Mark Tribe: Learning to Love the Future

HOT AIR
Mark Tribe, Bottsford Hollow, 2012, inkjet print, 24” x 38”. From the series Rare Earth.

A founder of Rhizome, Mark Tribe is known for his early contributions to the field of new media art and his socially-engaged performances and installations. His current practice engages the power of aesthetic experience to illuminate the challenges we and future generations will face in the climate crisis. Since 2012, he has made landscape pictures that unpack American ideas about nature and land, from Manifest Destiny to contemporary environmentalism. In this interview, Mark talks about his views on the climate, his landscapes, and his integration of machine learning tools (AI) into his latest project Learning to Love the Future.

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Eva Davidova: Re-coding Our Paradox

HOT AIR
Garden for Drowning Descendant/Garden Sequence from “Flying and Drowning Dream,“ interactive mixed reality installation, 2022, with performer Danielle McPhatter.

Eva Davidova makes new media works that focus on ecological disaster, our interdependence as a species, and the political implications of technology which she unpacks with performative works rooted in the absurd. She imagines the paradox that one day our descendants–human or cyborg–will be constructing our reality as a simulation, and asks: “If we are the games our children will program one day, can we influence the code they are writing?”

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Artists on Coping: JinJin Xu & Jiaoyang Li (Silkworm Pupas)

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Performance still from “In America, You are Asked Why Leaves are Green,” February, 2020; from left, artists JinJin Xu, Jiaoyang Li. Photo courtesy of artists

Silkworm Pupas is a new media arts collective consisting of NYC based Chinese poets Jiaoyang Li and JinJin Xu. Our projects strive for intimate ways to envision attainable, inclusive, and bleeding-edge futures through innovative storytelling, documentary poetics practice, sound installation and video-performance art.

Jiaoyang Li is a Chinese poet and visual artist. Her literary work has appeared in LA Reviews of Books-China channel, 3:AM, Spittoon Magazine, Voice and Verse poetry magazine, and others. Her interdisciplinary practices have been supported by the New York Foundation of Art, The Immigrants Artist Biennial and others. She co-founded the interdisciplinary poetry journal 叵CLIP.

JinJin Xu is a poet and filmmaker from Shanghai invested in docu-poetics. Her work has been featured in The High Line Public Arts, The Harun Farocki Institute, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, and anthologized in Nasty Women Poets. Honors include The Poetry Society of America’s George Borgin Prize and fellowships from The Thomas J. Watson Foundation and the Flaherty Seminar. She teaches hybrid workshops at NYU where she is a Lillian Vernon Fellow.

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Artists on Coping: Barak Chamo

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.


Sunset, 2019, light painting

Barak Chamo’s work explores the limits of perception, what is seen and unseen by the human system, and how its vulnerabilities are laid bare by interaction with technology in an accelerating feedback loop. His research-based practice employs light, video and kinetic sculptures to create intimate subjective spaces that recognize these limits inspire a shift in perspective.

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