Friday, May 19th: Elings Hall (CNSI) @ UCSB, Mesa Rd, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 4:00pm - 5:00pm | Opening Remarks by Chair George Legrady and Panel Talk by Guest Reviewers 5:00pm - 9:00pm | MAT End of Year Show Exhibition: Re-habituation (Main Event)
Saturday, May 20th: Location A: Elings Hall (CNSI) @ UCSB, Mesa Rd, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 9:00am - 12:00pm | Critique Sessions - Morning 12:00pm - 1:00pm | Lunch Break 1:00pm - 4:00pm | Critique Sessions - Afternoon Location B: Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science, and Technology (SBCAST) @ 513 Garden Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101 6:00pm - 7:50pm | Exhibition 7:50pm - 9:30pm | Live Performance (line up below)
Line up on Saturday:7:50pm - 8:10pm | F. Myles Sciotto 8:10pm - 8:30pm | Kurt Kaminski 8:30pm - 8:50pm | Hafiz Wan Rosli 8:50pm - 9:10pm | Prof. Curtis Roads 9:10pm - 9:30pm | Peter Edwards (casperelectronics)
The Media Arts and Technology (MAT) Program at University of California, Santa Barbara presents the 2017 End of Year Show: Re-habituation at the California NanoSystems Institute. Re-habituation encompasses work by over 50 artists and researchers from the MAT Program, AlloSphere Research Facility, Experimental Visualization Lab, Four Eyes Lab, MIRAGE Lab, Re Touch Lab, Systemics Lab, and transLAB.
The media and research works represent transdisciplinary subjects and span the areas of computational perception, computer vision, computer graphics & imaging, haptics, robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, conceptual art, digital humanities, mechanics of touch, human-computer interaction, data visualization, generative sound, generative design, scientific visualization, field research, sensor networks, remote sensing, and experimental music. Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to take a guided tour of the AlloSphere, the only immersive research instrument/lab of its kind in the world.
Re-habituation, the 2017 EoYS at MAT, confronts the challenge of refocusing critical attention on significant signals in an environment of increasing noise. Under challenging circumstances, it recovers lost habits of attention and discernment and proposes new forms of artistic expression and creative engagement.
Re-habituation centers on the critical and creative minds of the participating artists and inventors, and their abilities in reconfiguring themselves in response to the shifting territories of art, technology, and humanity. Departing from the existing frameworks of theories and ideologies, this diverse group - comprised of artists, engineers, musicians, architects, and computer scientists - is constantly developing new methods and tools to identify emerging territories, reclaim and reactivate lost routes, and instigate connections between timeless and future treasures. Living between the virtual and the actual, the real and the possible, this group delineates continua over binaries, constructing bridges over walls and borders.
Re-habituation, meaning “becoming refocused and reaccustomed,” stems etymologically from re- meaning “again," and from habitusand habeo— evoking habit (one’s patterns of behavior), habitat (one’s environment), having (a right to possess), and habeas corpus(one’s rights against unlawful detention). Our task is not only to work at the frontiers of knowledge— closing the divide between the unfamiliar and the familiar— but to nurture the roots, so that our endeavors are not simply buoyed by the spectacle of the novel, but born from the enduring— the ancient, the actual, and the human.
Admission is free for everyone!
Peter Edwards is an American artist, teacher and inventor working in the field of creative electronics. Over the past 15 years Edwards has worked closely with DIY electronics communities through his business casperelectronics and through outreach projects at universities and arts organisations around the world. He studied sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and developed the Creative Electronics Department at Hampshire College. More recently, he studied electrical engineering and electro-acoustics at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague while collaborating with musical electronics pioneers STEIM in Amsterdam. In 2016, Edwards moved to the Czech Republic to join forces with synthesizer producing arts collective Bastl Instruments. He now splits his time between Brno with Bastl Instruments and Brooklyn with arts collective The Silent Barn.
Ben Hooker is a designer and artist who works with interactive media in and about urban contexts. His projects, whether conceptual or applied, define new experiences and aesthetic situations which arise from the intermingling of the phenomenal and intangible worlds of physical materiality and electronic data. As daily life contains ever more windows into electronic spaces, and virtual realities increasingly occupy our minds, he investigates how site-specific media technologies can be employed to exploit the play between many realms to enable new kinds of technology-dependent lifestyles. He is Associate Professor and Core Faculty in the Media Design Practices graduate program at ArtCenter College of Design where he co-directs the new Post-Geographic City research group. Previously he was Visiting Faculty at Intel Research in Berkeley, where he worked as a ‘designer-in-residence’ on projects dealing with both urban and domestic computing. And, prior to that, he was a Research Fellow in the school of Architecture and Design at the Royal College of Art and final-year tutor in the Graphic Design program at Central Saint Martins College, London.
Kovitz is an Austrian artist working in the United States for the last decade. His work uses the visceral aspects of non-traditional materials to look at iconic imagery of borders, violence and identity. Since 1999 he has been assembling these narrative fragments into a super installation of 670 pieces. Recent exhibitions include Sunset:Delayed (collaboration with Andrea Lenardin) at the MAK in Vienna, solos shows in Los Angeles and Munich and inclusion in the First International Roaming Biennial of Tehran. Winter 2010 he took his project to an ice fishing hut in the Nova Scotia wilderness. Since 2011 Kovitz shares his time between Los Angeles and Lebanon where he teaches Fine Arts at the American University in Beirut as Assitant Professor.
Laila Shereen Sakr is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Feminist Studies and Middle East Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB, she has co-founded Wireframe, a new digital media studio that supports critical game design, data visualization, VR/augmented realities, digital arts and activism. She is known as the creator of the cyborg data body, VJ Um Amel, and the R-Shief software system. Her work uses computer analytics, visualization, and immersive worldbuilding techniques to map how participation in social media has influenced the formation of a virtual body politic. Shereen Sakr has shown in solo and group exhibitions and performances at galleries and museums including the San Francisco MoMA, National Gallery of Art in Jordan, Camera Austria, Cultura Digital in Brazil, DC Fridge Art Gallery, 100 Copies in Egypt, among other venues. Over the last two decades, she has been a leading voice in the open source movement, in particular for Arabic localization. She is Co-Editor for the open access journal: Media Theory, and also for After.Video (a paperback book and video stored on a Raspberry Pi computer packaged in a VHS case) published by Open Humanities Press. In addition, she is Research Collaborator in the Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab at MIT. Professor Shereen Sakr holds an M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California, Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and a PhD in Media Arts + Practice from the University of Southern California. Reviews of her work appear in The Wall Street Journal, Science, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Voice of America, The Monocle, Art Territories, Digital Media and Learning, Egypt Independent, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya, and The Creators Project.
