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Boston Cyberarts Festival

Music, Dance, Interactive Art are Major Themes of the Fifth Boston Cyberarts Festival

A complete listing and description of Festival events is on the website at http://www.bostoncyberarts.org

For more information, call 617.524.8495 or email info@bostoncyberarts.org

The creative connection between two of Boston’s most vital forces – the arts community and the high-tech industry – is once again in the spotlight at the fifth Boston Cyberarts Festival, with more than 60 exhibitions and events in and around Boston and Cambridge from April 20 through May 6.

The biennial Boston Cyberarts Festival has become an eagerly-anticipated part of the Boston-area arts and technology scene since the first event took place in 1999. It is the largest collaboration of arts organizations in New England and the only Festival in the world that encompasses all art forms, including both visual and performing arts, film, video, electronic literature, and public art. Among this year’s highlights are:

• Ideas in Motion: The Body’s Limit – An international roster of dance professionals and engineers are featured at this conference and performance series that explore the use of new technologies in dance.

• Music Performances – This year’s Festival includes fourteen concerts, including the world premiere of the multimedia operatic work The Puzzle Master, an all-day Visual Music Marathon, and Freex to Geex II at Berklee College of Music.

• Interactive Exhibitions – Interactivity is a focus of a number of exhibitions this year, including those at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Mass College of Art, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the Art Interactive gallery in Cambridge.

• Cyberarts for Youth – Activities for young people, families, and teachers take place at Cloud Place, the Museum of Science, and the Cambridge Science Festival.

A complete listing and description of Festival events is on the website at http://www.bostoncyberarts.org .

George Fifield, Founder and Director of Boston Cyberarts, noted: “The Festival celebrates the rich history of art and technology in New England, while providing a forum for the international cyberart community to come together and glimpse the future.” He added, “We are also gratified that the Festival has proven to be such a significant force in the creative economy of our region.” Independent studies conducted after both the 2003 and 2005 events demonstrated that the Festival, with a budget of less than $200,000, had a total economic impact of over $2 million on the regional economy.

Cyberart encompasses any artistic endeavor in which computer technology is used to expand artistic possibilities — that is, where the computer’s unique capabilities are integral elements of the creative process in the same way that paint, photographic film, musical instru-ments, and other materials have always been used to express an artist’s vision. The Greater Boston area has long had an international reputation as a center of cyberart, dating back to pioneering work done by such world-class institutions as WGBH and MIT.

Festival-goers can obtain information, chat with Festival staffers, obtain a CyberPass discount card, and purchase Festival merchandise at CyberArtCentral, located at Art Interactive, 130 Bishop Allen Drive, Cambridge, open daily from noon to 6:00 pm. Festival-goers can also obtain a listing of all the exhibi-tions and events in the April 20 issue of The Phoenix and at participating venues.

The Hotel @ MIT, a major sponsor of Boston Cyberarts and official hotel of the Festival, is the site of the 2007 Cyberarts Gala and Awards Presentation, taking place on Friday, May 4 at 6:30 pm. The party gives artists, spon-sors, and patrons of the arts an opportunity to meet, mingle, and view the works of some of the Festival artists. Also at the Gala, the IBM Innovation Awards will be presented to the top events and exhibitions of the 2007 Festival.

The Festival’s website at http://www.bostoncyberarts.org contains a complete database of Festival events, which can be searched by date, venue, location, and art form. The website also contains an Artist Blog, featuring commentary by many Festival artists, plus an online gallery and a database and registry for artists’ proposals.

For more information, call 617.524.8495 or email info@bostoncyberarts.org.

For more information go to: http://www.bostoncyberarts.org

Pavilion of Republic of Armenia

Pavilion of Republic of Armenia
at 52nd Venice Biennale-2007

June 10 – November 21, 2007
Opening for press and friends:
Friday June 8, 2007 13:00-16:00
Palazzo Zenobio, (Collegio Armeno)
Dorsoduro 2596 T: +041 522-8770
Vaporetto No. 82: S. Basilio stop
Vaporetto No. 52: Zattere stop
For directions visit http://www.accea.info

Artist: Sonia Balassanian
Curator: Nina Möntmann
Honorary Commissioner: Jean Boghossian
Organized by: The Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art
Hosted by: The Mekhitarian Armenian Congregation

Sonia Balassanian-Who Is the Victim?

War has changed. It has ceased to refer exclusively to war between nations, but involves more complex structures and dislocations. The information content the ubiquitous media images convey concerning specific conflicts is thin, they present an unchanging picture of misery as a universal constant of global crisis.

Memory assumes a central role in the lives of people who experience war and henceforth shift between two extremes, the collective necessity to remember and the individual desire to forget. For those who have experienced war or live in fear of one, or who live with memories of a war they actually took part in and survived, the question “who is the victim” is never far from the surface in depictions of war’s cruelty. But what is involved when a viewer of war images takes an interest in or empathizes with human suffering in far-off conflict zones? Not only those killed by war and their relatives are the victims, but all whom the fear of war afflicts. Compassion is an unstable emotion: “Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence” (Susan Sontag). In overcoming sympathy, a potential for action is released, a potential to lead-in to critical protest against an economy of global war.

Wars and crisis areas are a constant feature of Sonia Balassanian’s work. Her concern in her more recent video works are the ramifications of a general war (albeit never referred to as such) being waged against the individual. The images of Balassanian’s multipart video work “Who Is the Victim?” for the Pavilion of the Republic of Armenia at the 52nd Venice Biennale tap into this universalized misery and suffering of war.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART LEIPZIG

ROOMS, CONVERSATIONS
Solo Exhibition by DORA GARCÍA
Leipzig, 20-Apr-07 to 01-Jul-07
Opening on 19-Apr-07, 7pm

Curated by Julia Schaefer

Dora García uses the exhibition space as a platform to investigate the relationship between the visitor, the artwork, and place. To this end, the artist often draws on interactivity and performance. Through minimal changes, not encroaching on the space, the room is converted into a sensory experience, with each visitor leaving it with his or her perceptions altered, or at the very least perhaps with a degree of skepticism. By engaging with Dora García’s work, we develop the sense that even the smallest signs are possible signifiers. The artist engages herself with the question of what is real and what is fiction, and visitors become protagonists: sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.

While researching the city of Leipzig during her Blinky Palermo grant from the East German Sparkasse Foundation and the Leipzig Sparkasse, Dora García came across the Museum in the “Runden Ecke” (“Round Corner”), the original office of the Stasi (GDR secret police), and learned of “The Peaceful Revolution” in Leipzig in 1989. Her film “Rooms, Conversations”, exhibited in the GfZK, grapples with the history of the Stasi and engages with SITUATIONS of DENUNCIATION and surveillance. It’s not a REENACTMENT; the plot plays out in an undetermined time and space. Rather, Garcia focuses on abstract notions such as fear, control, authority, dependency, absurdity and power, issues she also examined in previous works such as “Fahrenheit 451 (1969)” (2003) or “Instant Narrative” (2007), which will be also exhibited in the Leipzig show. Alongside her own videos, objects and installations, Garcia has edited a selection of found footage, historical surveillance videos and photographs
made by IM (unofficial collaborators with the Stasi). The material – here presented out of its historical context – reveals itself surprisingly, as a peculiar form of narrative: conceptually highly interesting examinations of human behaviour and gestures that at times call to mind the Theatre of the Absurd.

Through the eyes of Spanish artist Dora Garcia, “Rooms, Conversations” opens a new view onto a highly important and topical political and social issue. Garcia’s work puts visitors into the unclear position of mentally or physically not always knowing whether they are the actor or the spectator – whether or not they are playing a role.

Curriculum Vitae
Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) studied Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca, Spain, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Holland. She lives and works in Brussels. Since 1999 she has created several works on the web (doragarcia.net). She has exhibited at the Manifesta 1998, Luxembourg, and the Istanbul Biennial 2003, at the SMBA in Amsterdam (1997), the MACBA in Barcelona (2003), and the FRAC Lorraine in Metz (2004). In 2007 she will participate in Munster Sculpture Projects.

OPENING HOURS
Tuesday through Sunday: 12 noon – 7pm

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART LEIPZIG
Karl-Tauchnitz-Strasse 9 + 11
D-04107 Leipzig
Telephone: +49.341.140 81 0
Fax: +49.341.140 81 11
Email: office@gfzk.de
http://www.gfzk.de

For more information go to: http://www.gfzk.de