New Media Gallery and New Westminster Arts Services are pleased to present three exceptional women in conversation; Zoë Druick, Micheal Vonn and Kate Hennessey. Interdisciplinary and multidimensional, Fresh Talk offers alternative perspectives and approaches to themes found in current New Media Gallery exhibitions.
Fifth in the series, Fresh Talk: BRINK is a conversation that will touch on a wide range of topics salient to the exhibition and the current cultural moment: the politics of choice + balance ; technology + trust; law + technologies; the psychology of violence + destruction; imagining artificial intelligence; the future of robotics + automation. Join us for an engaging and enlightening discussion!
Zoë Druick is Associate Dean (Graduate and Research) of FCAT and Professor in the School of Communication. Her primary areas of teaching and research are media studies, cultural industries and cultural theory. Her research considers histories, theories and trajectories of documentary and reality-based media. She has recently co-edited special issues of the Canadian Journal of Communication, on Cultural Production in Canada, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies, on Gender and Property Television after the financial crisis.
Micheal Vonn is a lawyer and has been the Policy Director of the BCCLA since 2004. She has taught civil liberties and information ethics (UBC), and is a frequent speaker on privacy, national security, policing, surveillance and free speech. She is currently a collaborator on Big Data Surveillance, a multi-year research projected lead by Queens University. She is an Advisory Board Member of Ryerson University’s Centre for Free Expression and an Advisory Board Member of Privacy International.
Kate Hennessy is Assistant Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology, with a PhD in Anthropology (UBC) and an MA in the Anthropology of Media ( University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies). The director of the Making Culture Lab, her research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage, and the mediation of culture, history, objects, and subjects in new forms.
The BRINK exhibition includes works by five international artists Miguel Angel Ríos, Nelmarie du Preez, David Bowen, Jacob Tonski, and Stefan Tiefengraber. Seven electronic media, robotic works and video installations suggest an adagio of fragile equilibriums. Works pivot between absolute control and anarchy. There are ambiguous tensions here; between freedom of choice and its repercussions; between what we understand as success, failure or stasis. Miguel Angel Rios and Nelmarie du Preez are represented by lens-based works that contain allusions to historic game playing, territorialism and a search for control. Battles play out on both a grand and human scale, exposing power struggles and symbiotic relationships. Stefan Tiefengraber and David Bowen give us either detached choice or ungovernable aggression; the promise of destruction is imminent and perhaps even tantalizing: these are strange attractors. In the centre of the exhibition a work by Jacob Tonski enacts a fragile dance of restraint & perseverance; containing the promise that some inherent and hidden mechanism will continue to hold things in place. Yet contained within all the works is a tipping point and the warnings of collapse.
SATURDAY, APRIL 22 2:00 – 4:00 pm
Anvil Centre – 4th Floor
New Media Gallery Open
Presented by New Westminster Arts Services + New Media Gallery
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