Edward Shanken
“From the Space Race to the Telematic Embrace and Beyond: A Research Trajectory”
Tuesday, February 15 at 4 PM
Miller Learning Center Room 171

ICE is pleased to host Edward Shanken, a leading scholar of interdisciplinary new media art, for a public lecture supported by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

Shanken is the author of  Art and Electronic Media, a groundbreaking and critically-praised survey published by Phaidon Press (2009). He is known as a dynamic speaker with the ability to weave together the histories of art, science, and technology, inspiring audiences to think beyond the traditional boundaries of the arts.

Shanken obtained an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University after receiving an M.B.A. from Yale University. He is a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Media Art History faculty at the Donau University in Krems, Austria. He was formerly Executive Director of the Information Science + Information Studies program at Duke University, an interdisciplinary program that studies new information technologies and their impact on art, culture, science, commerce, society, and the environment.

In 2003 he edited a collection of writings by artist Roy Ascott entitled Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness, where his introductory essay, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” received honorable mention in the Leonardo Award for Excellence. He created the indispensable online “Interdisciplinary Collaboration Bibliography”, a resource that documents writings relevant to the historical origins of interdisciplinary collaborations, and the “Art and Electronic Media Online Companion”, a repository of images, videos, texts, and links  about work by individuals, groups, and institutions that have made valuable contributions to the discourses of electronic art. His work has been published extensively in book chapters, journals, and exhibition catalogs, and he presents lectures at conferences and institutions around the world.

In Dr. Shanken’s own words, “I’m especially interested in the way artists envision the future and create models of it in the present.  Throughout the history of art, artists have often employed emerging technologies and scientific ideas in this pursuit.  I believe that art, at its best, offers deep insight – a type of knowledge that Gregory Bateson likened to wisdom – that can help build a more compassionate and peaceful future.”

The lecture is free and open to the public. For additional information about Edward Shanken visit: http://artexetra.wordpress.com

ICE-Vision: Le Doulos (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962)
Thursday, February 3 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“Jean-Pierre Melville’s existentialized gangster films are one of the glories of the French cinema, American forms played out with European self-consciousness. This 1962 effort stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as an informer on the lam, but plot pales before Melville’s detailed noir imagery of dingy hotel rooms, back alleys, and subterranean passages. Melville’s love for American films (he was a man of taste as well as talent) was one of the most profound influences on the New Wave generation. In French with subtitles. 108 min.” -Dave Kehr (Chicago Reader)

ICE-Vision: I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953)
Thursday, January 27 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“Ernest Hemingway once remarked that all of American literature came out of ”Huckleberry Finn.” With only slightly greater exaggeration, it could be said that much of American cinema, at least in the last 30 years or so, comes out of ”I Vitelloni” . . . It shows all of Fellini’s unrivaled virtues — his lyrical sense of place, his abiding affection for even the most hapless of his characters, his effortless knack for limpid, bustling composition — and very few of his putative vices.” -The New York Times

ICE-Vision and Nourish International present Dark Days (Marc Singer, 2000)
Thursday, November 18 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“If you asked a sampling of middle-class New Yorkers to describe their worst nightmare, more than a few might reply that it would be to find themselves indigent and homeless on the city’s streets. But as Marc Singer’s remarkable documentary film ”Dark Days” illustrates, even the worst nightmare can have descending levels of horror. Most of this unforgettable movie was filmed below the streets of Midtown Manhattan in a dank Amtrak railway tunnel where a colony of around 75 homeless put down roots, some for as long as 25 years, among the rats and the garbage. If any urban setting conjures up an image of the bowels of hell, surely this is it. And ”Dark Days” records it in stark black-and-white pictures that stir the most primal fears of subsisting in a world without light.” -New York Times

ICE-Vision: Tenebre (Dario Argento, 1982)
Thursday, November 11 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“Tenebre (a.k.a., Unsane, 1982) is among Argento’s giallo masterpieces, the self-reflexive story of an American author (Anthony Franciosa) who travels to Rome to promote his latest mystery thriller (also called Tenebre). When a strange string of murders rock the city, and the author begins receiving threats, he takes it upon himself to do a little investigating… Sensational gore abounds, along with the usual string of disconcerting set pieces (vicious dogs, murky childhood memories, overly stylized wardrobes and interiors). Creepy additional note: more often than not in an Argento film, when you see the murderer’s hands, it is the director himself wearing the gloves.” -GreenCine