steve gibson lecture - MAPPING SPACES(s)

Steve Gibson (Visual Arts & Digital Media, University of Victoria, Canada)

This presentation focuses on the recent of work of three Canadian Digital Media artists – Julie Andreyev, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Steve Gibson. More or less loosely influenced by the Situationists these artists consider issues of space, the body, public interaction and mobility.

Distinct from American popular media hegemony, but equally engrossed in North American media culture, Andreyev, Lozano-Hemmer, and Gibson present critical but engaged visions of technological art practice for the new millennium.

Mapping Space(s) presents Four Wheel Drift (2003-05) by Julie Andreyev, Body Movies (2003) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and Virtual DJ (2001-04) by Steve Gibson as divergent examples of populist but epic media experiences.

Each of these pieces transforms public interaction and posits radically workable solutions to the problem of interactivity that reached a stalemate at the end of the 20th Century.

Discarding the artificiality of hypertext and web-based corporate “interactivity” these artists opt for more naturalistic models of interaction based on play, personal subjectivity and aimless wandering.

lecture at DAW 2006 zurigo