic theory, arguing that chaos and complexity, as the native dynamics of the brain/mind, are fundamental determinants of aesthetic experience.
LISA LABRACIO
Wednesday, March 6
Bio: Lisa LaBracio’s animation career began as an artist at Oscar nominated Bill Plympton’s studio. After several years, Lisa began making animated films with children, in homeless shelters & halfway houses in New York City, and Eastern Africa, where she worked closely with displaced youth in Dadaab – the world’s largest refugee camp. Currently, Lisa is an animator at TED-Ed, the educational initiative of the renowned TED Conferences, where the team works tirelessly in an effort to revolutionize education & where Lisa continues to use animation to incite social change.
CHICO MACMURTRIE
Wednesday, February 27
Chico MacMurtrie is the Artistic Director of Amorphic Robot Works (ARW), a collective he founded in 1991, consisting of artists, scientists and engineers. Currently operating out of Brooklyn, New York, ARW is dedicated to the study and creation of movement as it is expressed in anthropomorphic and abstract robotic forms.
http://www.amorphicrobotworks.org
Chico Macmurtrie is one of the artists in the “Kinesthetics” exhibition currently on view at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery co-curated by Linda Lauro-Lazin and Nicholas Battis
CARTER HODGKIN
Wednesday, January 30
Bio: Combining digital media with drawing, painting, and animation Carter Hodgkin creates work which explores a new language of abstraction. Hodgkin has exhibited work nationally and internationally. Most recently, Americans for the Arts cited her permanent Public Art Project “Electromagnetic Fall” as one of the best public art projects for 2010. Hodgkin is a 2012 recipient of the Gottlieb Foundation Artist Fellowship; a 2009 Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts and a 1989 Fellow in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has been awarded fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation as well as being nominated for fellowships from Anonymous Was a Woman and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. In 1992, she was a Workspace artist at Dieu Donne Papermill, New York. Articles and reviews of her work have appeared in such publications as Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Flash Art, Artbyte and The New Yorker. Hodgkin is represented by Denise Bibro Fine Art. http://www.carterhodgkin.com/
FALL 2012 Lecture Series
Department of Digital Art Fall 2012 Lecture Series
5 Wednesdays from 12:45pm – 1:45pm in Myrtle Hall – Lecture Rm 4E-3, 4th Floor
200 Willoughby Ave Brooklyn, NY | ddals@pratt.edu | 718.636.3411
JOY GARNETT
Wednesday, November 28
Artist Joy Garnett will deliver a lecture titled “Painting and the Technical Image World” as part of the Department of Digital Arts’ fall 2012 lecture series. The talk will take place on Wednesday, November 28th from 12:45 PM to 1:45 PM in Myrtle Hall, Lecture Room 4E-3, on Pratt’s Brooklyn campus. The lecture is FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Garnett is a New York-based artist whose paintings are based on news photographs, scientific imagery, and military documents she gathers from the Internet and uses to
Since 2005, Garnett has served as arts editor at Cultural Politics, a contemporary culture, politics, and media journal published by Duke University Press. She is the editor of NEWSgrist, which she launched in 2000. Represented by the Winkleman Gallery in New York City, Garnett has shown her work at MoMA P.S.1 and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Garnett studied at the École des beaux-arts, Paris and received her MFA from The City College of New York. She has received numerous fellowships, including a grant from Anonymous Was a Woman.
For more information on Garnett:
firstpulseprojects.com/joy.html
twitter: @joygarnett
MARINA ZURKOW
Wednesday, November 7
Marina Zurkow makes media works about humans and their relationships to animals, plants and the weather. By turns humorous and contemplative, these take the form of animation, print graphics, sculpture, and participatory temporary public art works.
Nature has long been a stage upon which we project ourselves, making ourselves other. The series Crossing the Waters focused on climate change; a contemplation on catastrophe, it pictured ways in which we imagine nature within us, and nature without us. Friends and Enemies (which includes the Mesocosm works and Heraldic Crests for Invasive Species) mines the intersection of bias, inclusion, and kinship in our relations with other species in the midst of altered or depleted landscapes. Friends and Enemies includes dinners and tastings, lectures, animations, and printed materials.
Since 2000, Zurkow has exhibited at The Sundance Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The Seoul Media City Biennial, Ars Electronica, Creative Time, The Kitchen, The Walker Art Center, The National Museum for Women in the Arts, and Eyebeam, and other venues. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and has been a NYFA Fellow, a Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and a Creative Capital grantee. Zurkow is on faculty at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program (ITP), and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She is represented by bitforms gallery.
RIBOULI DIGITAL
Wednesday, October 3
Jennifer Mahlman & Andre Ribuoli
MARK AMERIKA
Wednesday, September 19
Mark Amerika’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center. In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME. He is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011 – remixthebook.com) and his collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007). His latest art work, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, was commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics. Amerika is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Principal Research Fellow in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at La Trobe University. More information can found at his website, markamerika.com and at his twitter feed @markamerika
JOHN DILWORTH – Irrational Reactions: The Independent Animation of An Irrational Mind
Wednesday, September 12
Bio:
Academy Award nominated director John R. Dilworth is a New York-based animation director and designer whose work has appeared on CBS, Showtime, HBO, FOX, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, MTV, Canal +, and Arte. His films have screened in museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. He is the founder of Stretch Films, Inc., one of the leading design and production studios for animation in New York City. Dilworth has produced and directed over 15 independent and sponsored short films that have screened worldwide. Dilworth’s 1995 animated short film, THE CHICKEN FROM OUTER SPACE, sponsored by Hanna-Barbera and Cartoon Network, was nominated for an Academy Award, an Annie Award, and a Cable ACE Award. In 1998, Dilworth turned THE CHICKEN FROM OUTER SPACE into a series for Cartoon Network entitled COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG. He served as executive producer, director, and co-writer of all 104 shorts, as well as voicing numerous characters. COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG is one of Cartoon Network’s top-rated shows and has been broadcast continuously since 1999 on both Cartoon Network and Boomerang! Dilworth’s 2005 independent film, LIFE IN TRANSITION, has received international recognition, being awarded Best of Show at the ASIFA-East Animation Festival, Maverick Award for Best Animation at Woodstock Film Festival, and Nominated for an Annie Award for Best Animated Short among others. The film was selected for the 2005 tour “Animation Show of Shows,” the best of contemporary international animation.
In 2011 Dilworth completed his seventeenth short film, BUNNY BASHING, which can be seen at http://stretchfilms.com/bunnybashing/. The website for many of John R. Dilworth’s animation is www.stretchfilms.com.
SPRING 2012 Lecture Series
Department of Digital Art Spring 2012 Lecture Series
5 Wednesdays (plus 1 Thursday*) from 12:45pm – 1:45pm in Myrtle Hall – Lecture Rm 4E-3, 4th Floor
200 Willoughby Ave Brooklyn, NY | ddals@pratt.edu | 718.636.3411
LECTURERS & DATES:
ROMAN VEROSTKO - “FROM BRUSH IN HAND TO BRUSH IN MACHINE: 1947 to 2012”
Wednesday, February 22nd
Artist, historian, Roman Verostko, was born in 1929 in the coal fields of Western Pennsylvania (USA). In the early 1980′s, following 30 years of painting, he began executing algorithmic drawings with a pen plotter. Today his studio includes a network of computers coupled to pen plotters driven with his own original software. By 1987 he created the world’s first software driven ‘brushed’ paintings with oriental brushes mounted on his pen plotter. His studio integrates coded digital procedure with fine arts traditions.
1993 Prix Ars Electronica, Honorary Mention
2006 Nominated for ”[ddaa] d.velop digital art award”
2009 SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Key note speaker ISEA 2011
Wednesday, March 7th
Alex McLeod constructs hyperrealistic 3D environments filled with crystalline mountains, fiery lakes, and rotund clouds, all rendered in a sickly sweet and gooey candy-colored palette. Recalling the wide-open vistas of Romantic landscape painting while at the same time staging otherworldly dystopias, McLeod’s CGI prints act as hybrid spaces that imply an almost infinite recombination of the past and present, the real and virtual. Beneath their seductively polished surfaces, of glimmering fortresses and floating geometric abstractions, lies a haunting stillness that comes forth in the aftermath of cataclysmic events. The cause of destruction remains unknown in these depopulated spaces -there are no people in these images, however much human traces remain in the rickety railways and empty fortresses.
MAGDA SAWON & WILLIAM POWHIDA
Wednesday, March 21st
William Powhida, Griftopia 2012
Wednesday, March 28th
Don Hertzfeldt is the creator of many short animated films, including the Academy-Award nominated Rejected and Everything Will Be OK. His animated films have received over 150 awards and have been presented around the world.Some notable honors include a Short Film Palm D’or nomination at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival (Billy’s Balloon), a 2001 Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short (Rejected), the Sundance Film Festival’s Jury Award in Short Filmmaking (Everything will be OK), and Best Picture and Best Screenplay from the Fargo Film Festival (I am so proud of you).
Before the age of thirty, his films were already the subject of several career retrospectives. He was the youngest director named in the “They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They” list of “The 100 Important Animation Directors” of all time, and in 2010 he received the San Francisco International Film Festival’s “Persistence of Vision” Lifetime Achievement Award at the age of 33.
Cesar Kuriyama
Wednesday, April 4th
TED Full Spectrum Auditions, May 24, 2011, New York, NY. Credit: James Duncan Davidson
Pratt DDA BFA’04
Cesar Kuriyama has been selecting one second of video from every day of his life, and editing them together into a montage that both records his life, and forces him to revaluate how he approaches each day.
As a video maker, director, producer and animator Cesar Kuriyama has worked for giant clients like Hersheys, BMW, Verizon, Gillette and the NFL. But what we love about him are his personal projects — based on his travel, his love of the arts community, and his family and friends. Imagine a movie that contains one day of your entire life …
