Bio:
Kyle McKinley cares about friendships, public education, and bicycling. His practices involve extended collaborations with artist collectives and bicycle tool cooperatives, with an eye to intervening in the production of the spaces of late capitalism. Since coming to DANM this has increasingly included investigation of how our physical bodies interact with technologies to produce space and how our social bodies interact with technologies to produce meaning.
Thank-yous: Gratitude and recognition are due to: Ann Altstatt Kelly Brown Pou Dimitrijevich Jennifer González Madeline Lane-McDonald? Nick Lally Chip Lord Joshua Muir Jennifer Parker Sophia Strosberg The Santa Cruz Bike Church everyone who contributed time and ideas to building and all of students, staff and faculty who make up DANM. This presentation was made possible with funding from UCSC’s Porter College Graduate Arts Research Committee and Florence French Awards.
Kyle McKinley is a student in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz. His twin backgrounds in sculpture and literary theory have been radically informed in recent years by his involvement with bicycle education non-profit organizations and “free-school” community education projects. These seemingly divergent interests coalesce in Kyle's work around questions of appropriate technologies and the politics of space and place.
Kyle's research in digital arts employs “locative media” strategies to start conversations about the role of philosophy, of architecture, of the bicycle, and of technologies in the lives of individual viewer/participants. Recent collaborations with Miki Foster have employed the emergent genre of guided video walking tours in efforts to create non-standard, non-monolithic narrations of architectural spaces. Similarly, Kyle's MFA thesis work Bicilogues will consist of a collection of interviews on diverse topics, all of which are filmed while riding bicycles. These interviews will be presented as an interactive video installation in which viewer/participants pedal stationary bicycles in order to make the interview-videos play back intelligibly.
Kyle received a BA in Three Dimensional Inter-media and a BA in World Literature from UC Santa Cruz in 2003 and expects to receive an MFA in Digital Art and New Media from UC Santa Cruz in 2010. He is a long term collective member of Bike Church Santa Cruz as well as participating in numerous other non-profit cooperatives and collectives.
Kyle McKinley?'s art and activism are focused on community-based appropriate technologies. For the past five years that has taken the form of working in organizations that teach people to maintain their bicycles.
Kyle completed a double major in Sculpture and World Literature at UC Santa Cruz. At that time his artworks were installations that offered embodied equivalents to Post-Structuralist theory.
More recently Kyle's has made 'zines that appropriate the idioms of early twentieth century children's literature to form social commentary. These publications, the art-objects that accompany them, and any future works are rooted in radical collaboration.
Kyle McKinley's art and activism are focused on appropriate technologies and building communities to effectively implement those technologies. For the past six years that has taken the form of working in organizations that teach people how to build and maintain bicycles for personal transportation. He considers his praxis in these organizations to be a melding of his artistic, theoretical and pedagogical interests.
Kyle's Bachelors' degree from UC Santa Cruz was a double major in Three Dimensional Inter-media and in World Literature. At that time his artworks were mostly installation-based performance art that were attempts to build sculptural/embodied equivalents to post-Structuralist theories of Capitalist accumulation. Kyle's writings similarly employed semiotic and Marxist theories to explore popular cultures.
More recently Kyle's artistic endeavors have been 'zines and artist's books that appropriate the aesthetics and idioms of early twentieth-century children's literature to form absurdist commentary about contemporary society. These publications, and the guerrilla art that accompanies them, have been collaborative efforts with scientific illustrator and fellow bicycle activist Ann Altstatt. Kyle's future artworks, including his thesis work in the DANM MFA, will no doubt continue to benefit from such collaborations.
Kyle is interested in anarchist theory, collectively generated content (wikis), consensus decision making, the non-profit industrial complex and transgressive models of ontology.
Kyle McKinley's art and activism are focused on appropriate technologies and building communities to effectively implement those technologies. For the past six years that has taken the form of working in organizations that teach people how to build and maintain bicycles for personal transportation. He considers his praxis in these bicycle collectives to be a melding of his artistic, theoretical and pedagogical interests. It is Kyle's belief that engagement with such forms of skill-sharing not only afford access to knowledge about bicycle repair but also radically transform the patron's experience of tools, technology, and transportation. This transformation, in turn, might lead to self-reliant communities.
Born and raised in far-northern California, a radical-environmentalist perspective has been Kyle's political orientation for as long as he can remember.
Kyle's Bachelors' degree from UC Santa Cruz was a double major in Three Dimensional Inter-media and in World Literature. At that time his artworks were mostly installation-based performance art that were attempts to build sculptural/embodied equivalents to post-Structuralist theories of Capitalist accumulation. Kyle's writings similarly employed semiotic and Marxist theories to explore popular culture, histories of race-slavery, and avant-garde Art movements of the 1960s.
More recently Kyle's artistic endeavors have been 'zines and artist's books that appropriate the aesthetics and idioms of early twentieth-century children's literature to form absurdist commentary about contemporary society. These publications, and the guerrilla art that accompanies them, have been collaborative efforts with scientific illustrator and fellow bicycle activist Ann Altstatt. Kyle's future artworks, including his thesis work in the DANM MFA, will no doubt continue to benefit from such collaborations.
Other recent works have used imagery appropriated from specific political contexts (protest movements) to create large-scale digital prints. Rather than blindly recuperating the content of the appropriated imagery as “art”, these prints make apparent their own histories of appropriation in order to construct a dialectical tension between “protest” and “art” for the viewer to explore. Examples include high-resolution digital imaging of low-quality stencils and wheat-pastes.
Current and future projects continue Kyle's interest in the antique aesthetics of the late Victorian era, and attempt to provide embodied opportunities for viewers to interrogate the relationships between technology, history, and human agency.
Kyle is interested in anarchist theory, collectively generated content (wikis), consensus decision making, the slow-food movement, the non-profit industrial complex and transgressive models of ontology.
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