EventsThe New Social Environment#821

A Word or Two on Art and Technology: A Critics Page Discussion

Featuring Doreen Rios, Tina Rivers Ryan, Margaret Wertheim, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Kay Watson, Clara Che Wei Peh, and Charlotte Kent

Tuesday, May 30, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Rail May 2023 Critics Page contributors Doreen Rios, Tina Rivers Ryan, Margaret Wertheim, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Kay Watson, and Clara Che Wei Peh join guest critic and Rail Editor-at-Large Charlotte Kent for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Phong H. Bui.

In this Talk

Read the Brooklyn Rail's May 2023 Critics Page →

Doreen A. Ríos

Doreen A. Ríos is an independent curator and researcher. Founder and director of [ANTI]MATERIA, an online platform dedicated to the research and exhibition of digital art, post-digital practices and new materialities in Mexico. She was chief curator at Centro de Cultura Digital from 2019 to 2021. Doreen graduated with a Masters in Contemporary Curating from Winchester School of Arts and with a degree in Architecture from the Tec de Monterrey. Currently she is Advisor of Advanced Technologies at KADIST and she’s part of the International Selectors Committee for Lumen Art Prize.

Tina Rivers Ryan

Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is a renowned expert on the history of media art. As Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, her exhibitions include 2022’s Peer to Peer — the first U.S. museum survey of artists engaged with blockchain technologies — and (with Paul Vanouse) 2021’s Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art, which received an Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators. Her recent publications include a review of MoMA’s exhibition Signals for Artforum and a catalog essay on the materiality of screens for The Modern in Ft. Worth. She has received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, was named to Artnet’s 2022 Innovators List, and holds degrees in art history from Harvard and Columbia.

Margaret Wertheim

Margaret Wertheim – a science writer, curator and artist – is the author of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, Pythagoras Trousers (a cultural history of physics), and other books. She has written about science and technology for many publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, TLS, New Scientist, Cabinet, and Aeon. She and her sister Christine Wertheim are co-creators of the Crochet Coral Reef, the world’s largest art+science project, shown at the 58th Venice Biennale, Helsinki Biennial, The Smithsonian, and other international venues. www.crochetcoralreef.org

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design. She was a 2021 visiting Mellon Professor in the Practice at Occidental College, where she co-curated the Oxy Arts exhibition, “Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI” with Meldia Yesayan. She is the co-editor of the Spring 2023 Art Papers issue on AI, with Sarah Higgins. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was released by X Artists’ Books in 2022.

Kay Watson

Kay Watson is a researcher, producer and curator working with art and advanced technologies, photography and video games. She is currently Head of Arts Technologies at Serpentine where she leads the art and technology programme. She is a Trustee of Brighton Photo Fringe, Mediale and The Photographers’ Gallery.

Clara Che Wei Peh

Clara Che Wei Peh is an independent curator and arts writer from Singapore. Her recent curated projects include: Art Dubai Digital, UAE; “Proof of Concept”, Co-Museum and Appetite, Singapore, and “Generating/Iterating”, The Upside Space, Singapore (all 2023). She has been published in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, the 8th Asian Art Biennale Reader, Hyperallergic, among other platforms. She is also the founder of NFT Asia, an artist collective in web3. She has been an Adjunct Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts and recently sat on the Advisory Board of the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize. Clara holds an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a BA in Economics from Yale-NUS College.

claralikesart

Charlotte Kent

Associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University Charlotte Kent, PhD, is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and a contributor to assorted books on art and technology, including as co-editor of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (Intellect Books, 2024), co-author of Midnight Moment: A Decade of Artists in Times Square (Monacelli Press, 2024), and editor of Generation to Generation (Vetro, 2026). She is the recipient of grants from NEH and Google Art + Machine Intelligence, with a forthcoming book on contemporary art and technoabsurdity. She is a member of the College Art Association’s Committee on Intellectual Property.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨