Things I’ve organized and/or participated in.
APRIL 2024: I had the chance to visit Aalto University in lovely Helsinki to deliver a talk called Ontologies of AI Photography at the Helsinki Photomedia Sixth International Photography Research Conference.
FEBRUARY 2024: I joined Jason Isolini for a conversation about his conceptually ambitious and materially expansive solo show You’re Bringing Me Down at Picture Theory in NYC, moderated by Constanza Valenzuela.
JANUARY 2024: I was thrilled to be in Málaga for the opening of Ida Kvetny’s and Diana Velasco’s exhibition Future Fossils: Exploring Virtual Realms at the Centre Pompidou Malaga, where I was invited to be in conversation with the artists about their extraordinary transmedia artworks.
DECEMBER 2023: I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion — alongside two esteemed panelists: art critic, writer, and translator Qianfan Gu and curator, educator, and writer Barbara Pollack — on the occasion of Frank WANG Yefeng’s solo exhibition, The House of the Solitary, at Smack Mellon.
NOVEMBER 2023: It was an honor to deliver the keynote at the 5th Chinese-American Art Faculty Symposium at William Paterson University. The theme was New Trends, New Journey, so I focused on the ontology, art historical context, and future of creative AI in a talk called Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
OCTOBER 2023: I had the opportunity to be a part of a course called Web3 Renaissance: Traditional Art Meets the Digital Age organized by Christie’s Education, LiveArt.io, and Elena Zavelev. The course launched with a discussion of the history of digital art and the relationship between traditional art, web3, and digital art alongside the inimitable artist Claudia Hart, whose complex creative art practice is informed by architecture, art history, and traditional art forms like painting, drawing, and performance.
JULY 2023: I presented a paper at the Arts + Humanities in Digital Transition Conference in Lisbon, which focused on situating AI generated images in a photographic and art historical context, drawing on the theoretical work of Tom Gunning, Hito Steyerl, and Joanna Zylinska.
JUNE 2023: I curated the group exhibition 404: error at :iidrr Gallery in New York City. Drawing on critical glitch studies work of Rosa Menkman, Nathan Allen Jones, and Legacy Russell, 404: error explores how artists critically and creatively engage with errors, glitches, and other failures in their work as a provocative gesture toward a new perspective, and toward redefining what we find problematic or correct.
MAY 2023: I participated in the 21st annual STS Conference Graz 2023 | Critical Issues in Science, Technology, and Society Studies in the thematic field Digitalization of Society and AI and the area called Understanding the Metaverse: theoretical, empirical, and critical challenges for a new (?) internet age. My talk, A Metaverse of Fluidity, Inclusivity, and Plurality, focused on independent metaverses created by artists and art groups that function as alternatives to Big Tech’s designs for web3 and contribute to the making of an open and diverse pluriverse. Artists and groups in my discussion included Carla Gannis, Snow Yunxue Fu, Skawennati and AbTeC (Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace).
APRIL 2023: I gave a talk in the Intro to Digital Imaging class taught by new media artist Snow Yunxue Fu in the Photography & Imaging Department at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. I focused on the shared ontology of AI images, regardless of their aesthetics or style, and situated AI photography in a broader art historical context to show how they draw on previous modern art techniques and creative impulses, such as Surrealism, Cubism, Dada poetry, collage, automatism, cameraless photography, and more.
MARCH 2023: I took part in a comprehensive, one-day symposium hosted by the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Arts, which focused on the influence of AI on the lens and screen arts. Panels were organized by themes reflecting on the recent explosion of interest, use, and questions surrounding AI image synthesis tools and language learning models in art schools, journalism, society, and as creative opportunities. I moderated a conversation with artists Carla Gannis and Stephanie Dinkins and recordings of all the panels are archived here, including the keynote address by Hito Steyerl.
NOVEMBER 2022: I had the privilege of discussing the future of image-making and photography — following the explosion of various AI-based image synthesis tools — with artist, writer, and digital culture theorist Lev Manovich. Our talk was organized by the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media department at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and held at the SVA Theatre on November 28, 2022. A recording of the event can be accessed here.
SUMMER 2022: I was invited by artist Marie LeBlanc Flanagan to participate—alongside a group of other scholars/thinkers/creatives—in Tech Tech Tech, a project organized by Ada X exploring feminist digital tools and platforms as alternatives to Big Tech. We workshopped some ideas, then co-wrote a zine called Finding Our Way, which explores questions, problems, and possible solutions to Big Tech’s biggest problems.
JUNE 2022: I gave a talk at the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media department at the School of Visual Arts on how photography is situated at the threshold between truth and fiction — the creation of images of distant, untouchable places, people, and objects understood through a distorted sense of time and space. Developments in post-photography extend this duality, urging us to think about how we document and share experiences in built environments, remediating the photographic camera, the photographer, and landscape photography.
APRIL 2022: I had the pleasure of chatting with hosts and hybrid analog/digital sculptors Sophie Kahn and Colette Robbins on their YouTube series File Exchange. We talked about many things, including topics related to my research: fictional realism, language as a creative system, glitch politics, digital bodies and identities, and more. The episode is archived here, alongside previous episodes featuring digital artists who share their inspiring work, tools, and creative processes.
DECEMBER 2020: I sat down with artist Florence Montmare to discuss her new project, Scenes from an Island, coinciding with the launch of her photo and video exhibition at Fotografiska NY. Our conversation can be viewed in full here.
May 17-June 7, 2019 at Mohsen Gallery, Tehran
HAFT PAYKAR | SEVEN BEAUTIES: I curated group exhibition with Tooraj Khamenehzadeh in Tehran, Iran.
Haft Paykar | Seven Beauties is a group exhibition that revives, explores, and shares an ancient Persian text through an exercise in reception theory. This cultural theory fosters the idea that the meaning of any text is never fixed or transparent, rather shaped by a number of contributing factors by both the producer, who encodes a text with meaning, and the recipient, who decodes it. Interpretation is further shaped by distribution, personal experience, social circumstance, distance, and time.
We selected a 12th century poem as the starting point for participating artists and audiences to interpret and produce meaning. Haft Paykar was written by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, better known as Nizami, in 1197. It incorporates themes of exploitation, ambiguity, beauty, symbolism, multiculturalism, and self-actualization through various literary devices, including non-linearity and epic storytelling. A key component is the assemblage of the seven beauties, or seven brides, who are summoned by the story’s protagonist, a heroic prince. Each beauty originates from a different region of the world and is represented by a different color, day of the week, and planet, which correspond to her mood and shape her character.
Seven female artists were chosen, who originate from same the seven regions, or ‘climes’, represented in the poem: Naiza Khan (Pakistan), Cui Fei (China), Anna Khodorkovskaya (Khwarazm/Russia), Neža Knez (Siqlab/Slovenia), Nicène Kossentini (the Magreb/Tunisia), Nina Papaconstantinou (Rum/Greece), and Negin Mahzoun (Persia/Iran). Excerpts from the poem were used as a prompt for a new work that illustrates the artists’ interpretations and exercises in meaning-making. The results represent a wide range of creative approaches, media, and interpretations to bring the ancient poem into a contemporary context. Plays with form, materials, scale, aspects of time and space, language, metaphor, memory, geographies, and identity draw out, contemplate, and interrogate various aspects of the original text.
NATURALLY SYNTHETIC
Curated group exhibition March 5–27, 2015
Made in NY Media Center by IFP
30 John Street | Brooklyn, New York, 11201
(Above) Daniel Lopera, still from In Utero, Being Life, Doing Death, Next State? (2014); (Below, L to R): Dana Miller, A Theory of All Things #2455 (2012); Kimberly Witham, Still Life with Watermelon and Chipmunk (2011); Caryn Cline, still from Left Side, Riverside (2011); Erica Magrey, screenshot from Face, Porthole, Window, Glovebox (2013)
With the ability to extend sight, memory, and interaction, our media tools foster a synthetic hub through which nature and experience are visualized, made accessible, and become normalized, achieving something that feels naturally synthetic.
The artists selected for this group show make subtle use of their chosen medium to capture and construct synthetic environments that serve to analyze or question things like humanity, what it means to be alive, and under what conditions can fantasy and reality become enmeshed.
THE LOUNGE curated group exhibition with Caterina Mallone | May 12–26, 2010 | NoCommercialValue.org
Featuring work by Amy Casey, Greg Fenton, Brian Knauer, Erica Magrey, Hollis B. Thornton, and Ann Toebbe.
SHARED SPACES curated group exhibition | April 22-28, 2009 | NoCommercialValue.org
Featuring work by Blu, Burak Arikan, Char Davies, Erin Gleeson, Melissa Grey, and Yasmine Soiffer.
IMPERMANENCE curated group exhibition with Caterina Mallone & Tanisha Christie | Sept. 27, 2008 | La Lutta Project Space
RECLAIM: THE VISUAL SPACE IN BETWEEN curated group exhibition with Caterina Mallone | July 19, 2008 | Supreme Trading
OTHER ACTIVITIES + SERVICE
2016–present: Editorial board of Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy
2021: Researcher in Residence, The Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, NY.
2020: Web Art vs. Art on the Web, SVA’s MFA Photography, Video and Related Media summer workshop with Liz Zito, Wednesday, August 5, 2020 @ 1pm, Zoom.
2019: KARA Artist Talk with Haffendi Anuar, Rafael Cañete, Sarah Feuillas, and Laure Catugier, Tuesday, May 28 @ 7pm, Darbast Platform, Tehran, Iran.
2019: Curators Panel Discussion of Haft Paykar | Seven Beauties with Tooraj Khamenehzadeh and Behrang Samadzadegan, Tuesday, May 21 @ 7pm, Darbast Platform, Tehran, Iran.
2018: Participant, Invisible Voice art project by Mark Farid.
2016: Researcher in Residence, Signal Culture, Owego, NY
2015: SVA Art in the First Person Series: The Vanishing Points of Treece, a lecture and conversation about my book Vanishing Points with photographer Dina Kantor.
2014–2017: Computer Culture Area Chair, Southwest Popular/American Culture annual conference.
2014: Professional participant, Tisch School of the Arts Annual Film and TV Meet and Greet.
2012–present: Member, New Media Caucus
2010: Honorary Member for Excellence in Teaching, Alpha Lambda Delta First-Year Honor Society, Ramapo College of NJ.