Art Science Connect presents an evening of virtual talks and performances by Mindy Seu, Todd Anderson and Tiri Kananuruk. Seu’s lecture titled “The Metaverse is a Contexted Territory,” commissioned and published by Pioneer Works Press, extends our thinking of networked multi-person digital scapes into new creative territory.
This event is curated by Tommy Martinez and is free and open to the public. Reserve a spot here to attend.
“The Metaverse is a Contested Territory,” lecture by Mindy Seu
The term “metaverse” originated in the 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash as a portmanteau of “meta” and “universe.” This root word—universe—is the territory at stake: a single, universal virtual world. While Facebook trademarks all variations of “Meta” and “Metaverse” and pushes billions towards VR RnD, others wonder… What is the metaverse, anyway? Originally written for Software for Artists: Untethering the Web and adapted from the eponymous essay, “The Metaverse is a Contested Territory” traces the development of hardware alongside “hard” science fiction and suggests the need for new perceptual structures and soft approaches to worlding.
Mindy Seu (b. 1991, California) is a designer and technologist based in New York City. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close collaborations. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation include projects for the Serpentine Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Frieze, Dazed, Gagosian Quarterly, Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and more. Mindy holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.
Chatroom Performance by Todd Anderson and Tiri Kananuruk
Todd Anderson and Tiri Kananuruk will invite the audience into a collaborative chatroom-based performance. An emergent set of interactions will unfold between attendees through a special set of instructions. This performance builds off of work created for Todd and Tiri’s class ‘Experiments in Networked Performance’ which they led at School for Poetic Computation this summer.
Todd Anderson is a digital poet, software artist and educator based in New York City where he organizes and teaches for the School for Poetic Computation. He has been making experimental software art for over 10 years including the live interactive poetry project Hotwriting, the Chrome Extension ARG ‘An Experience’, the performance-inside-the-browser extension HitchHiker, and multiple plays and performances with the multidisciplinary group H0t Club. He is perhaps best known as the host and curator of WordHack, the monthly language+technology talk series in NYC running every third Thursday since 2014.
Bangkok-born, New York-based Tiri Kananuruk is a performance artist and educator. Her works focus on the manipulation of sound, the disruption of time. How technologies change the meaning and the ways we communicate. She utilizes mistakes, both human and machine, as means of improvisation. She holds a BA in Exhibition Design from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and a Master in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. Tiri has lectured at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the School for Poetic Computation. She is currently an adjunct professor at Collaborative Arts, New York University. She was a new media artist resident at Mana Contemporary (2019), CultureHub New York (2020), Barnard Movement Lab (NUUM)(2020), and Media Art Exploration (NUUM)(2021). She is a founding member of NUUM Collective. She is a co-founder of MORAKANA along with Sebastián Morales.