Virtual Memory: Discussion & Book Launch
Thursday, April 14
6:30 PM
Homay King in conversation with Matmos (Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt) about her new book, Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Duke University Press, 2015).
This two-day session brings together artists, curators, scholars, and musicians to delve into and discuss the questions posed by the virtual within contemporary art and visual culture. Although “virtual reality” might conjure associations from a dated landscape of cybernetic theory and early computer animation, “virtuality” has seemingly never been more present, both in physical space and online experience. From journalism to cinema, architecture to art, and from video games to the military industrial complex, the terms and technologies of the virtual are evolving in new and previously unimagined ways in which binaries such as the analog and the digital are no longer sufficient.
On Thursday, April 14 scholar Homay King will join Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt of the electronic music duo, Matmos, to discuss her recent book Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality and her call to reclaim the virtual as a radically open-ended space that creates projections of other worlds, but is always “immanent within matter and the world.” On Friday, April 15 we will reconvene with artists Rachel de Joode, Cayetano Ferrer, Florian Meisenberg, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Susanne M. Winterling to discuss how the virtual, in both a critical and material sense, is being theorized and deployed by contemporary practitioners. Drawing on King’s scholarship, the invited artists have been asked to reflect on how the virtual functions not just within the space of the otherworldly, but as rooted in a temporal and embodied lived experience.
Organized in collaboration with the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway.
Advance registration suggested.
The event is made possible in part by the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Programming in Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
Programming at ICA has been made possible in part by the Emily and Jerry Spiegel Fund to Support Contemporary Culture and Visual Arts and the Lise Spiegel Wilks and Jeffrey Wilks Family Foundation, and by Hilarie L. & Mitchell Morgan.
