Jitter image by Djavan Santos. Courtesy of the artist.

Tuesday, 10 November 2009
7:30 to 9:30pm
SFAI Café
800 Chestnut Street campus
Free and open to the public

Part of a larger ongoing collaborative project between SFAI and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, SFAI’s Fall 2009 Design and Technology Salon—Reinventing Social-networking Practices for Art and Design—will bring together in conversation SFAI Film department chair Lynn Hershman Leeson, Paris-based new and emergent media art pioneer Maurice Benayoun, Stanford Humanities Lab associate director Henrik Bennetsen, and SFAI Design and Technology department chair Paul Klein (moderator).

Panelists will introduce and discuss concepts for producing connected media through systems of artist-to-artist production—productions that, in turn, will generate multiple avenues of work and inspiration for other, similarly engendered projects. Traditional aspects of open-source software, shared systems of production, and notions of authorship—particularly as configured by the advent of social-networking practices—will be interrogated with a view both to broadening the discourse on open-source platforms and to their emerging relevance to and applicability within art and design practice.

Bios of Participants

Chair of SFAI’s Film department, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson is known internationally for her pioneering use of new technologies. Her three feature films—Strange Culture, Teknolust, and Conceiving Ada—have been shown at festivals across the world and have won numerous awards. Recently honored with grants from Creative Capital, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also the recipient of a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She is currently working on a feature-length documentary—Women Art Revolution—about the revolutionary feminist art movement.

Paris-based new and emergent media art pioneer Maurice Benayoun is one of the founders of CITU. A director in the 80s of video installations on such artists as Daniel Buren and Sol LeWitt, he cofounded Z-A, a virtual reality lab. He collaborated with Belgian graphic novelist François Schuiten on Quarxs and received the Bourse Louis Lumière/Villa Médicis Hors les Murs award for his project Art after Museum. Together with architect Christophe Girault, he won in 2006 the competition for the new permanent exhibition in the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which opened in 2007.

Associate director of the Stanford Humanities Lab, Henrik Bennetsen heads the Speed Limits research project—a collaboration with the Bornholm Museum in Denmark on the ways in which 3D collaborative technologies augment traditional cultural institutions—and relatedly works on developing the open source Sirikata platform for the deployment of games and virtual worlds. At the 2009 MiTo music festival, he participated in the mixed-reality performance Una serata in Sirikata after leading the development of the enabling technologies. He worked on the LifeSquared research project, which explored animating traditional archives—in this case, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s—with new technology. The project was exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and at SFMOMA.

Chair of SFAI’s Design and Technology department, Paul Klein investigates the discursive realms of compact and decentered urbanity. He has explored the cultural practices inherent in spectatorship, identity, and xenophobia, and his artwork has been exhibited at SFMOMA, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Alternative Museum in New York City, and the Museum of Modern Art in Cartagena (Colombia). His work was also included in In Transition: Russia 2008 at the National Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) in Moscow and in the five-venue traveling exhibition New Realities: Hand-colored Photographs, 1839–Present.

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Download a PDF (204k) of the press release here.