| Amy Balkin | Beatriz da Costa | Temporary Travel Office | Beehive Design Collective
Jens Jarisch | Sharon Davis | Kim Stringfellow | Sarah Kanouse | Shiloh Krupar | The Yes Men | Matthew Friday | Jeff Lovett | Futurefarmers
Amy Balkin's work is concerned with spatial and environmental justice. She is best known for works whose medium is the land and the geopolitical relationships that frame it, in projects that address the transformation of the environment into property and wasteland. These include the collaboration Invisible-5 (invisible5.org), an environmental justice audio tour, and the clean-air park Public Smog (publicsmog.org). She lives and works in San Francisco, California.
More @ http://tomorrowmorning.net
Beatriz da Costa is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York and Los Angeles. She works at the intersection of contemporary art, politics, engineering and the life sciences. da Costa is a Creative Capital grantee of 2009. a past recipient of the Social Sculpture Commission by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Eyebeam (with Preemptive Media), and has received numerous grants and awards including the Culture Innovation Grant and an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the Andy Warhol Museum, the Natural History Museum in London, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla, Spain, and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2008 she published Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, an anthology comprising new writings by members of the soft and hard science communities as well as artists, literary scholars, and long term activists (ed. B. da Costa & K. Philip, MIT Press 2008). Her work has been covered in national media outlets such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle. She currently works on series of projects addressing interspecies relations within a health-environmental context. da Costa is a co-founder of the art, activist and technology group Preemptive Media, a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble, and Associate Professor in Studio Art and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.
More @ www.beatrizdacosta.net
The Temporary Travel Office produces a variety of services relating to tourism and technology aimed at exploring the non-rational connections existing between public and private spaces. Our mission is to investigate the potential of tourism as a critical activity, i.e. one able to generate imaginative and analytical perspectives on our surroundings. Towards these ends, The Travel Office produces guided, and self-guided tours as well as research documents and proposals for rethinking monuments and parks.
The Temporary Travel Office was founded by Ryan Griffis. Ryan is an artist currently teaching new media art at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His writing has appeared in publications such as New Art Examiner, RePublic, ArtUS, Artlink, Rhizome and Furtherfield. He has curated exhibitions for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Turbulence.org, Greenmuseum.org and George Mason University on themes that include the politics of genetic technologies, energy consumption and artistic forays into agriculture. Under the name Temporary Travel Office, Ryan creates work and publications that attempt to use tourism as an opportunity for critical public encounters. These encounters include public tours of urban parking lots, speculative proposals for parks and hotels and, most recently, a series of experimental guidebooks. These works have been presented in various institutional forums, including the Bureau for Open Culture (Columbus College of Art & Design), AREA Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Ryan was born and raised in Florida.
More @ www.temporarytraveloffice.net
he Beehive Design Collective is an a wildly-motivated, all volunteer, activist-art collective dedicated to cross-pollinating the grassroots by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images for use as educational and organizing tools. We work anonymously as word to-image translators of complex global stories, gathered and shared through first hand conversations with affected communities. Our graphics, workshops and presentations offer hopeful stories of resiliency from the front lines of communities impacted by globalization, climate change, and resource extraction.
A committed group of mostly women, we are working to create holistic, accessible and educational images and spaces that inspire critical reflection and strategic action.
More @ www.beehivecollective.org
Jens Jarisch has spent half his life in Berlin, where he currently works as an independent producer of one-hour radio documentaries. He has squandered valuable years studying literature, occupying himself with random travels to peculiar places all along. Spellbound by the world's sound, he began recording what he found most difficult to grasp, trying to reveal the hidden and make it audible. Jarisch’s work runs to twelve documentaries and has been awarded with several national and international media prizes.
More @ http://yeya.de
For more than 20 years Sharon has made groundbreaking local and international documentaries for ABC Radio. She covered the first democratic election in South Africa, and was present when Kosovars streamed across the Macedonian border to escape the war. Her documentary on prison corruption prompted an ICAC inquiry. Sharon's work has been recognised by numerous awards including four Walkley awards, the Human Rights Award, the George Munster Award for Independent Journalism, the International Women in Film and Radio Award, and a special mention in the prestigious international Prix Italia. In 2000 she was awarded an International Reuters Scholarship to study at Oxford University.
More @ http://www.abc.net.au/rn/360/about
Kim Stringfellow is an artist/educator whose work and research interests address ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms incorporating writing, digital media, photography, audio, video, installation, mapping, and locative media. She is an associate professor in School of Art, Design, and Art History at San Diego State University. Stringfellow's projects have been commissioned and funded by leading organizations including the Creative Work Fund, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Seattle Arts Commission, and the California Council for the Humanities. Stringfellow co-collaborated with lead artist, Amy Balkin and others to produce the Invisible-5 audio tour project in 2006. Photographic book projects include, Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938–2008 (2009) and Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005 (2005). Both books were published by the Center for American Places.
More @ www.kimstringfellow.com
Sarah Kanouse's written and visual work examines how physical and political landscapes are socially produced in order to create alternate, oppositional experiences of them. She looks into the spatial practices—visible and invisible—that have produced a certain place over time and influence how politics are lived there. By alternately supplementing, shifting and undermining the visual dimension of space, she offers what W.J.T Mitchell calls an "account of landscape…[that traces] the process by which landscape effaces its own readability and naturalizes itself" in order to produce alternate ways of seeing and inhabiting those places. Her artwork has appeared in exhibitions, screenings, and events mounted by Concordia University (Montreal); the University of Michigan; the Smart Museum (Chicago); Artlink (Belgrade, Serbia); University of California Berkeley; Columbia College (Chicago); Indiana University; University of Wisconsin Madison; and the Centro Cultural Rosa Luxemburg (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and many other festivals and artist-run spaces. Sarah's writings have been published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Leonardo, Acme, The Democratic Communiqué, Critical Planning and Art Journal. An Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Iowa, she teaches specialized classes in video/time-based media and art and ecology.
More @ www.readysubjects.org
Shiloh Krupar is a cultural geographer, with interests that lie at the intersection of geography, architecture, performance studies, and environmental justice. Her work has focused on the politics of nature conservation, environmental memory, and labor/compensation issues at decommissioned military sites and nuclear facilities in the western United States, and the curatorial practices and spectacular spaces of the future in postsocialist urban China. New projects include: disaster and cities in aftermath, the unseen medical geographies of waste, and interfaces of the body with cancer detection technologies. Collaboration and performative methodologies, such as absurdist humor and institutional mimicry, are central to her practice. She is an Assistant Professor in the Culture and Politics Program at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on critical geography, cultural theory, green politics, and global cities. She is currently finishing a solo book project entitled Hot Spotter's Manifesto: Practicing Transnatural Ethics, Politicizing Uncertainty, and a co-authored book Waste=History with C. Greig Crysler (UC Berkeley). Krupar's research projects have been published in such venues as Society and Space, Public Culture, Radical History Review, and Liminalities. Her latest article "The Biopsic Adventures of Mammary Glam: Breast Cancer Detection and the Practice of Cancer Glamor" will appear in the guest-edited volume Social Semiotics 22.1 (with Nadine Ehlers, Georgetown University). On the side, she accumulates artifacts for an ongoing museum of bureaucracy.
More @ http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/srk34
The Yes Men are a group who use any means necessary to agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, and then smuggle out the stories of their undercover escapades to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of big business. The stories are often both shocking and hilarious. They have been called "the Jonathan Swift of the Jackass generation" by author Naomi Klein. The Yes Men have impersonated World Trade Organization, Dow Chemical Corporation, and Bush administration spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the world. They do this (a) in order to demonstrate some of the mechanisms that keep bad people and ideas in power, and (b) because it's absurdly fun. Their main goal is to focus attention on the dangers of economic policies that place the rights of capital before the needs of people and the environment.
The Yes Lab
At the moment, the Yes Lab is mainly a series of brainstorms and trainings to help activist groups carry out media-getting creative actions, focused on their own campaign goals. It's a way for social justice organizations to take advantage of all that we Yes Men have learned-not only about our own ways of doing things, but those we've come in contact with over the decade and a half we've been doing this sort of thing. The Yes Lab has offices and workshopping space at NYU's Hemispheric Institute in New York.
More @ theyesmen.org
Matthew Friday is an educator and transdisciplinary artist who works across a variety of media, contexts and institutions. His research includes the theory and implementation of radical pedagogy, and an interest in regional ecologies and the history and practice of communities of resistance. Working both collectively and individually, Matthew Friday’s projects have taken up issues of organized labor, community agriculture initiatives and watershed remediation and management. He is an active member of the international research and consultation collective spurse.
Matthew Friday holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico and a MFA from Indiana State University and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. Matthew Friday has taught at the State University of New York at Oswego and Ohio University and recently became the graduate director for the School of Art at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Matthew Friday has exhibited in a number of venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art Open Studios, Exit Art Gallery, the University of Buffalo Art Department Gallery, the Cambridge Art Association, 1708 Gallery (Richmond), the University of Rochester Art Gallery, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the Center for Contemporary Arts in St. Louis, Ohio State University Urban Art Center, Spaces (Cleveland) and the Indianapolis Art Center. As part of the collective spurse, Friday has exhibited at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, ArtSpace in New Haven Connecticut, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Grand Arts, White Columns, the Kitchen, Bemis Art Center and the Guggenheim LAB. His work has been reviewed in October, the New Art Examiner, the Chicago Reader, Art Papers and Punk Planet and has been included in several catalogs including The Interventionists (MassMOCA) and Experimental Geography (Independent Curators International/Creative Time)
Friday’s work has been supported with a number of grants including a New York Federation for the Arts Strategic Opportunity Stipend and an Ohio Arts Initiative grant.
More @ http://www.matthewfriday.net
Jeff Lovett is a Pittsburgh based artist whose work explores the ensnared histories of politics, industry, and geology in Appalachia. Every artifact and experience of the region is influenced by the presence of coal on both human and geologic time scales. Lovett's work often plays with the nuanced distinctions between truth, fact and honesty utilized in methods of documentation and historical representation. He critically investigates and documents evidence of the region's past with a variety of techniques that range from the analog aesthetics of film to the digital images produced by mobile scanning units.
A graduate from Ohio University's School of Art with a MFA in Sculpture and Expanded Practice, Lovett's work has been most recently exhibited at the Cooper Union gallery in New York and Spaces gallery in Cleveland. He has also published a book with his research and writing titled Black Seam.
More @ http://www.jefflovett.net
Futurefarmers is a group of artists and designers working together since 1995. Our design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, aritist in residency program and research interests. We are teachers, researchers, designers, gardeners, scientists, engineers, illustrators, people who know how to sew, cooks and bus drivers with a common interest in creating work that challenges current social, political and economic systems. Members include: Dan Allende, Ian Cox, Amy Franceschini, Sascha Merg, Josh On, Stijn Schiffeleers, Michael Swaine.
More @ http://www.futurefarmers.com
Mark Cooley - Curator
Mark Cooley is an interdisciplinary artist interested in exploring the intersections of art, activism and institutional critique in a variety of contexts. Subjects of particular interest are U.S. foreign policy, corporate culture, and the political economy of new technologies. Recently, Mark has focused his attention on food production and consumption and the ways in which artists may mediate in these processes. Mark’s work has been featured internationally in online and offline venues such as Exit Art, NY, Rhizome.org, Furtherield.org, the World Social Forum, MediaLabMadrid, and many other sites. Mark is currently a professor in the School of Art at George Mason University in the suburbs of Washington D.C.
More @ http://www.flawedart.net
