As part of the 2014 Annual Showcasev, join participating Eyebeam artists for a full day of invigorating inquiry into critical approaches to emerging technologies and their creative usage.  Topics will include: Art and Speculative Physics, Fair Use and Creative Rights Online, Opacity and Imperceptibility within Technology, and Bushwick: Learning Lessons from The East Village and SoHo.

Schedule of Events:

11:30AM -12:00PM

Doors Open

12:00PM – 1:00PM

Input–>Output 

The machine logic of labor is so clear on paper. In action, however, inputs are shaped by ideological assumptions and historical baggage and outputs interpreted by the same, effectively reproducing those biases. The practices of the two artists on this panel shed light on this, both tracing beginnings and endings of operation.

Aggregating lines envisioned by Brancusi, Rodin, and Hepworth, Vitruvius, Gropius, and Koolhaas, for Eyebeam Resident Nick Hornby’s monumental sculptures and speculative designs accumulate art historical and architectural references result in image/objects both familiar and estranged. Wyatt Niehaus’s newest body of moving image work, undertaken while a 2013 Eyebeam resident, studies the rhythms of fully-automated ‘light-out’ factory machinery that runs without human supervision, capturing the unexpected aesthetic flourishes of technology at peak efficiency.

Panelists: Nick Hornby, Eyebeam alumnus, artist; Wyatt Niehaus, Eyebeam Resident, artist

Moderator: Zachary Kaplan, Rhizome Community Manager 

1:00 PM – 2:30 PM

On Bushwick: Contradiction, Co-Dependence or Conspiracy? The Reification of Avant-Garde Practice

This panel will discuss social and political aspects of the Bushwick art scene. It will be couched in the terms of the institutionalization of an avant-garde that is currently commodified by the speculative art market and at the same time, subject to MFA-ification: its reification as established pedagogy. This creates a climate in which both professional credibility and proximity to the gallery scene are now understood to be necessary though not sufficient for an artist to survive. Thus the narrative of idealism and real-estate development, and the very complex relationship between the utopian goals of the avant-garde and of youth and creative artistic energy, must be reconsidered in terms of those apparently contradictory forces  – of the speculative market and the business of art. This phenomenon has most recently crystalized in Bushwick, but also manifested historically in both Soho and in the East Village. Panelists are gallerists who will discuss these questions in terms of their personal experiences.

Panelists: Kelani Nichole, Transfer Gallery; Nicholas O’Brien, artist and independant curator;Wendy Olsoff, PPOW; Tom Weinrich, Interstate Projects

Moderator: Mostafa Heddaya, managing editor Hyperallergic  

2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

Fair User: Art and Copyright online

With the democratization of content creation came a preponderance of overzealous copyright claims. Do private agreements between copyright holders and hosting platforms such as YouTube compromise artist’s fair use rights? This open discussion invites artists to share their copyright experiences with hosting platforms and debate the future of distributing digital works online. Useful tools to make fair use decisions more confidently will be shared.

Panelists: Patricia Aufderheide, Co-Director of the Center for Social Media and author of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright; Elisa Kreisinger, video artist and artist-in-residence at Eyebeam and Public Knowledge; Michael Weinberg, Co-Vice President of Public Knowledge, a digital advocacy group in Washington, D.C., and author of It Will Be Awesome If They Don’t Screw It Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology

3:30PM – 4:00PM

Break

4:00 PM – 5:00PM

Elsewheres: Of alternate universes and other speculations

The artists will be joined in conversation by Dr. Janna Levin a theoretical cosmologist based at Columbia University and Kevin Slavin, Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab. Together they will present examples of speculation and simulation in contemporary science as well as in other fields, contextualizing their installation Elsewheres: The Miracle of W 540 21st Street. The conversation will focus on how our world view is being shaped by speculation, how it always has been and what this means for both artistic practices and for society as a whole.

Panelists: Dr. Janna Levin, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College, Columbia University; Sascha Pohflepp, Eyebeam Resident and artist; Kevin Slavin, Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab; Chris Woebken, Eyebeam Resident and artist

**CANCELLED**

5:00PM – 6:00PM

Contemporary Temporary – Sound Works and Music (CT-SWaM) presents: Sound In Conversation – Disruptive Resonances Away From the Phenomenon

This roundtable will explore sound as a technological, physical, and artistic phenomena. All three participants share a practice of curating and organizing sound art works, but coming from three different angles, each one of them with his own artistic practice and active in other disciplines. Daniel Neumann, organizer of the series CT-SWaM at Eyebeam has invited writer and sound art curator Morten Søndergaard from Denmark, and composer, installation artist and sound art curator Michael J. Schumacher to talk about ephemeral qualities, aesthetic concerns in spatial sound, post-indeterminacy, the ‘sound citizen’, and how context is fragile – resonate and decaying.

Panelists: Daniel Neumann, Eyebeam alumnus, sound artist and curator; Michael J. Schumacher, founder and director of Diapason Gallery; Morten Søndergaard, media art curator, writer, and critic