Steve Dietz is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. He also co-founded, with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts the award-winning educational site ArtsConnectEd, and the artist community site mn artists.org with the McKnight Foundation.

Dietz has organized and curated new media exhibitions including Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net (1998); Shock of the View: Artists, Audiences, and Museums in the Digital Age (1999); Digital Documentary: The Need to Know and the Urge to Show (1999); Cybermuseology for the Museo de Monterrey (1999); Art Entertainment Network (2000); Outsourcing Control? The Audience As Artist for the Open Source Lounge at Medi@terra (2000); Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace (2001-02); a nationally traveling exhibition;Open_Source_Art_Hack (2002), with Jenny Marketou, at the New Museum, New York City; Translocations (2003), part of How Latitudes Become Forms at the Walker Art Center; State of the Art: Maps, Games, Stories, and Algorithms from Minnesota at the Carleton Art Gallery (2003); Database Imaginary (2004), with Anthony Kiendl and Sarah Cook, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Center for the Arts; Fair Assembly, web-based projects for Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005), with Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Art Formerly Known As New Media (2005), with Sarah Cook, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Centre, Container Culture (2006), with Deborah Dormer-Lawler, Zhang Ga, Alice Ming Wei Jim, Gunalan Nadarajan, Ellen Pau, Johan Pijnappel, Soh Yeong Roh, Yukiko Shikata, ZeroOne San Jose, Edge Conditions(2006), at the San Jose Museum of Art, and is curating selected projects for the Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, July 19-22, 2007. The next ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge will take place June 4-8, 2008.

Dietz speaks and writes extensively about new media, and his interviews and writings have appeared in Parkett, Artforum, Flash Art, Design Quarterly, Spectra, Salmagundi, Afterimage, Art in America, Museum News, BlackFlash, Public Art Review, Else/Where and Intelligent Agent; in exhibition catalogs for Walker Art Center, Centro Parago, Site Santa Fe, San Francisco Art Institute, and aceart; and in publications from MIT Press, University of California Press, and Princeton University Press.

He has taught about curating and digital art at California College of the Arts, Carleton College, the University of Minnesota, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Prior to the Walker Art Center, Dietz was founding Chief of Publications and New Media Initiatives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and editor of the scholarly journal, American Art.

www.yproductions.com

ICE Collab_3 has three main components:

1. A presentation and public lecture by Steve Dietz, Director of New Media Initiatives at the Walker Art Center. Steve Dietz has played a seminal role as a curator of digital culture, from the founding of the Digital Arts Study Collection http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/ at the Walker in 1998 to the upcoming exhibition “Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time”, marking the tenth anniversary of the New York Digital Salon to which he also contributed an essay entitled “Ten Dreams of Technology”.

2. Informal presentations and roundtable discussions featuring UGA students, faculty and local practitioners. Topics include emerging technologies, current works in progress, web standards, usability, aesthetics, open source movements, collaborative filtering and speculation!

3. Temporary Media Lab. ICE Collab_3 participants can work together to create impromptu Web content that tracks and represents the discussions that ensue over the 3 days of the workshop.

Presentations

Projects from Gallery 9
Steve Dietz, Director of New Media Initiatives, Walker Art Center

Gallery 9 is a site for project-driven exploration, through digitally-based media, of all things “cyber.” This includes artist commissions, interface experiments, exhibitions, community discussion, a study collection, hyperessays, filtered links, lectures and other guerilla raids into real space, and collaborations with other entities (both internal and external). 

Web Standards: Usability and Aesthetics
Tom Cona and Mark Callahan

Tom Cona teaches Web design at the New Media Institute. Mark Callahan teaches Web design at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Tom and Mark will each discuss their top five considerations for approaching Web design and face off on usability, aesthetics and web standards.

eco-log: ICE Project in Progress
Kate Ross, Tom Black and eco-log participants

eco-log is a collaborative arts project between artists and community members that explores local ecology and the issue of urban sprawl. Kate Ross and Tom Black will show how they are integrating digital technology in this exciting new multimedia project.

Performance and Technology: Virtual Vaudeville
David Z Saltz

David Z Saltz, a Professor of Drama at UGA, will present a collaborative work in progress that uses computer gaming and motion capture technologies to recreate the experience of attending a live theatrical performance from the past.

ideasforcreativeexploration.com: Conceptual Site Development
Joe Willey, Mark Callahan and ICE Collab 1 participants

An overview of the ICE Web site and how it developed from concept to a dynamic code-driven site integrating Flash, XML, PHP and MySQL.

Digital Media Projects
Students from the Digital Media area of the Lamar Dodd School of Art will show works.

Bryan Rogers served as head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University from 1988 through 1999. Prior to that, he was professor of art at San Francisco State University, where he founded the Conceptual Design Program. Rogers has also held appointments at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. and the University of California at Berkeley. From 1982 to 1985, he was editor of the international art-science-technology journal Leonardo. He completed a year of post-graduate work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich on a fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. He has also held fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

At Carnegie Mellon, Rogers led the development of a number of innovative programs in art and design, stressing the importance of connections to other fields of inquiry. As founding director of the Studio for Creative Inquiry, an interdisciplinary outreach center dedicated to fostering ambitious, experimental, advanced-technology projects in the arts, he significantly strengthened Carnegie Mellon’s interactions with regional and international communities. He also served as principal investigator on major NSF and NASA supported projects.

At Michigan, Rogers has led the complete restructuring of the educational programs within the School of Art and Design. A major thrust of this effort has been to firmly engage the School with the University and the broader community, both local and global. Focused on creative work and infused with contemporary information and imaging technologies, the new programs endeavor to unite the domains of art-making and designing.

In addition to his administrative accomplishments, Rogers is a sculptor and installation artist whose work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. His work explores conceptual intersections of art, science and technology, often manifesting in complex, interactive installations of kinetic objects.

On Friday, November 15th at 12:00 PM Ela Lambin and Leah Mann of Lelavision will visit ICE for an informal roundtable discussion. All are welcome.

Lelavision combines modern and aerial dance, music, theater, and large interactive musical sculptures to create innovative works of awe and whimsy. Ela’s musical instrument/sculptures represent a harmony of sound, form, and movement meant not solely to be looked at and walked around but to be sounded and intimately experimented with. Leah’s work is eclectic in form, pulling from many ethnic and technical genres but always centered in the exploration of dance as sacred and enhanced by the use of props, large visual elements ( bungee cords, scaffolding, sets, sculpture, trapeze, etc.) and alternative spaces to convey her themes and to push the boundaries of the perspective.

Lelavision will be in residence with the Department of Dance and will perform Banging Bamboozles at the New Dance Theater from November 14- 16.

On Wednesday, November 6th at 1:00 PM Martin Kersels will visit ICE for aninformal roundtable discussion.  All are welcome.

Based in Los Angeles, Martin Kersels works with sculpture, videoand photography assembling machines made of found objects, moving parts,moving images and sound. He is currently co-chair of the art program at the California Institute of the Arts.

Martin Kersels will give a public lecture at the Georgia Museum of Art on Tuesday, November 5th at 5:30 PM as part of the Lamar Dodd School of Art Visiting Artists/Scholar Program.