Michal Rovner was born in Israel in 1957 and since 1988, has had a studio in New York City.
The artist’s prolific work in video and film, as well as on paper and canvas, has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions including: -a 2002 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York; -an acclaimed exhibition featured at the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2003; -In Stone, in 2004 at PaceWildenstein, New York; and -Fields, opened at the Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2005 and traveled to the Tel Aviv Museum.
Michal Rovner’s work has been collected by many major museums such as: -The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; -Museum of Modern Art, New York; -The Guggenheim Museum, New York; -The Art Institute of Chicago; -Los Angeles County Museum of Art; -San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; -Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; -The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Rovner’s films have been screened, including: -Notes (2001), a collaboration with composer Philip Glass, that premiered at the Lincoln Center, New York; and -Border (1997) premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London.
Some of Michal Rovner’s site specific and public art projects include: -Chase Manhattan Bank on Park Avenue in New York City; -LVMH Headquarters, Paris; -Chanel Headquarters in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Osaka; and -- a permanent twelve-meter high video wall at the new historical museum at Yad Vashem (The Holocaust Memorial), Jerusalem.
Danja Vasiliev is a Russian born critical engineer, computer artist, and researcher. His work and experiments relate to topics of digital life and everyday technology, networked environments, computer operating systems, machine-2-human interfaces, data forensics, reality hacking and else. Using networked computers as a raw model/base he’s trying to merge digital and meat spaces.
“when a person gives self-control over to a computer and accepts the default options without a question, that person becomes a cyborg.”
He’s critical about the contemporary tendency for pervasive cyborgination; while working with the same technologies he’s finding out about the permutations of networked and flesh realities.
Since 2004 his work is based exclusively on free and open source software.
In 2007 he co-founded moddr_ medialab, a collective of artists united by the shared interest in doing strange things with technology and engaging with critical forms of computer-art practice.
In 2010, together with Julian Oliver conceptualised ‘critical engineering’ movement.
Julian Oliver is a New Zealander based in Berlin. He’s been active in the critical intersection of art and technology since 1998. His projects and the occasional paper have been presented at many museums, international electronic-art events and conferences, including the Tate Modern, Transmediale, Ars Electronica and the Japan Media Arts Festival. His work has received several awards, ranging from technical excellence to artistic invention and interaction design.
He’s given numerous workshops and master classes in software art, augmented reality, creative hacking, data forensics, object-oriented programming for artists, virtual architecture, artistic game-development, information visualisation, UNIX/Linux and open source development practices worldwide. He’s a long-time advocate of the use of free software in artistic production, distribution and education.
In 1998 he established the artistic game-development collective Select Parks.
Daniel Massey (b. 1982, Mexico) is an artist, designer, and programmer based out of San Francisco, CA. Daniel’s recent work seeks to instigate new modes of collaboration, creation, and transformation by approaching technology as inherently malleable. His work take on varied forms, from immersive installations and web-based work, to live visuals and sound. Daniel earned his MFA in Digital Arts & New Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was part of the Yahoo! Design Innovation Team and was recently a resident artist at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. His work has been exhibited internationally.
Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data and digital technologies.
Aaron’s work takes real-world and community generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and technology. His projects have been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science foundation’s first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Two of his music video collaborations have been Grammy nominated. He recieved his MFA in Design|Media Arts from UCLA. In 2010 Aaron was the Abramowitz Artist in Residence at MIT and currently leads the Data Arts Team in Google’s Creative Lab.
Born in 1946, Yann Arthus-Bertrand has always been fond of nature. It was in the late 70s, in Kenya, while studying with his wife Anne the every day life of a pride of lions that, that he truly became a photographer. He understood that he had to tell the facts through images rather than words. He also discovered the beauty of the world seen from above when he became a hot air balloon pilot and began experimenting aerial photography.
Upon his return to France, he published in 1981 his first book Lions, first release of a series of 80 books. He also began a career as a reporter-photographer and closely worked with various naturalists including Dian Fossey and her mountain gorillas in Rwanda. His work was published in many internationally known magazines such as Paris Match, Geo, Life or National Geographic.
In 1991, he created Altitude, the first photo agency specialized in aerial photography.
In the 90s, under the patronage of UNESCO, he embarked upon his most ambitious project: creating an image bank of the earth seen from above. Yanns aim was to create a record of the worlds environment for present and future generations. In 1999, his work was published and The Earth from Above, translated in 24 languages, became one of the best selling illustrated books with more than three million copies sold worldwide. The Earth from Above is also an open-air free access exhibition that travels in more than 100 cities around the world and has attracted to this date over 100 million visitors. But it is still a work in progress. Many countries remain to be visited, and geographical coordinates of every shot will allow other photographers and scientists to locate and document the evolution of these sites.
At the same time, Yann Arthus-Bertrand carries on with the systematic inventory of house pets and domestic breeds, photographing the animals in the studio or outdoors against a canvas backdrop.
In 2003 he launched “Six Billion Others”. Cameramen travel the world to meet and interview people as a mean to portray the planet under a humanistic angle. To date more than 4.000 interviews have been filmed in more than 65 countries.
In 2005 Yann Arthus-Bertrand created GoodPlanet, a non-profit organization which is dedicated to the promotion of sustainable development, his leitmotiv, through all his different projects. Yann would like to enable each and every one of us to become a custodian of our planets future and consequently of our own future. He also directed a series of four, two hour documentaries entitled Earth From Above which was shown on French television in 2006-2007 , and started this year the production of a feature length film on the state of the global environment and the challenges we are facing.
Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web ’80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced “Katz”) emerged in the early ’90s with his radical works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of robotics, biology and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience (Uirapuru) to the cultural impact of biotechnology (Genesis); from the changing condition of memory in the digital age (Time Capsule) to distributed collective agency (Teleporting an Unknown State); from the problematic notion of the “exotic” (Rara Avis) to the creation of life and evolution (GFP Bunny).
At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kac opened a new direction for contemporary art with his “transgenic art”--first with a groundbreaking transgenic work entitled Genesis (1999), which included an “artist’s gene” he invented, and then with his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000).
From his first experiments online in 1985 to his current convergence of the digital and the biological, Kac has always investigated the philosophical and political dimensions of communication processes. Equally concerned with the aesthetic and the social aspects of verbal and non-verbal interaction, in his work Kac examines linguistic systems, dialogic exchanges, and interspecies communication. Kac’s pieces, which often link virtual and physical spaces, propose alternative ways of understanding the role of communication phenomena in creating shared realities.
Kac merges multiple media and biological processes to create hybrids from the conventional operations of existing communications systems. Kac first employed telerobotics in 1986 motivated by a desire to convert electronic space from a medium of representation to a medium for remote agency. He creates pieces in which actions carried out by Internet participants have direct physical manifestation in a remote gallery space. Often relying on the indefinite suspension of closure and the intervention of the participant, his work encourages dialogical interaction and confronts complex issues concerning identity, agency, responsibility, and the very possibility of communication.
Bill Fontana (born USA 1947) is an American composer and artist whodeveloped an international reputation for his pioneering experiments in sound.
SInce the early 70’s Fontana has used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces.
He has realized sound sculptures and radio projects for museums and broadcast organizations around the world. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Post Museum in Frankfurt, the Art History and Natural History Museums in Vienna, both Tate Modern and Tate Britain inLondon, the 48th Venice Biennale, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Art Gallery of NSE in Sydney and the new Kolumba Museum in Cologne.
He has done major radio sound art projects for the BBC, the European Broadcast Union, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, West German Radio (WDR), Swedish Radio, Radio France and the Austrian State Radio.
Andrew Smith dreams about finding old junk. In one recurring dream, he discovers an abandoned mill loaded with old gears and equipment. In another, there’s a barn full of wheels, gumball machines, and stoves. Some nights he’s wandering through a fantastic garage sale. In each of these dreams, he responds the same way: He can’t wait to get the stuff home.
Real life and dreams merge in Smith’s life. A resident of Lehi, Utah, Smith makes his living sculpting figures from scrap metal and machine parts. Some make noise, pump water, or chime the hour. One has a tornado inside it, created with a fan and a fountain mister. Most contain motors or serve practical functions like holding up lights, aquariums, or weathervanes. Each of them is one of a kind.
And each begins with the arbitrary welding together of a few scraps or bolts. His work is shown in numerous galleries, but also in places like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. An exhibit, conceived of in connection with the National Inventors Hall of Fame, featured Smith’s art as a reflection of the theme: “Art of Invention: Invention of Art.”…
Antez is a percussionist and is a sculptor who explores the sound matter by interviewing the physical perception of sound.
He studied drums with the musician Jacques Givry, electroacoustic music with composer Xavier Garcia. It play improvisation and offers sound installations, he has worked in theater, dance, film…
with bands: Art moulu, La Cellule d’Intervention Metamkine, A contrario…
Michal Rovner was born in Israel in 1957 and since 1988, has had a studio in New York City.
