Mark Tribe
Mediation, Performance, and the Public Sphere
Date 10/11/10
Affiliation Artist, Brown University
Abstract
In 1968, protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago chanted “The whole world is watching,” and shortly thereafter their images appeared on the evening news. These days, protesters bring their own cameras and post their clips on YouTube. Has participatory media effected a structural transformation of the public sphere? How have media technologies and practices changed the roles of public space, performance, and the human body in politics? How have new forms of mediation and distribution altered the ways in which history is produced and experienced?
Mark Tribe will discuss recent work and current projects, including a video archive of police surveillance of activists, a performance/installation in which guitarists play covers of "Sweet Child O' Mine," and reenactments of Vietnam-era protest speeches.
Bio
Mark Tribe is an artist and occasional curator whose interests include art, technology, and politics. His artwork has been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Trinity Square Video in Toronto, the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, and the National Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow. He has organized curatorial projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, and inSite_05. He is the co-author, with Reena Jana, of The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010), and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006). He is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, where he teaches courses on digital art, curating, open-source culture, radical media, and surveillance. In 1996, he founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. He received a MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego in 1994 and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 1990. He splits his time between Providence and New York City.
-- As of 10/11/10