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  • Angela Kariotis: Rehearsing for the Future: Performance Technologies for Healing Centered Education

    Angela Kariotis is a community engaged culture worker and educator building creative programs serving the needs of cities, institutions, and students of all ages for public good. Kariotis integrates restorative practices for a transformative learning experience and a healing centered education. Using a design thinking framework and appreciative inquiry for experiential learning, Kariotis synthesizes art-making for social entrepreneurship. Angela is winner of a NJSCA fellowship in playwriting, a National Performance Network Creation Fund Award, and a Tennessee Williams Theater Fellowship. As a performance artist, she’s been presented by venues such as UCLA, University of Texas at Austin, People’s Light, Legion Arts in Iowa, and Contact Theater in Manchester, UK. Kariotis is Curriculum Director and Facilitator of Walking the Beat, a national arts education program interrogating the history of police, the way we police each other, and ideating alternative cultures of care. Learn more about her commitments at https://angelakariotis.squarespace.com/

    Part 1: Artist Talk and Performance – Monday, March 28th, 2022
    In-Person // 10:05-11:25am  – Location: Plangere 235

    Part 2: Workshop – Wednesday March 30th, 2022
    In-Person // 2:45-4:20pm – Location: Plangere 235

    RSVP required: Please contact Deanna Shoemaker, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication (dshoemak@monmouth.edu) to RSVP.

     

  • Sam Cusumano

    Join us for a virtual Arts-Engineering talk/performance/workshop with Sam Cusumano. Cusumano is an Engineer for the Arts living in Philadelphia working with students, artists, musicians, and curators to create educational interactive electronic devices and installations. As part of his creative practice, he has connected plants and fungi with synthesizers to make music. Biodata Sonification is the process of representing invisible changes in plants to create music. By detecting microcurrent fluctuations across the surface of a plant’s leaf, these changes are used to generate MIDI notes which can be played through a synthesizer or computer to create sound. In this virtual presentation Sam Cusumano will explain methods used to tap into the secret life of plants, showing how to translate data for making music, and discuss the implications of interpreting biodata. Audio examples of Biodata Sonification will be performed live using analog synthesizers, digital audio workstations, and synth apps along with a Snake Plant, large Monstera, and various Cacti.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.

    Free and open to the public, but registration is required.

    This event is being recorded for educational and archival purposes and it may be posted on our website. By participating in this presentation, you give permission for Monmouth University to record the presentation for University purposes. You understand that your name, likeness, voice and statements may be recorded. If you do not wish to be recorded, a recording of this presentation will later be available upon request, and you can contact Amanda Stojanov, Assistant Professor of Digital Media (astojano@monmouth.edu) with any questions you may have regarding the presentation.

  • Kerry Skarbakka – White Noise: Artist Talk and Discussion

    Part 1, 9am-9:50am
    Kerry Skarbakka, White Noise: Artist Talk and Discussion (Co-Sponsored by PGIS)

    Kerry Skarbakka (b. 1970) is an artist working at the intersection of studio arts, performance, and constructed photography. The core of his practice examines the complexities of existence, control, and the vulnerabilities of the human condition through performative physical feats and expanded roles of identity. Skarbakka’s performance-based photographic work depicting acts of falling, drowning, and fighting have been exhibited in galleries, museums, and art fairs internationally. Highlights include the Torrance Art Museum, CA; the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the North Carolina Museum of Art; and Fargfabriken Norr, Stockholm. A Creative Capital grantee, he has received funding from the Oregon Arts Commission, The Ford Family Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Chicago Center of Cultural Affairs. He was also awarded a commission from the City of Seattle through the 1% for the Arts Program. Skarbakka’s work has been featured in notable publications including Aperture, Art and America, Afterimage, and ArtReview International. Skarbakka received his BA in Studio Arts from the University of Washington and an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. He is an Associate Professor of Photography at Oregon State University.

    For Part 1 of this event, Skarbakka will join students in the History of Photography course in a conversation of the role of art in constructing identity. In particular, they will discuss how his various projects examine and confront notions and ideals of white masculinity in the United States. Members of the public are welcome to join in the discussion.

    Part 2, 10:05am-11:00am
    Scholar/Teacher ::: Teacher/Scholar (Co-Sponsored by CETL)

    For the second part of Kerry Skarbakka’s visit at Monmouth, he will join in a discussion with MU’s Associate Professor of Art History, Corey Dzenko. Dzenko has been writing about Skarbakka’s work for over 15 years, since she contacted him for an interview as part of her MA Thesis research. Since that time, they have continued their conversations as Skarbakka moved on to additional performative art projects and Dzenko published about Skarbakka’s work in connection to media theory and the politics of identity. Together, they will introduce and showcase their ongoing collaboration and will then invite faculty and students to talk about the connection between research—including artistic practice—and teaching. The goal of this event is to provide faculty with a space to consider various aspects of their scholarly pursuits, while showing students some of the behind-the-scenes of what faculty do in addition to teaching in the classroom.

    For more information, visit skarbakka.com or email Corey Dzenko, Associate Professor of Art History (cdzenko@monmouth.edu). These events are sponsored in part by the Program of Gender and Intersectional Studies (PGIS) and The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL)

    This event is being recorded for educational and archival purposes and it may be posted on our website. By participating in this presentation, you give permission for Monmouth University to record the presentation for University purposes. You understand that your name, likeness, voice and statements may be recorded. If you do not wish to be recorded, a recording of this presentation will later be available upon request, and you can contact Amanda Stojanov, Assistant Professor of Digital Media (astojano@monmouth.edu) with any questions you may have regarding the presentation.

     

     

  • Enter The Facilitatrix: Strategic Soft Power for Collaborative Artists

    Elliot Reed’s Enter the Facilitatrix outlines a select few performances and, through the use of participatory exercises, enacts some the process he uses during rehearsals. Rehearsal provides an invaluable tool for developing content, building camaraderie, and identifying the unique talents of each person in the room. Reed believes in play and respects “unscripted” studio time as a constant wellspring of potential. His role as director is to highlight, edit, and reassemble the material presented to him. This is only possible by treating the cast as individuals, promoting a shared goal while developing trust between each other. A trusting cast is able to extend their limits and offer support, because the fear of ostracism is greatly diminished. His objective is to share improvisational tools for generating ideas, clearing creative muck, and bringing people together—inspiration that extends to many collaborative, creative, and social disciplines.

    Elliot Reed is a performance artist and director based in New York City. Working in realtime, Reed creates solos, ensemble performances, and videos that center the live subject. His projects exist between people, leveraging candid interaction among performers and audience. Utilizing a choreographic lens, Reed assembles bodies, movement prompts, and narrative within exhibition spaces. As viewers move through his work, the narrative arc moves through them, unfurling itself in actual time. Reed is a 2019 danceWEB scholar, 2019-20 Artist In Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and recipient of the 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent works include a commission with JACK Quartet (2020), MoMA PS1 (2021), The Getty Museum (2018), The Hammer Museum (2016), The Dorthy Chandler Pavilion (2018), The Broad (2017), University of Southern California (2016), and performances at MoonStep Tokyo (2017), MNSKTM Osaka (2017), VFD London (2017), and MOOI Collective Mexico City (2017).

    For more information, visit elliotreedlabs.com or email Amanda Stojanov, Assistant Professor of Digital Media (astojano@monmouth.edu).

    This event is being recorded for educational and archival purposes and it may be posted on our website. By participating in this presentation, you give permission for Monmouth University to record the presentation for University purposes. You understand that your name, likeness, voice and statements may be recorded. If you do not wish to be recorded, a recording of this presentation will later be available upon request, and you can contact Amanda Stojanov, Assistant Professor of Digital Media (astojano@monmouth.edu) with any questions you may have regarding the presentation.

  • Electo Electro 2020 – Interactive Workshop and Artist Talk

    With Mike Richison

    Special Guest: Patrick Murray, Monmouth University Polling Institute

    ARTIST TALK:
    Wednesday, October 7, 6:00 PM

    WORKSHOP:
    Wednesday, October 7, 7:30 PM
    Attendees who are planning to participate in the 7:30 workshop are kindly requested to download and install a demo version of max msp jitter. This is not required. https://cycling74.com/downloads

    Electo Electro 2020 is an interactive installation combining audience participation, music, news footage, and politics. The project allows participants to remix videos from political rallies, debates, and news in a structured sixteen beat loop. The touchscreen design is a parody of the system employed by the Accuvote, a voting system that is difficult to audit and susceptible to hacking. The parody continues into the format of the installation itself which will resemble a polling station. There will be an artist talk at 6:00 followed by a Max MSP Jitter workshop at 7:30 pm.

    Mike Richison is a multimedia artist and an Assistant Professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey where he teaches motion graphics. He employs a variety of approaches including sculpture, graphic design, and interactive video. His work utilizes found objects such as turntables, voting booths, and scavenged video clips as well as the Max MSP Jitter programming environment. Mike has exhibited at Autonomous Cultural Centre Medika (Zagreb, Croatia); Figment NYC and Art in Odd Places (New York); and Peters Valley School of Craft and Morris Museum (New Jersey). His projects have received attention in outlets such as Leonardo, Noisey (Music by VICE), FACT Magazine, Hyperallergic, WABC-TV Channel 7 News New York, and The Washington Post. Before moving to New Jersey in 2007, he lived in the Detroit, Michigan area for several years.

    These events are FREE and open to the public, but please register if you plan to attend.
    They are virtual only. A Zoom link will be provided when you register.

    This event is presented in collaboration with Galleries and Collections and the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

  • ArtNOW Art+Feminism Wikipedia-Edit-a-thon

    Wikipedia is a worldwide collaborative encyclopedia project made up of a globalized network of volunteers who give their time to edit the site. Within this globalized network, there still lacks a diversity of voices. “In a 2011 survey, the Wikimedia Foundation found that less than 10% of its contributors identify as female; more recent research puts that number at 16% globally and 23% in the United States.”  (Mandiberg, M., Prajapati, S., & Schrock, R., 2020). Who contributes to a database matters. Especially when in 2015, that database was “the 7th most visited website in the world” (Paling, E., 2015). A 2011 study from the Pew Research Center, shows that “the more educated someone is, the more likely he or she is to consult Wikipedia. Almost 70 percent of Americans with college degrees read Wikipedia” (Paling, E., 2015). If college-educated people and students are using Wikipedia as a main source of information, there is an argument for students learning how to edit and contribute to the online encyclopedia that they use.

    It is increasingly important for cis and trans women, gender-non-conforming people, people of color, and Indigenous communities to be written back into history. When information systems like Wikipedia systematically exclude aspects of the human experience, our understanding of the world is incomplete. To have access to a more accurate information system that includes representation of historically marginalized groups, our understanding of success, knowledge, and of ourselves can become more whole.

    VIRTUAL EVENT SCHEDULE: Friday, September 18th

    8:00 AM                               WIKI EDIT-A-THON BEGINS

    8:15 AM                                OPENING REMARKS

    8:30 AM                                EDITING WIKIPEDIA: TRAINING

    9:15 AM                                 LIBRARY RESEARCH: ONLINE TRAINING

    9:30 AM­–12:00 PM              EDITING WIKIPEDIA: FREE TIME

    12:00 PM                                EDITING WIKIPEDIA: TRAINING

    12:45 PM                                LIBRARY RESEARCH: ONLINE TRAINING

    1:00 PM–4:00 PM                  EDITING WIKIPEDIA: FREE TIME

    4:00 PM–5:00 PM                  CLOSING REMARKS

     

    ArtNOW Art+Feminism 2020 is a Wikipedia-Edit-a-thon hosted by ArtNOW and the IDM Research Lab.

    Co-sponsors: The Monmouth University Guggenheim Library and Program in Gender and Intersectionality Studies (PGIS) at Monmouth University.

    This event was organized with the guidance of Art+Feminism, “an intersectional feminist non-profit organization that directly addresses the information gap about gender, feminism, and the arts on the internet… ensuring that the histories of our lives and work are accessible and accurate” (Mandiberg, M., Prajapati, S., & Schrock, R., 2020).

  • POSTPONED – Word is Bond

    Exclusive Screening and Conversation with Director Sacha Jenkins and Grammy Winning Artist, Che “Rhymefest” Smith

    Word Is Bond, a documentary exploring the transformational power and many layers of poetic hip-hop lyrics, featuring insights from world-renowned hip-hop artists like Nas and J Cole. 

     

  • Collective Unconscious: Artist Talk with Amanda Stojanov

    Amanda Stojanov is an artist, educator, and activist. Her work explores storytelling through multi-tech platforms including VR, immersive audio/visual projection, animation, and others. She has worked with design teams in large design studios, independent agencies, and non-profit organizations, and she continues to work as a freelance art director and designer. Stojanov is a member/co-founder at voidLab and co-founder of voidLab’s panel series DECENTRALIZING THE WEB (projects.dma.ucla.edu/voidlab), which cultivates critical evaluations of online presence through an intersectional feminist lens. It aims to untangle the psycho-social implications of identity politics on the global web, examining the embedded biases driving dominant modes of representation in digital spaces.

    Stojanov has exhibited her work in California, Budapest, and Linz. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Interactive Digital Media in Monmouth University’s Department of Communication. Previously she worked as an educator at Art Center College of Design, UCLA, and Loyola Marymount University.

    Stojanov’s work can be seen at: https://amandastojanov.com/

  • Strange Radio, Live! Listening to the Deep Connection: Lecture-Performance Transmission with Karen Werner

    Strange Radio, Live! is an immersive lecture-performance in story and sound, part of an ongoing series of experimental radio narrowcasts and broadcasts about the stranger, nearness and distance, forced migration, displacement, home, and the intergenerational transmission of memory. Strange Radio’s point of departure is Holocaust postmemory in Vienna, Austria, a sonic portal for sensing experiences of strangers and strangeness in multiple unfolding contexts across the globe. Strange Radio, Live! weaves together personal documentary; disembodied voices and sounds separated from points of origin; fragile signals transmitted through radios and embodied reflections on memory, place, time, and radio—itself a strange medium. Postmemories bounce against histories, sometimes buried and inaudible, in new locations. Tuned into both utopian longings and wounds, Strange Radio is a fragile signal, a love song to radio as a medium, metaphor, and method of deep listening together.

    Karen Werner is an award-winning radio artist, audio storyteller, and sociologist. Her audio pieces have been broadcast on community and public radio stations across Europe, North America, Australia, and Israel. They have also been part of numerous live events and art exhibitions. In 2017-2018, Werner created a series of public sound installations at Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier, including “Covenant of the Tongue” and “Zirkus,” which are sonic autoethnographies about Holocaust postmemory in Vienna. Her recent work is in live performance: sound installation meets documentary storytelling meets narrowcast radio transmission. Werner is a 2019 invited artist at the Kone Foundation’s Saari Residence in Finland and was a 2017-2018 Fellow of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. She received a Tending Space Fellowship from the Hemera Foundation from 2014-2016 for artists with a Buddhist practice.  She is on the faculty of the BFA in Socially Engaged Art Program at Goddard College in Vermont.

    Werner’s work can be seen at: KarenWerner.net

  • New Stories for the Anthropocene: Artist Talk with Elizabeth Demaray

    Elizabeth Demaray is an artist who focuses on the interface between the built and the natural environment. In this vein, she builds listening stations for birds that play human music, cultures lichen on the sides of skyscrapers in New York City, and designs alternative forms of housing for land hermit crabs. These artworks often involve the concept of a biotope, which is a small environment where human and non-human populations overlap.

    While in residence at Monmouth University, Demaray will present these projects and will lead a workshop on non-anthropocentric design. She will also be pairing with the campus to create a community-based project that embraces the idea of “trans-species giving.” According to Demaray, the concept of trans-species giving asserts that the commonalities between life forms are such that we may actually be able to give other organisms a “hand up,” notwithstanding our own cultural or species-specific assumptions about the natural world.

    Demaray is the recipient of the National Studio Award from the New York Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture, and was the featured artist at the 2014 Association of Environmental Science Studies symposium, Welcome to the Anthropocene. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is an associate professor of fine arts and head of the sculpture concentration at Rutgers University, Camden. On the Rutgers, New Brunswick, campus, she is a work group advisor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and an advisor at The Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University, in the Department of Computer Science, which is dedicated to supporting artistic practice in the fields of computer vision and machine learning.

    Demaray’s work can be seen at: https://elizabethdemaray.org