Made in Internet: "Background Story"

by Kristin Lucas. "A sequence of fair use background images arranged for aesthetic and formal reasons, paired with a short story assignment generated through Amazon's Mechanical Turk in response to the image sequence."



(Thanks, Paul!)

Symposium at CentralTrak: Revisiting the Cyborg Manifesto

Organizer Charissa Terranova explains,

In 1985, Donna J. Haraway published "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century." Haraway distilled a new paradigm pf subjectivity that moved beyond traditional paradigms of gender duality and classical humanism. The Manifesto called for an honest embracement of the psycho-corporeal transformations that ensue from technology, the way in which those technologies emancipate us from old mythologies of "human nature" and interpolate into patterns of ecological destruction and the violent matrix of the military industrial complex." [The symposium,] Woman Body Image: Half-lives of the Cyborg Manifesto 25 Year After . . . will revisit the Manifesto as we approach its 25th anniversary.

A main draw for me is Kristin Lucas (see prior post here re- her show at and/or gallery; her work was also included in The Program); the other participants sound interesting, too.

More on CentralTrak's calendar.

Kristin Lucas's "Whatever Your Mind Can Conceive" at And/Or Gallery

. . . in Dallas, Texas -- one of the best shows I've seen anywhere in the last twelve months; smart and insightful, expressing archetypal yet urgent concerns in the idioms of today.

There are two, thematically-related parts. In the front gallery is her "contemplative installation including video, light box prints, cast rocks, and laser cut comets" featuring, among other things, fragments of a narrative including sessions the artist undertook with a real hypnotherapist to treat a grotesque eruption on her face that she purports to believe enhance her job performance as a bingo caller. In the back of the gallery is her related, "Refresh group exhibition [comprising the legal documentation and courtroom sketches from when] she legally changed her name from Kristin Lucas to Kristin Lucas as a kind of re-awakening, [plus portraits] she had her colleagues produce . . . of her before and after the change."

The work in the front gallery is shown in the picture but looks better as installed at And/Or. There are three channels of video, one screening on a boxy, older computer monitor that's been painted with a finish similar to that of the fake "rocks," and two screening wholly or partly on beautifully-knotted plywood -- a last-minute decision that may sound weird but looks fantastic and works well with the Western setting of the narrative.

See the show if you can; more info on And/Or's site.