This conversation, presented as part of the exhibition Broadcasting: EAI at ICA, will focus on how media artists approach the production and distribution of their work, which requires access to technology tools ranging from consumer software and hardware to high-end commercial facilities and platforms. Artists Antoine Catala and Tony Cokes will join Alex Klein and Rebecca Cleman, co-curators of Broadcasting, to discuss how the process of creating and distributing work has impacted their artistic practice.
A live recording of Broadcasting’s first program installment, Broadcasting: Means of Production with Antoine Catala and Tony Cokes, is now available to view online.
Since the mid-1980s, TONY COKES has produced videos and installations that engage in cogent investigations of identity and opposition. His works question the construction of subjectivities and how race, gender, and class are perceived through what the artist terms as the “representational regimes of image and sound,” as perpetuated by Hollywood, the media, and popular culture. Cokes lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Recent exhibitions include at the Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson; Whitechapel Gallery, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; REDCAT, Los Angeles; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Pera Museum, Istanbul; and the Louvre, Paris. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthallen, Copenhagen; Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus; and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, among many others. Cokes lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
ANTOINE CATALA’s work endows technology with physicality and considers how artificial renderings of forms behind a screen might change our feelings toward them. His video works and internet projects, such as “Distant Feel,” use humor to reveal the ways in which images on the web can be neutralized by way of insincere sentiments or nostalgia. Catala is interested in this underlying structure of his medium—in the collective assumptions we make of images in digital forms, and the ways they can or cannot provoke emotion in scenarios we might encounter. Catala has exhibited at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, Sculpture Center, New York, Espai d’art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain, Fridericianum, Kassel, MoMA PS 1, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia, New Museum, New York, among many other international galleries. He participated in the 12th Lyon Biennale and 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience at the New Museum in New York, and is part of the group exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018). Catala lives and works in New York.
Broadcasting: EAI at ICA brings together an intergenerational group of artists whose time-based artworks are produced in concert with their means of circulation, from the democratic platform of public access television to the instantaneity of social media. Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) was one of the first nonprofit organizations dedicated to the advocacy for and development of video as an art form, providing a crucial space of production and distribution for figures such as Nam June Paik and Joan Jonas. Drawing on EAI’s extraordinary archive, and building upon ICA’s history of engagement with media art, Broadcasting will foster a dialogue between early innovators and contemporary practitioners through an installation, screenings, and series of live events. Featuring works by artists including Robert Beck, Tony Cokes, Ulysses Jenkins, JODI, Shigeko Kubota, Kristin Lucas, and TVTV the exhibition will focus on how artists exploit the act of “broadcast” as a subject, as a means of intervention, and as a form of participation across a variety of displays.
