Performance

Jordan Crandall is Chair of the Visual Arts department. He is an artist, theorist, and performer based in Los Angeles.  His video installations, presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide, combine formats and genres deriving from cinematic and military culture, exploring new regimes of power and their effects on subjectivity, sociality, embodiment, and desire.  His most recent video installation, HOTEL (2010), produced in advanced, 4K high definition technology, probes into the realms of extreme intimacy, where techniques of control combine with techniques of the self.  Crandall writes and lectures regularly at various institutions across the US and Europe.  He is the 2011 winner of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award for outstanding theory and research-based digital arts practice, given by the Transmediale in Berlin in collaboration with the Vilém Flusser Archive of the University of Arts, Berlin.  He is currently an Honorary Resident at Eyebeam art and technology center in New York, where he is continuing the development of a new body of work that blends performance art, political theater, philosophical speculation, and intimate reverie.  The work, entitled UNMANNED, explores new ontologies of distributed systems  -- a performative event-philosophy in the form of a book and a theatrical production.  He is also the founding editor of the new journal VERSION.     He has recently given keynote lectures at several major conferences including "Cosmobilities" at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich; "Architectures of Fear" at the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture; and "Sorting Daemons" at Queens University, Ontario.  Other lectures include “Goodbye Privacy” at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; the ESRC/Surveillance Studies Network Seminar Series at the Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK; the conference "Everyday Militarism: New Zones of Empire" at UC Berkeley; the Cultural Studies Colloquium Series at UC Davis; and the conference "Architecture in Mind -- Trans-Thinking the City" at the Delft School of Design, Netherlands.  He has have been awarded several research fellowships:  most recently, a fellowship and residency at Newcastle University, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape (Global Urban Research Unit/Culture Lab), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship at the NEH/Vectors Summer Institute on Multimodal Scholarship the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, USC.  He is a researcher in residence at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2).   An anthology of Crandall's projects and critical writing, Drive: Technology, Mobility, and Desire, is available from Hatje Cantz Verlag.  His writing has appeared in such books as Architectures of Fear (Barcelona Center of Contemporary Culture); Synthetic Times: Media Art China (The MIT Press);  Worterbuch des Krieges/Dictionary of War (Merve Verlag Berlin); and The Aesthetics of Risk (JRP Ringier) -- as well as in journals including Estudio Visuales; CTheory; Atlantica; Art Journal; Journal of Visual Culture, and Theory, Culture, and Society.  His ongoing art and research project Under Fire, concerning the organization and representation of war, has resulted in two catalogues published by the Witte de With center for contemporary art, Rotterdam, and an online archive developed for the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville.  Crandall’s other books include Trigger Projekt (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2002); Heatseeking (Caen: Esac, 2002); Suspension (Kassel: Documenta X, 1997); and Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network (New York: D.A.P., 2001).     Crandall's earlier works include the site-specific video installation Suspension (1997) commissioned by Documenta X in Kassel; a seven-part video installation entitled Drive (1998-99), commissioned by the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlshrue; a six-part video installation entitled Heatseeking (2000), commissioned by inSITE in San Diego and Tijuana; and Trigger (2002), a two-channel video installation which debuted in October 2002 at Henry Urbach Architecture, New York, supported by the New York State Department of Cultural Affairs and ARTSPACE, San Francisco and New York.     Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki; the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz; ARTLAB in Tokyo; the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil in Mexico City; the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie in Caen; the Kunst-Werke in Berlin; the Kitchen in New York; AGORA in Rio de Janeiro; the Edith Russ Site für Medienkunst in Oldenburg; and the TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst in Rotterdam.  His work has also been presented in group exhibitions at major institutions such as the Whitney Museum in New York, the Tate Modern, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.    Crandall's videos have been presented at many international film and media festivals including the World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam; the Transmediale International Media Art Festival Berlin; the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media; the Video Archeology Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria; the MIX Festival in New York City; the Berlin Biennial; the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruck, Germany; “Cine y Casi Cine” at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest; and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.   

Rubén Ortiz-Torres is an artist who joined the Visual Arts Department effective Fall 2001. He began his career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter in the early 1980s, well before he received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in 1992. Ortiz-Torres is a Mexican-born artist who has been living and working in Los Angeles since 1990. Ortiz-Torres is widely regarded as one of today's leading Mexican artists and as an innovator in the 1980s of a specifically Mexican form of postmodernism. Over the past ten years, he has produced a body of work in a wide range of media -- extended series of photographs, series of altered readymades, a feature film, several videos (including three in 3D), large scale video installations, major painting series, sculptures, customized cars and machines, photocollages, performances and curated exhibitions. Since 1982, Ortiz-Torres's work has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions, over 100 group shows in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and more than 50 screenings of his films and video works. Over 150 written pieces cover his work in mainstream media such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Reforma (Mexico), La Jornada (Mexico), and El Pais (Spain); in significant art world publications with international circulation such as ArtForum, Art Images, Frieze, New Art Examiner, Poliester, Bomb, Flash Art, and Art in America; and in numerous exhibition catalogues and books. Ortiz-Torres has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from, to name a few, teh Andrea Frank Foundation, the Foundations for Contemporary Performance Art, the U.S. Mexico Fund for Culture, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Banff Center for the Arts, and the Fullbright Foundation.

An artist/filmmaker working for many years in installation, photography, video, film, performance, drawing and writing, Antin has an international reputation. She has had one woman exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the La Jolla Museum (now the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art), the Long Beach Museum, etc., as well as a major 30-year retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which traveled to several venues in the U.K. and included a book catalogue. She has created major installations at the Hirschhorn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Jewish Museum in New York City, among others. She is represented in major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, etc. As a performance artist she has appeared in venues around the world including the Venice Biennale and the Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C. Several of her mixed media, groundbreaking works such as 100 Boots, CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture, The Angel of Mercy, Recollections of my Life with Diaghilev, The King of Solana Beach, The Adventures of a Nurse, are frequently referred to as classics of feminist, postmodern art. As an artist she is represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. She has written three books, Being Antinova (Astro Artz) and Eleanora Antinova Plays (Sun & Moon) and The Man Without A World; a film script (Green Integer) and a photo book 100 Boots (Running Press). She has made nine videotapes, among them Representational Painting, 1971, The Ballerina and the Bum, 1973, The Little Match Girl Ballet, 1975 and From the Archives of Modern Art, 1989, (all tapes distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix). She has written, directed and produced narrative films, among them the feature, The Man Without a World, 1991, (Berlin Film Festival, U.S.A. Film Fest., Ghent Film Fest., London Jewish, San Francisco Jewish, Women in Film, etc.) and The Last Night of Rasputin, 1989, (premiered with a live performance in a two-week run at the Whitney Museum), (all films distributed by Milestone Film & Video, N.Y.), and the video installations Loves of a Ballerina, 1986, Vilna Nights, 1993, and Minetta Lane, 1995. Her most recent awards include several AICA (International Association of Art Critics) awards including one in 2003 for best gallery show for “The Last Days of Pompeii”, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Achievement Award in 1998. Antin has been a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego since 1975 where she was the recipient of the UCSD Chancellor's Associates Award for Excellence in Art in 1996. Antin's most recent work includes the Sydney Biennale with performances at the Sydney Opera House and the premier of a major new photographic work The Last Days of Pompeii at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the Craig Krull Gallery in Los Angeles and the Marella Arte Contemporanea Gallery in Milan, Italy. Her newest photographic piece “Roman Allegories” premiered in New York at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in Feb. 2005 and the Marella D’Arte Contemporary Gallery in Milan.

For more info: photos, videos, etc., please visit amy-alexander.com Amy Alexander has worked in film, video, and digital media. She received a BA in Communications: Film/Video from Rowan University and an MFA in Film/Video with additional work in New Media from California Institute of the Arts. She is currently Associate Professor of Visual Arts: Computing at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to coming to UCSD, she taught at CalArts and USC, as well as working commercially in television, animation, new media and information technology. With a background in music and programming as well as in visual media, her work encompasses live visual performance, public art, and critique of software and its relationship to contemporary culture and politics. Drawing on her early background in musical performance and real-time video synthesis, Alexander’s recent work focuses on contemporary audiovisual and new media performance from a performing arts perspective. In collaboration both with other video artists and with computer vision researchers, she developed SVEN: (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network), a real-time video performance and installation that takes a humorous but critical look at artificial intelligence surveillance algorithms by developing techniques that detect when people look like rock stars instead of criminals. She has continued to develop her CyberSpaceLand VJ performances, focusing on developing the performative aspects of gestural control, Internet-based narrative, and chaotic properties of visual software. Together with Annina Rüst and composer Cristyn Magnus she is currently developing Discotrope: The Secret Nightlife of Solar Cells. Discotrope an audiovisual performance for public space that uses solar cells and their energy production for aesthetic and performative ends to create a large-scale visual environment that examines the curious history of dance in cinema. She is beginning research into work that integrates percussion and audiovisual performance. Alexander has also recently written chapters on historical and contemporary live audiovisual performance for The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music and Audiovisuology Compendium: See This Sound. Alexander’s graduate work focused on historical studies of abstract animation (visual music) and its practice in real-time analog video synthesis and computer graphics. Much of her subsequent work has been in software art, net art, and live audiovisual performance. Her early net projects, such as The Multi-Cultural Recycler (1996) and thebot (2000), made use of computer programming and time-based structures acting upon material from the Internet. As Cue P. Doll she developed the tactical barcode-scanning software CueJack (2001) and co-produced software projects with The Yes Men including Reamweaver (2002). Alexander was a founding member and developer of the Runme.org software art respository and the the Discordia.us media culture community weblog project, both launched in 2003. Alexander’s website, plagiarist.org (1998 – present), includes links to most of her projects as well as housing a number of other older, mostly text based humorous projects on topics of digital primacy and ownership. In addition to her net and installation work, many of Alexander’s software-based projects have been performance-based. Several of these projects focused on the humorous possibilities of media and software art, often taking a critical look at the overflow of computer and business cultures into pop culture and leisure, e.g., B0timati0n, CyberSpaceLand, Extreme Whitespace, and The Typewriter. Alexander was also a member of the TOPLAP livecoding audiovisual performance ensemble and online discussion group. Alexander has been active in the curation of software art and development of software art discourse, with a particular interest in how software influences contemporary culture and vice versa. She is a founding member, developer, and moderator of the online Runme.org software art repository and was involved with the Read_Me software art festival as a juror, reviewer, and co-organizer from its inception in 2002. She has written texts for Runme.org and the Read_Me festivals and books, Low-fi.org and others, as well as participating in software art panels at Transmediale/Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and at Ars Electronica in Linz. She has served on the software art juries for the Read_Me and Transmediale festivals. In 2004, she curated the exhibition, “Softside: A selection of projects from Runme.org” at the Sonar festival in Barcelona. Alexander’s work has been presented in art venues, public spaces and mainstream settings. Exhibitions include ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Prix Ars Electronica, Sinking Creek Film Festival, Steirischer Herbst, Transmediale, European Media Art Festival, net.congestion, Santa Monica Museum of Art, pARTS Gallery, Read_Me, Next Five Minutes, Sonar, The Tirana Biennale, The New Museum and The Whitney Museum – as well as in nightclubs, on the streets and on the Internet. Her projects have been reviewed in publications including Leonardo, ArtNews, Neural.it, Furtherfield.org, Rhizome, USA Today, The New York Times, Wired, Slashdot, Libération, The Boston Globe, The Independent, as well as in various books and articles on digital media art.