Here's some info for the New Art Panel, coming up now! 
6pm
New Art Panel
Maria Lind is director of Tensta Konsthall in the outskirts of her native city of Stockholm, Sweden. Lind previously held posts as director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in upstate New York, head of Iaspis in Stockholm, director of Kunstverein München in Munich and curator at Moderna Museet, also in Stockholm. In 2009, she became the fourth recipient of the Menil Foundation’s prestigious Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. The anthology Selected Maria Lind Writing was compiled by Brian Kuan Wood and features essays, interviews, statements and research notes written in English between 1997 and 2010.
Olivia Leiter: In Defense of Interpassivity (in the face of hyperemployment)
Interactivity is everywhere. It occupies the virtual world, our work environment and particularly the space of art. Interaction holds the utopian promise of participation and equality. However, it has become an overused and therefore meaningless concept that is often instrumentalized by institutions to mask certain dynamics and operations. Today, our activities are constantly being outsourced to technologies. The flickering global screen defines our contemporary age and necessitates the remapping and reorienting of our interactions in a live stream of processes and events. The questions which I will try to answer in this presentation include: How might we affirm the interpassive essence of interactivity and activate it for productive use through delegating our emotional labor to machines? How might technology transform conceptions of employment, allowing us to interact less than before? In addition, as far as the experience of art is concerned, how might we reposition the terms of engagement around interpassivity?
Olivia Leiter is an artist based in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Political Science and a BFA in Sculpture from Brandeis University and is currently pursuing a Certificate in the Art and Curatorial Program at the New Centre for Research & Practice.
Aaron Gemmill: Feedback Effects of Artworks & Social Practices Optimized for Machine Legibility & Network Circulation
Gemmill’s presentation consists of a slideshow concerning some problems and opportunities associated with the photographic network-image, including feedback effects of images and social practices optimized for machine/network legibility and circulation in contemporary art and the real world. Keywords: Contemporary Art Daily/computer-aided design; fitting the description; surveillance/sousveillance and photogenic extrajudicial murder; bureaucratic image/bureaucratic topology; consequences of human-machine collaboration; attenuating the virtual; visual absence and presence; spectator-operator and machinic punctum; sabotage.
Aaron Gemmill lives and works in Brooklyn and Yonkers, NY. He holds an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Gregory Sholette: Maybe it’s Time to Invent a Turing Test for Socially Engaged Art and Art Activism?
How can we be sure if a given event is a spontaneous act of political intervention or a rehearsed performance of a political intervention? What distinguishes the organic singular gesture and a programmable version of that gesture? When a group of informally organized artists recently occupied a major contemporary art museum in New York City was this activism or art? Perhaps a tweaked version of Alan Turing's famous test for determining the presence of machine intelligence is just what is needed to help exasperated critics, curators, historians, and administrators who are increasingly lost within the folds of the contemporary art multiverse.
Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist, and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), REPOhistory, and Gulf Labor Coalition. His publications include It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-edited with Oliver Ressler, and Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture.
Ana Teixeira Pinto: Cognitive Mapping and the Digital Turn
In his seminal work Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Frederic Jameson coined the term “cognitive mapping” to address the crisis of representation which results from this gap between phenomenological experience and the economic structures, which determine it. The talk will address cognitive mapping as an artistic praxis. The digital turn appears to be correlated with a crisis of representation: though equipped with a growing variety of optical media, the subject is increasingly unable to represent the algorithmic totality, which surrounds him. Visual technologies produce manifold images of virtually everything, yet we can no longer identify whose gaze they represent. As Alexander Galloway noted, “data’s primary mode of existence is not a visual one” (Galloway, 2011). The twin forces of globalization and digitalization seem to open a gap between phenomenological experience and the economic structures which determine it.
Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer from Lisbon, based in Berlin. She is currently a lecturer at UdK (Universität der Kunste), Berlin, and her writing has appeared in publications such as e-flux journal, art-agenda, Mousse, frieze d/e, Domus, Inaesthetics, The Manifesta Journal, and Texte zur Kunst.
Mohammad Salemy is an independent curator based in Vancouver and New York and an organizer at the New Centre for Research & Practice.
