Chair and Associate Professor of Art History
Visual Arts Department, University of California at San Diego
Grant Kester is Chair and Associate Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. His publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press) and Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press). His forthcoming book is The One and the Many: Agency and Identity in Contemporary Collaborative Art (Duke University Press).
Title of Talk:
Enclosure Acts: Collaborative Practice in an Indian Village
http://www.parkfiction.org/index.html
Co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and President of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios
Dr. Catmull is co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. Previously, he was vice president of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm, Ltd., where he managed four development efforts in the areas of computer graphics, video editing, video games and digital audio. Dr. Catmull has been honored with three Scientific and Technical Engineering Awards, including an Oscar®, from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work. He also won the Coons Award, the highest achievement in the computer graphics field, for his lifetime contributions and was awarded the animation industry's Ub Iwerks Award, given to individuals for technical advancements that make a significant impact on the art or industry of animation. A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, Dr. Catmull earned B.S. degrees in computer science and physics and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah.
With the UC Santa Cruz Foundation, The Art of Collaboration will co-present a lecture by
Dr. Ed Catmull on the topic of collective creativity. Dr. Catmull is co-founder of Pixar, and president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. He will be awarded the 2009 Foundation Medal at the Founders Day Dinner on Friday, October 23 (http://www.ucsc.edu/founders/).
His UCSC Foundation Forum keynote address is entitled “Creativity: What I Don’t Know and What I Know”.
Here is an article by Dr. Catmull on the subject of collective creativity.
Associate Professor of New Media at UMaine, co-directs Still Water, and co-founded LongGreenHouse.
At the Edge of Art (2006), investigates how new strategies of empowerment--execution rather than representation, arrest rather than entertainment--work in communities of new media artists, and how these practices reshape art and real world contexts. LongGreenHouse (2007), weaves the Wabanaki Longhouse, permaculture gardens, and networked collaboration into a hybrid "communiversity".
Blais' publications and creative work explore the overlap of digital culture, indigenous culture and permaculture. This cross-cultural braid suggests tribal and networked alternatives to conventional socio-political and cultural structures, and co-creates models of deep sustainability.
http://at-the-edge-of-art.com
Associate Professor of Art, UCSC
E.G. Crichton uses a range of art strategies to explore social issues, history, and site-specific subject matter. She often works within community settings and collaborates across disciplines with performers, writers, scientists, composers and others. Her work has been exhibited in art institutions and as public installations in Europe, Japan, Australia and across the U.S. As first Artist-in-Residence for the GLBT Historical Society, she has developed LINEAGE: Matchmaking in the Archive, a project that involves a growing number of participants, each one matched with the archive of someone who has died. The first exhibition of work from this process opened in June.
http://egcrichton.ucsc.edu/
http://lgbtlineage.net/
Sharon Daniel is an artist who uses and develops information and communications technologies to advocate for social justice. Daniel engages in the production of “new media documentaries” -- building online archives and interfaces that make the stories of technologically disenfranchised communities available across social, cultural and economic boundaries. Daniel is Chair of the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches classes in digital media theory and practice. Her work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and abroad.
http://publicsecret.net
Claudia Eipeldauer studied in Vienna (Austria) and Berlin (Germany). She has a Master's Degree in Media and Communication Science and has been a member of the artist group WochenKlausur since 2002. Together with WochenKlausur, she established a design-workshop for former drug addicts in Vienna (Austria), a cinema program for migrants in Limerick (Ireland), an upcycling-network for social institutions in Chicago (USA), among other projects. She also worked for design-, theatre- and architecture groups, for the exhibition department of The House of World Cultures in Berlin, and as journalist.
Upon invitation from art institutions, the artist group WochenKlausur develops concrete proposals aimed at small, but nevertheless effective improvements to socio-political deficiencies. Proceeding even further and invariably translating these proposals into action, artistic creativity is no longer seen as a formal act but as an intervention into society. Within fifteen years 25 projects have been successfully carried out.
http://www.wochenklausur.at/
Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert have been collaborating together since 1994 on conceptually based performance works, interventions, writings, installations, videos, photography and prints. Their work is about power and vulnerability; how it relates to relationship dynamics, society, and politics. Collaborating is a tool that Fletcher and Reichert use to integrate the negotiation for power into the work of art. They exhibit their work internationally, and have appeared on both Bay Area
NPR member stations KQED and KALW, on Studio 360 (a PRI nationally syndicated program), and the European on-line magazine der Spiegel. Their art has appeared in various international publications including Flash Art International, Art Week, East Bay Express, Der Spiegel magazine, the Associated Press, The Contra Costa Times, The Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post.
http://www.life-art.org
Associate Professor and Chair, History of Art and Visual Culture, UCSC
Jennifer A. González is Associate Professor and Chair of the History of Art and Visual Culture department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her critical writings have appeared in numerous periodicals and journals including Frieze, Bomb, and Art Journal. She has contributed essays to anthologies such as The Cyborg Handbook, Race in Cyberspace, and With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture. Her book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award.
http://havc.ucsc.edu/faculty/jennifer-gonzález
Melissa Gwyn is co-curator of Full Disclosure, a show of art and artifacts that looks at the trial and error of artists and scientists through an intimate survey of their processes. She is a painter who examines the subject of nature and artifice through empirical disciplines, art history and literature. In her new work she depicts ovate forms that reference biology, medical modeling technology and the jeweler’s craft. Through minute detail and material excess these new paintings suggest the pathology behind a desire to possess beauty, power and eternal youth. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US, in Japan and England and reviewed in Art Forum, Time Out, New York Times, Village Voice, Art News and other publications.
http://review.ucsc.edu/spring08/text.asp?pid=2097
George Mason University
Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Mason University (http://mes.gmu.edu/) and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal (www.arabstudiesjournal.org), a peer-reviewed research publication and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad (www.aboutbaghdad.com), and director of a film series on “Arabs and Terrorism” (www.arabsandterrorism.com). He is currently working on his book on Syria’s political economy, provisionally titled “The Political Economy of Regime Security: State-Business Networks in Syria.” Bassam recently directed a new film series on Arab/Muslim immigrants in Europe, titled The “Other” Threat (www.TheOtherThreat.com). He also serves on the Editorial Committee of Middle East Report (http://www.merip.org/).
http://www.ArabsandTerrorism.com
http://www.AboutBaghdad.com
http://www.TheOtherThreat.com
Director, Global Lives Project / Institute for the Future
David Evan Harris is Executive Director of the Global Lives Project and Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future. David lived in Brazil from 2004-2007 as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar, receiving a master's degree in Sociology from the University of São Paulo, where he studied the relationships between domestic workers and their employers in Brazil and the US.
David received his B.A. in 2003 from UC Berkeley, where he created his own major in "political economy of development and environment." In college, he spent eight months traveling and studying in Tanzania, India, the Philippines, Mexico, and the UK. In 2000, he held an internship at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and has since worked with numerous non-profit and educational organizations in the US and Brazil.
In Brazil, David wrote and directed newscasts for CurrentTV. His writings and photographs have been published in print and online with the BBC, Adbusters, the Sarai Reader, Glimpse Magazine, Next American City, Focus on the Global South, Alternet and Grist. David speaks fluent English, Portuguese and Spanish and intermediate French.
http://globallives.org
Assistant Professor of Art UC Santa Cruz
Dee Hibbert-Jones enters into dialogs about power, politics and emotions with the general public, exploring questions about personal security, personal feelings, emotions and control. Drawing social, cultural, and political metaphors from everyday materials and actions, she works to investigate ideas about political powerlessness, collective feeling, corporate and state control. In her most recent collaborations she collected Methods of Escape with the general public in the UK; mapped travelers subway stories in Japan and investigated the Politics of Fear at the Subversive Fair in Austria. Hibbert-Jones is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Public art at UC Santa Cruz.
Hibbert-Jones's work has been exhibited and screened in Europe, Israel, Japan and the U.S. in galleries, museums and international festivals. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Artists’ Project Grant (with the Berkeley Art Center), a European Cultural Council Grant with Social Impact, a Creative Work Fund Grant and a San Francisco Individual Artist Grant, among others. She holds an MFA, MA and BA from York, Durham and London Universities in England and an MFA from Mills College, Oakland.
http://deehibbert-jones.ucsc.edu/
Co-director, Still Water; Associate Professor of New Media, University of Maine
Jon Ippolito (three.org/ippolito) has made a career out of pursuing vocations for which he is drastically underqualified. Following short-lived stints as a dancer and astrophysicist, he has co-created online artworks seen at the Walker Art Center and ZKM, curated exhibitions of video art and virtual reality at the Guggenheim, and published a regular column in ArtByte magazine. He suspects that his early adoption of new media has something to do with his recent success in pulling the wool over people's eyes.
http://three.org/ippolito/
Professor of Critical Studies
Executive Director of The Labyrinth Project
School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California
Marsha Kinder began as a literary scholar before moving to the study of transmedial relations among art forms. She currently is a Professor of Critical Studies in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she has been teaching since 1980. Her specialties include Spanish cinema, narrative theory, children’s media culture, and digital culture. She has published over one hundred essays and ten books. Since 1997 she has directed The Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on database documentaries and digital scholarship, working in collaboration with artists, scholars, scientists, archivists, students and cultural institutions. In 1995 Kinder received the USC Associates Award for Creativity in Scholarship; in 2001, was named a University Professor for innovative interdisciplinary research.
http://www.thelabyrinthproject.org
http://www.russianmodernism.org
John Jota Leaños is a social art practitioner and who utilizes all and any media to engage in diverse cultural arenas through strategic revealing, tactical disruption, and symbolic wagon burning, His practice includes a range of new media, photography, public art, installation, and performance focusing on the convergence of memory, social space and decolonization. Leaños' work has been shown at the Sundance 06 Film Festival, Cannes Short Corner 07, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Leaños is a Creative Capital Foundation Grantee and has been an artist in residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Center for Chicano Studies (2005), Carnegie Mellon University in the Center for Arts in Society (2003), and the Headlands Center for the Arts (2007). Leaños is an Assistant Professor of Social Documentation at University of California, Santa Cruz.
http://leanos.net
Professor, Film & Digital Media department, UCSC
Chip Lord is a media artist who works with video and photography. As a member of Ant Farm, 1968-1978, he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the Cadillac Ranch sculpture in Amarillo, Texas. Since 1980 he has worked independently and in collaboration producing video installations and single channel videotapes. His film work straddles documentary and experimental genres, often mixing the two, and has been shown widely at film and video festivals and in Museums. In 2005 a survey of his video work was shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arts Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. His project Movie Map, which includes photographs of San Francisco neighborhood theaters was shown at the Rena Bransten Gallery in 2003 and will be included in the group exhibition, AUTO.SUEÑO Y MATERIA in Gijon and Madrid, Spain in 2009. In partnership with Bruce Tomb he executed a temporary public Art commission for the City of San Jose, Hello, San Jose, in 2008. He is currently developing a public video art piece for the remodeled Bradley Terminal at LAX, to be completed in 2010. He is a Professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at U.C. Santa Cruz, and he lives in San Francisco.
The exhibition, ANT FARM 1968-1978, originated by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, 2004, has shown at five other locations in the US and Europe. Additional exhibitions were at the FRAC Centre, Orleans, France (Oct. 11 – Dec. 22, 2007) and the Graduate Architecture School at Columbia University (March, 2008). Each exhibition produced a book monograph about Ant Farm.
http://www.antfarm.org
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/lord
Michael Mateas explores the intersection of AI, art and design, forging a new research discipline called Expressive AI. He is currently a faculty member in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the MacArthur Endowed Chair. He helped launch UCSC’s game design degree, the first such degree offered in the UC system. Michael's research group, the Expressive Intelligence Studio, has ongoing projects in autonomous characters, interactive storytelling, game design support systems, AI models of creativity, and automated game generation. Michael received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
http://eis.soe.ucsc.edu
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/michaelm
Media Arts + Practice PhD Program, University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts
Susana Ruiz is a media artist whose interests include the intersections of art, journalism, game design, and politics. Her MFA thesis project, "Darfur Is Dying," was said to be one of the best representations of life in Darfur by Pulitzer Prize winner NYTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof, and was presented in Capitol Hill. Susana also co-developed "Finding Zoe," a game addressing gender stereotyping that won the Ashoka Changemakers "Why Games Matter" competition. She is co-founder of the design collective Take Action Games and a doctoral student in Media Arts & Practice at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union and an MFA in Interactive Media from USC.
http://www.takeactiongames.com
Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. Warren's writings on new media and computer science have been published widely and his art work has been shown at the ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art; and, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
http://people.ucsc.edu/wsack
Filmmaker
Associate professor, Film and Digital Media department UC Santa Cruz
Gustavo Vazquez, originally from Tijuana and currently residing in San Francisco, is an independent filmmaker who has directed over thirty productions, including documentaries, video installations, and dramas. Gustavo Vazquez’s research interest explores cross-cultural visual studies and video design. Vazquez’s interest in border issues and identity has led to a series of independent and collaborative works. His experience of crossing borders has left an imprint offering a personal perspective and access to contemporary ethnographic projects. In many regards, his work reflects both a rooted foundation in negotiating polarity between cultures. In his work we find a conceptual fusion of the opposite realities in class, culture, language by integrating diverse elements to illustrate the marginal and dominant paradigms. His latest documentary Que Viva La Lucha delves into the world of Mexican masked wrestling. He is a co-author of Documentary Filmmaking: A Contemporary Field Guide, published by Oxford University Press in February 2009.
Vazquez is an associate professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at UC Santa Cruz. He is the recipient of several awards, including a Rockefeller Media Fellowship and a Eureka Visual Artist Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.
Here is a statement by Professor Vazquez on the subject of collaboration
Expressive Intelligence Studio, Computer Science, UC Santa Cruz
Noah Wardrip-Fruin works to bridge the arts, humanities, and computer science with a particular interest in fiction and playability. His digital media projects have been presented by conferences, galleries, research facilities, arts festivals, and museums. He is author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (MIT Press, 2009) and has edited four books, including Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (MIT Press, 2007), with Pat Harrigan, and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003), with Nick Montfort.
Part of an interview that includes discussion of collaboration:
On open peer review:
Organizer
Margaret Morse is a Professor of Film and Digital Media at UCSC and Director of the University of California Education Abroad Study Center in Germany 2008-10. She is currently researching collaboration in art discourse and practice and exploring cultural changes in Eastern Europe 1989-2009. Her current writing projects include a monograph on Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and a book on "Art and the Other Senses".
If you would like to hear Prof. Morse talking about the "Art of Collaboration"on the radio show, Artists on Art, with DANM graduate student, Nada Miljkovic, please click here. This interview was broadcast live 10/20/09. Also, click here to see a short video from the KZSC radio station in the moment.
Organizer
B Ruby Rich is Professor and Chair of the Department of Community Studies and the Social Documentation Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, teaching documentary and cultural studies. Prior to coming to UCSC in 2004, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley as well as at the New School for Social Research, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Halifax College of Art and Design.
Prof. Rich is the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke University Press) and is in progress on The Rise and Fall of the New Queer Cinema. In 2007, she was the Guest Editor for a special section, “On Documentary,” in Cinema Journal. She is on the editorial advisory board for Camera Obscura and Secuencias, as well as on the editorial board for the British Film Institute's Film Classics series, published by Palgrave-MacMilan. Her current work looks at trends in queer cinema, at emerging forms of documentary, at the history and design of film festival cultures, and at the status of truth and fiction in Palestinian cinema. Collaboration has been a constant theme in her work, involving not only artists but also subjects and communities.
In 2007, Prof. Rich received the James Brudner Award for outstanding lesbian and gay scholarship from Yale University and in 2006 the Lifetime Honorary Membership award, given for contributions to the field, from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. In 2007, she received a residency and fellowship from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.
Long active in film festivals internationally, Prof. Rich served as an International Curator for the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and served on juries at the Sundance, Toronto, San Francisco, Oberhausen, Havana, Sydney, and Guadalajara film festivals. She is currently a member of the advisory board of the Provincetown Film Festival. She interviewed documentarian Errol Morris on stage for the 2008 San Francisco International Film Festival. At the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, she moderated a panel, “Truths and Consequences,” on the crisis in transnational documentary. At the Bay Area Video Coalition’s recent Producers' Institute in New Media, she addressed the need for new documentary vernaculars.
A long-time critic, cultural commentator, and journalist as well as a film scholar, Rich previously served as Director of the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts, financing non-profit film, video, and radio activities throughout New York State, and prior to that as Associate Director of the Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a journalist, she has written for The Guardian (UK), The Nation, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Sight and Sound, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Chicago Reader, and other publications. On radio, she has been a film commentator for the CBC's The Arts Today, PRI's The World, and occasionally the BBC World Service. On television, she has an Emmy for her work on the public television series, Independent View, and has also collaborated on programs or series for the IFC and Sundance cable channels.
Coordinator
Soraya Murray is a scholar and critic of contemporary art, with particular interest in new media, theory and criticism, and globalization in the arts. Her writings have been published in Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Flash Art, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She is also a regular contributor to the international contemporary art journal ExitEXPRESS (Spain). Murray holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine, and recently received an MA and PhD in art history at Cornell University. She began teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Fall 2007. Murray is completing a manuscript on bodies under the duress of advanced technologies and globalization, especially in the context of contemporary visions of alterity.
http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/semurray
Uneasy Bedfellows essay, Co-Authorship with Derek Conrad Murray, published in Art Journal
