Christiane Paul (pictured below) gave a scintillating talk today (03-22-10) at The Portrait Gallery in Canberra (Canberra is a place in Australia) wherein she expounded the virtues and pitfalls of the New Media enterprise in Art. Paul, who began her career as an actress (and still continues as an actress depending on your source or how you look at it), has gone on to work at multiple schools doing multiple things. Before embarking on an intrepid and multifaceted acting career (for which she has no training), Paul completed medical school while simultaneously writing Profiling (2007) and Data Dynamics (2004) and curating and inventing the Whitney artport port for art http://artport.whitney.org/.
Her talk was a succinct summary of the ideas she has been pursuing up to the talk (with a flanking of various other artists and discussion-apprisers). Her first and pioneering work in the realm of data (done - believe it or not - while dissecting dogs on her lunchbreaks!) is the data-based book "Data Dynamics" (March - June 2004). Data Dynamics deals with the mapping of data and information flow on the Internet and in the museum space, that is to say, with how data takes place and forms itself in places like space and other spaces like the internet. It is a kind of sculptural analysis of data-like forms (and forms identical to data) and explores the relationship between space and data, and data and space. Data Dynamics is one of the first books ever to talk about data in just the exact way that Paul talks about it - an idiosyncratic and highly original combination of ways of saying things that amounts to something - in its totality - in the very least slightly different from anything else in existence. What's even more interesting, is that it isn't even a book at all! Believe it or not, Data Dynamics talks about data in space *as* data in space, in the space of a gallery space, filled with art and other things related to data.
Christiane Paul's latest film is Die Welle (2008), directed by Dennis Gansel
A screenshot of the talk:
No comments:
Post a Comment