Dia Talks
Artist Web Projects: 25th Anniversary Series
Saturday, January 16, 2021, 12 pm, Dia Online
Event Details
Saturday, January 16, 2021, 12–2 pm
Live on Zoom
On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dia’s Artist Web Projects as well as the recent restoration of several of those works, Dia presents a series of conversations that bring together a range of voices to reflect on the artistic and technical development of internet-based artwork since 1995.
The artist Barbara Bloom spoke with Dia curator Kelly Kivland for the first event in this series, which focused on Bloom’s Half Full — Half Empty (2008). The second event gave focus to Fantastic Prayers (1995), a collaboration between Constance DeJong, Tony Oursler, and Stephen Vitiello that was realized as an Artist Web Project, performance, and CD-ROM.
Over the past twenty-five years, the series of Artist Web Projects has evolved in parallel with not only practical advances in digital technology and web programming, but also the role of the internet in contemporary life. This third event features a discussion of prominent themes that have arisen since the inception of Dia’s series, including the politics of virtual intimacy, appropriative data dissemination, as well as how online spaces make visible conditioned systems of representation and interferences.
The event begins with a discussion on digital culture by writer Orit Gat, followed by a panel discussion between Artist Web Projects contributors Cheryl Donegan and Kristin Lucas that is moderated by curator and writer Howie Chen and archivist and artist Andrew Lampert.
Orit Gat: “Welcome to My David Bowie Fansite”
12 pm
RSVP and receive a Zoom link here.
Inspired by Artist Web Projects commissioned in the mid- to late 1990s, Orit Gat references representations of internet users in popular culture, from Nora Ephron rom-coms to The Matrix (1999) and from futuristic imagery of video chats to Zoom, in order to chart changing attitudes on the internet, including the way the medium’s voice marks a constant shift to, and away, from optimism.
Orit Gat is a writer whose work on contemporary art and digital culture has appeared in a variety of publications, including ArtReview, e-flux journal, frieze, and the White Review, where she is a contributing editor. A winner of the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, she is currently working on her first book, a memoir about watching soccer as a prism through which to explore questions about immigration, nationalism, race, gender, money, love, and the possibility of belonging. Gat lives in London.
Howie Chen and Andrew Lampert in Conversation with Cheryl Donegan and Kristin Lucas
12:45 pm
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Curator Howie Chen and archivist Andrew Lampert engage in a conversation with artists Cheryl Donegan and Kristin Lucas on extending artistic practices into emergent media and the unexpected archival considerations of these experiments. In revisiting Donegan’s Studio Visit (1997) and Lucas’s Between a Rock and a Hard Drive (1998), the speakers aim to contextualize these early web-based commissions within the artists’ overall conceptual practices and draw connections to their current projects.
Howie Chen is a curator and writer and a founding director of Chen’s, a townhouse gallery in Brooklyn. Previously, he has held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1, both in New York City, and cofounded the curatorial project Dispatch. Chen graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and was a curatorial fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. His writing has been published by Primary Information and Badlands Unlimited and in journals including Artforum, Art in America, and frieze. He is currently a faculty member at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development in New York. Chen is also editing an anthology that collects the writings and ephemera of the Godzilla Asian American Arts Network to be published by Primary Information in fall 2021. Chen lives in New York.
Cheryl Donegan received her bachelor’s degree in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and a master’s degree of fine art at Hunter College in New York City. The artist’s work integrates the time-based, gestural forms of performance and video with painting, drawing, and installation. Direct, irreverent, and infused with an ironic eroticism, Donegan’s practice puts a subversive spin on issues relating to sex, gender, art making, and art history. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the 1995 Whitney Biennial, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; New York Film and Video Festival; and the 1993 Venice Biennale. She lives in New York.
Andrew Lampert is an artist, archivist, writer, and a cofounder of the consulting firm Chen & Lampert. His work has been exhibited at, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; New York Film Festival; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Toronto International Film Festival. He has edited books on Tony Conrad, Harry Smith, Manuel DeLanda, and George Kuchar. Lampert served as archivist and curator of collections at Anthology Film Archives, New York, where he preserved hundreds of films and videos and co-programmed public screenings. His videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. He lives in New York.
Kirstin Lucas is a media artist whose work explores the impact of technology on humanity, blurring the boundary between the technological and corporeal. Her augmented reality, video, installation, net art, and performance works have been presented internationally by museums and galleries, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; FACT Liverpool; and Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea. Lucas is an assistant professor in the department of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin.