Dorkbot SoCal 45 Tuesday night July 26

Dorkbot SoCal 45 & Book Launch: Xtine Borrough, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Jeremy Rotsztain

***** TUESDAY, JULY 26th, 2011
***** 7:00pm
***** Machine Project
***** 1200 D North Alvarado Street
***** Los Angeles, CA 90026
***** Google map of Machine Project

Presenters will include...


1. Xtine Borrough

http://missconceptions.net
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415882224/

xtine is a media artist, educator, editor of Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design (Routledge 2011) and co-author of Digital Foundations (New Riders/AIGA 2009). Informed by the history of conceptual art, she uses social networking, databases, search engines, blogs, and applications in combination with popular sites like Facebook, YouTube, or Mechanical Turk, to create web communities promoting interpretation and autonomy. xtine believes art shapes social experiences by mediating consumer culture with rebellious practices. As an associate professor of communication at CSUF, she bridges the gap between histories, theories, and production in design and new media education. Her website is http://missconceptions.net.

"Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design" offers an inside look into the process of successfully developing thoughtful, innovative digital media. In many practice-based art texts and classrooms, technology is divorced from the socio-political concerns of those using it. Although there are many resources for media theorists, practice-based students sometimes find it difficult to engage with a text that fails to relate theoretical concerns to the act of creating. Net Works strives to fill that gap. Using websites as case studies, each chapter introduces a different style of web project--from formalist play to social activism to data visualization--and then includes the artists' or entrepreneurs' reflections on the particular challenges and outcomes of developing that web project. Scholarly introductions to each section apply a theoretical frame for the projects. Beyond project summaries, chapters also include an explanation of the websites' technological components; historical, cultural, and ethical perspectives; a list of links; key words; and short online exercises that relate technical skills to individual projects. Combining practical skills for web authoring with critical perspectives on the web, Net Works is ideal for courses in new media design, art, communication, critical studies, media and technology, or popular digital/internet culture.



2. Jonah Brucker-Cohen

http://www.coin-operated.com
http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com
http://www.twitter.com/coinop29

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is a researcher, artist, and writer. He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is an adjunct assistant professor at Parsons MFA in Design & Technology. He has held a Research Fellow positions at Media Lab Europe and Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City. His work and thesis focuses on the theme of "Deconstructing Networks" which includes over 77 projects that attempt to critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications including WIRED Magazine, Make Magazine, Neural, Rhizome.org, Art Asia Pacific, Gizmodo and more, and his work has been presented at events and organizations such as DEAF (03,04), Future Everything (2004, 2009), Art Futura (04), SIGGRAPH (00,05),Transmediale (02,04,08), ISEA (02,04,06,09), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Tate Modern (03), Whitney Museum of American Art's ArtPort (03), Ars Electronica (02,04,08), ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (04-5), Museum of Modern Art (MOMA - NYC)(2008),San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008), and Palais Du Tokyo, Paris (2009). His work has been reported about in The New York Times, Wired News, Make, El Pais, Gizmodo, Engadget, The Register, Slashdot, The Wire, Rhizome, Crunch Gear, Beyond the Beyond, Neural, Liberation, Village Voice, IEEE Spectrum, The Age, Taschen Books, and more.



3. Jeremy Rotsztain

http://www.mantissa.ca
http://twitter.com/jmantissa
http://www.photoribbons.com

Jeremy Rotsztain is a Canadian digital artist who, taking cues from the practice of painting, works with movies, images, and sound as a kind of malleable and expressive material. In his work, popular narratives, pixels, and sound bites are sampled, transformed, re-arranged and composed in an effort to examine the language and patterns of contemporary media and the shared cultural experiences that we have with them. Jeremy writes custom software, enabling him to collect, edit, and compose with his materials in hybrid and unconventional ways that aren't supported by existing commercial software applications. His work has been screened, performed and exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt and the New York Hall of Science in NYC, Urban Screens in Melbourne, Subtle Technologies and InterAccess in Toronto, Electric Fields in Ottawa, SAT in Montreal, and New Forms Festival in Vancouver.

Action Painting is a series of animated digital paintings composed using cinematic gestures from Hollywood action flicks. Moving visual elements from popular action films -- explosions, fistfights, car chases, and gunshots-- are used as compositional material to create works in the style of abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock. Action Painting brings together the adrenalin-filled culture of action cinema and the formalist canon of modernist painting. It is a line of inquiry into spontaneity and self-expression that contrasts user-generated web 2.0 culture against the work of the genius craftsman -- and reflects cinema's use of violence as pure spectacle.