Upcoming Talks at ITP
All ITP Announce Messages are archived here – http://itp.nyu.edu/help/announce/
For the next 2 Fridays at ITP
** Fri, 2/23, Interdisciplinary Artist, Hasan Elahi
** Fri, 3/2, Marianne Weems from the Builder’s Association
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Special Event
Interdisciplinary Artist, Hasan Elahi
Friday, February 23
starting at 6:30pm
Room 447
Hasan M. Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines
issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders
and frontiers. His current multi-faceted project, Tracking
Transience, was inspired by Elahi’s experiences being tracked by the
FBI. As a result of an erroneous tip called into law enforcement
authorities, he was singled out as a suspect in the 9/11 attacks on
the World Trade Center and Pentagon. After undergoing months of
regular interrogations and finally nine consecutive lie-detector
tests, he was cleared of any suspicions. However, this experience
lead Elahi to conceive a self-tracking device that constantly
transmits his location in space and other information. With funding
from Creative Capital, he is currently developing an automated system
for self-tracking. Other aspects of Tracking Transience include a
database of thousands of images of airports Elahi travels through and
sometimes sleeps in, food he consumes in transit, and public toilets
he uses while traveling. Elahi recently was invited to speak about
his work at the Tate > Modern in London, at the annual PopTech
conference on technology and society in Camden, ME, and at at the
American Association of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford
University. He has had numerous exhibitions nationally and
internationally at venues such as PS122 (NYC) Exit Art (NYC), the
Kulturbahnhof (Kassel, Germany), the BBC Big Screen (Manchester, UK),
and the Hermitage (St. Petersburg, Russia). His work has been
supported with significant grants and numerous sponsorships from the
Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, Creative Capital Foundation, DuPont
Industries, and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San
Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain. Currently, he is an Assistant
Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University
in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
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Special Event
Marianne Weems from the Builder’s Association
Friday, March 2
starting at 6:30pm
Room 447
The Builders Association (www.thebuildersassociation.org) is an OBIE
award-winning New York crossmedia performance company founded in 1994
by director Marianne Weems. Many ITP faculty and graduates have
collaborated with The Builders Association including Ben Rubin (sound
design), and Peter Norrman and Jeff Morey (video design.) In this
talk, Marianne Weems will present some of the past Builders
Association’s projects and will discuss this work in the context of
contemporary theater and technology.
Weems will be teaching a 6 week studio course at ITP this
summer. Currently the class is conceived as a performance
development studio. Multimedia performance increasingly grapples with
interactivity and with networked events – but with mixed results. This
course will address issues in incorporating technology into
performance, i.e. what does it add the performance? How does it
reflect and amplify meaning? How does it function within a live event?
Students will work through the process of creating a
performance. We will focus in particular on staging networks: what
does it mean to stage an event which is happening in several arenas
at once? How do we know it’s working? How do we know that it is a
‘live’ event? How does the collapsing of distances make those places
and actors ‘present’ and how does that intersect with the presence of
live performers? These questions of telepistemology will be tackled
in the context of a intensive, studio course which will feed into The
Builders Association’s next production.
BIO:
MARIANNE WEEMS is artistic director of The Builders Association
(www.thebuildersassociation.org) and has directed all of their
productions, beginning in 1994. In addition to her work with the
company, she is currently at work on a new theater/music event with
David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, and she recently completed a multimedia
workshop with Disney Creative Entertainment and Walt Disney
Imagineering. Marianne serves on the boards of Art Matters, Yaddo,
and Arts Presenters, and is on the advisory committee of the Center
for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance at UCLA. She is
the co-author, with Philip Yenawine and Brian Wallis, of Art Matters:
How The Culture Wars Changed America (NYU Press 2000.) In the
distant past, she also worked as a dramaturg with Susan Sontag, The
Wooster Group, and others.
The Builders Association is an OBIE award-winning New York-based
performance and media company that exploits the richness of
contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater. Based
on unusual collaborations and extensive periods of development, the
company’s productions feature a seamless blend of media, text, sound,
architecture, and stage performances
that explore the impact of technology on human presence. Since
1994, with a growing circle of artists, the company has collaborated
on nine large-scale theater projects, including MASTER BUILDER
(1994), THE WHITE ALBUM (1995), IMPERIAL MOTEL (FAUST) (1996), JUMP
CUT (FAUST) (1997), JET LAG (1998-2000) with Diller + Scofidio,
XTRAVAGANZA (2000-01), ALLADEEN (2002-05) with motiroti, AVANTI
(2003-05) and SUPER VISION with dbox (2005.) The Builders Association
has been one of the most active international touring experimental
theater companies in America, their work has presented at venues
including the Singapore Arts Festival, London’s Barbican Centre,
Romaeuropa Festival, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Festival
Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogota, and the Melbourne International
Arts Festival, among many others.
For more information, visit www.thebuildersassociation.org
Midori Yasuda
Admissions, Special Events, Alumni Coordinator
Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)
Tisch School of the Arts
New York University
721 Broadway, 4th Floor
New York NY 10003
Phone: (212) 998-1882
Fax: (212) 998-1898
midori.yasuda@nyu.edu