Ceci Moss
Since 2005
Works in Oakland, California United States of America

BIO
Ceci Moss is the Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco Art Institute. She is responsible for coordinating several exhibitions (both solo and group shows) each year, special projects, public art commissions, and public programs for YBCA. Highlights include solo exhibitions by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, Lucy Raven, Nate Boyce, Shana Moulton, and Brenna Murphy, a large scale public art installation by Kota Ezawa in YBCA’s sculpture court, and YBCA’s signature triennial Bay Area Now 7 co-curated with Betti-Sue Hertz. She also co-curated with Astria Suparak the exhibit Alien She that examines the lasting influence of the punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl on contemporary artists, and toured to five venues nationwide.

She has a MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in History and Sociology from U.C. Berkeley. Her academic research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice and network culture. Her PhD dissertation "Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu" examines the expansion of internet art beyond the screen in the 2000’s, especially towards sculpture and installation, as a product of what theorist Tiziana Terranova called an “informational milieu.” Combining art history and media theory through the analysis of case studies that range from internet art and social media in the 2000’s to Jean-François Lyotard’s groundbreaking new media exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1985 Les Immatériaux, her dissertation asks how the widespread technological capture of information affects cultural production, specifically contemporary art, and the kind of critical response it necessitates.

Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, Performa Magazine, New Media & Society and various art catalogs. Prior to her position at YBCA, she was the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organization Rhizome, Special Projects Coordinator for the New Museum/Rhizome and an Adjunct Instructor at New York University in the Department of Comparative Literature. From 2000-2014, she programmed a radio show dedicated to experimental music, Radio Heart, on the independent radio stations KALX, East Village Radio and Radio Valencia.

the age of aquarius (2012) - Anne de Vries


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waves from the web re-photographed as a multi media ocean.

-- FROM ARTIST'S WEBSITE

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Call for Submissions: Location One Virtual Residency Project


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Image: Work by 2008 Location One Virtual Residents Andy Deck, Susanne Berkenheger, and Hidenori Watanave

Downtown New York art non-profit Location One are seeking submissions for their Virtual Residency Project. The program is in its second year, and is one of the few residencies of its type out there. Deadline is April 15, 2009. More info below:

Location One presents its second Virtual Residency Project in the form of a call to artists and other creative individuals with the purpose of fostering collaboration and creativity across geographical expanses and areas of expertise. The goal of this residency is to find two participants who are not physically proximate but who are willing to work with someone they've most likely never met before using some form of non-F2F (face to face) interface such as webcams, email, chat, video, blogs, telerobotic prostheses, Second Life, MIDI, skype, social networks, walkie-talkie, snail mail, mental telepathy, radio, networked video gaming, POTS (plain old telephone service), tin cans on string, or any other means of collaboration to develop a project that will be presented at Location One in the Fall of 2009, either on our web space or in our exhibition space. The theme of this project is "Levels of Undo".

The two participants will also use a blog set up expressly for the Virtual Residency Project to discuss ideas, possible projects and to track the progress of the work. The conversation will be public and open for public comments and will be considered an intrinsic part of the Virtual Residency.

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John Latham on tank.tv


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Image: John Latham, Speak, 1968-69, 16mm (Screengrab, Original 16mm)

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Image: John Latham, Erth, 1971 (Screengrab, Original 16mm)

John Latham's films Erth (1971), Britannica (1971), Talk, Mr. Bard (1968), Unedited Material from the Star (1960), and Speak (1968-69) are now on view at tank.tv. See below for a short excerpt from the curatorial statement.

The influence of John Latham (1921-2006), an artist whose work includes painting, performance and film to mention just a few, has extended far beyond the boundaries of the art world. Interested in theoretical physics, Latham developed an opposing cosmology which rejected the primacy of space and matter and favour of time and event. The body of work and concepts which developed out of this way of thinking still challenge the way we conceive of art as event and of the place of the artist within society. Notions of event can be seen as transversal to Latham's whole oeuvre. Indeed, a pioneer in the use of spray paint in the 1950's, Latham started spraying black dots on canvasses. For him, such a gesture and the resulting pictorial effect was similar to the structure and the functioning of the cosmos. "Least events" (the spray burst occurring in time) produce beings (the black dots) out of nothingness (the blank canvas).

His impact on conceptual art can be best appreciated in his opinions concerning language. For Latham, since language stems from objects, it is unable to grasp a reality based on events. According to Latham this results in the lack of a common conception of the world, which is itself responsible for the division of people. In his practice Latham attempted to transpose the unseizability of events through objects into art, thus coining the term "event structure".

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Rhizome's "The Long Gallery" at Why + Wherefore


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Rhizome's Curatorial Fellow Brian Droitcour organized an online exhibition, which went live last night, for Why + Wherefore's series "7 x 7." Titled "The Long Gallery" the show brings together works that horizontally exceed the standard-sized frame of the browser. Artists include Justin Kemp, Christy Matson, Brenna Murphy, Bennett Williamson, Petra Cortright, Peter Baldes, and Daniel Eatock. The show is the sixth installment of seven separate online exhibitions curated by seven websites with seven works each. (Whew! So many 7s.) Apparently it was a pain to code too, sorry W+W!

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Discussions (52) Opportunities (6) Events (10) Jobs (3)
EVENT

Lucy Raven: Hollywood Chop Riding


Dates:
Thu Nov 06, 2014 18:30 - Sun Jan 11, 2015

Location:
Oakland, California
United States of America

New York-based artist Lucy Raven uncovers the diffuse, obscured systems that support contemporary life through a research-led practice that encompasses films, installations, illustrated lectures, and essays. Deeply attuned to the processes of production often unseen within visual culture in a networked, globalized world, Raven’s contemplative storytelling uncovers the economic, historical, geographic, and material complexities at play in technology through an exploration of topics such as the outsourcing of post-production work for the film industry from Hollywood to countries around the world, evolving technical standards in film projection, and the immense infrastructure behind the global copper mining industry.

For her solo presentation at YBCA, Raven stages a new anaglyph 3D video installation entitled Curtains (2014). The project emerges out of the artist’s ongoing research into the global network of post-production facilities that create the visual effects for Hollywood’s blockbuster films. Post-production is meticulous and labor intensive, involving hours of frame-by-frame detailing. Film studios seek the least expensive labor force worldwide to complete their work, outsourcing labor to studios that span Bombay, Beijing, Toronto, London, and Vancouver. Raven visited and documented some of these spaces through sound and image. The result is Curtains, a 3D video that creates a portrait of an otherwise invisible global assembly line, providing a glimpse into the quiet reality and human hands that lie behind the spectacle of fantastic computer-generated simulations found in today’s mainstream films.

A series of screenprints from Raven’s ongoing RPx project are also featured in the exhibition, as well as a new lenticular print. RPx emerged from research undertaken during a 2011 residency at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where Raven unearthed and archived motion picture test patterns used by projectionists to calibrate the quality of film projection. The “RP” in Raven’s project stands for “recommended practices,” a directive set by the standards-developing committee in Hollywood, the Society of Motion Pictures, and Television Engineers (SMPTE) to ensure continuity across viewing experiences. The test patterns featured in the RPx prints are images meant for machines and the technicians who maneuver them, a relic and a precursor to the standards that surround our current high definition images. Both RPx and Curtains point towards the careful engineering involved in the fabrication of illusion, including the construction of human vision within that process.

About the Series
Control: Technology in Culture is a new series of exhibitions in the YBCA Upstairs Galleries showcasing work by emerging and mid-career artists who examine the social, cultural, and experiential implications of technology. The exhibitions in this series seek to prompt timely questions about the profound and far-reaching influence of technology in our daily lives by focusing on artists whose work spans a multitude of disciplines and relates to a diverse set of issues, including architecture, acoustics, psychology, labor, consumerism, the environment, and the military.

The term “control” refers to philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory that, as a result of the ever-increasing role of information technology, Michel Foucault’s “disciplinary society” of the 20th century has given way to a “control society” in the 21st century. In contrast to discipline, which molds the individual through confinement in factories, prisons, and schools, control is diffuse, adaptable, and ubiquitous, modulating rather than molding the individual.

Control: Technology in Culture is curated by Ceci Moss, Assistant Curator of Visual Arts.


EVENT

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon: It Only Happens All of the Time


Dates:
Fri Mar 07, 2014 18:00 - Sun Jun 15, 2014

Location:
San Francisco, California
United States of America

Los Angeles-based artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon works in sound, installation, and sculpture. Her work is often devised around audio and spatial feedback systems that manipulate the visitor’s awareness of sound and space, incorporating the physical and sonic qualities of surrounding architecture to engage the viewer’s senses. Gordon investigates sonic and architectural applications of cybernetic systems in the 20th and 21st centuries to technological design, from anechoic chambers to the military’s use of Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) speakers. Reverse engineering those implements of social control, the dissonant spaces she creates uncover how such systems regulate human subjectivity, mobility, and perception.

Commissioned by YBCA, Gordon’s new installation—part of her solo exhibition It Only Happens All of the Time—is an immersive sonic experience that emphasizes the primacy of the embodied experience; one that encourages the visitor to navigate the space through a mode of listening that is both felt and heard. Gordon explores sound’s ability to establish different levels of intimacy, and the exhibition’s title points towards the ubiquitous presence of sound in that process, whether it exists at the periphery or center of our awareness. The installation’s sound-absorbing walls reference the design of anechoic chambers found in military and scientific testing facilities, which insulate and absorb sound reflections. In contrast to the walls of the installation, which gestures towards a calculated experience, the sculpture Love Seat situated within this contained environment suggests another, more emancipated, arrangement. Surrounded by a multichannel speaker system distributed throughout the gallery, Love Seat encourages visitors to sit and share in a listening experience with others, while maintaining a physical separation. Fostering an exchange between visitors that wavers between proximity and distance, Love Seat parallels how we listen together.

Gordon’s other works for the exhibition echo a similar concept—sound as experienced within the body becomes a way to feel with others, and to experience the mechanisms of built space through non-visual means. Her film Everyone Will Be Here Now But Me documents a site-specific sound environment created within the empty offices of the Los Angeles Food Center. It follows visitors as they explore sound installations distributed throughout the building, with the option to listen through binaural microphones that captured the 3D stereo sound of the space. The suspended figures in Gordon’s new series of drawings and watercolors Filter Resonance B more subtly signal the body; wire-like lines protrude and drift through these organ-like forms, a reference to the potential for connectivity. Gordon imagines that the drawings represent actual filters, which isolate information, and their presentation is meant to evoke the interfaces of audio filters in music software, which allow the user to directly regulate reverb, equalization, and so on by manipulating graphic elements. Much like the show itself, these strange configurations invite reflection on the many ways the body is instrumentalized through technology.

About Control: Technology in Culture

Control: Technology in Culture, curated by Ceci Moss, Assistant Curator of Visual Arts, is YBCA’s new series of exhibitions showcasing work by emerging and mid-career artists who examine the social, cultural, and experiential implications of technology. The series seeks to prompt timely questions about the profound and far-reaching influence of technology in our daily lives by focusing on artists whose work spans a multitude of disciplines and relates to a diverse set of issues, including architecture, acoustics, psychology, labor, consumerism, the environment, and the military.

The term “control” refers to philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory that, as a result of the ever-increasing role of information technology, Michel Foucault’s “disciplinary society” of the 20th century has given way to a “control society” in the 21st century. In contrast to discipline, which molds the individual through confinement in factories, prisons, and schools, control is diffuse, adaptable, and ubiquitous, modulating rather than molding the individual.


EVENT

Brenna Murphy: Liquid Vehicle Transmitter


Dates:
Fri Jul 19, 2013 18:30 - Sun Sep 08, 2013

Location:
San Francisco, California
United States of America

Working in sculpture, game design, installation, performance, sound and the internet, Portland-based artist Brenna Murphy is interested in digital technology’s capacity to connect and expand human consciousness. For Murphy, digital tools act as an electronic prosthesis that deepens awareness and cognition, rather than as an alien entity outside human experience. The labyrinth is an ongoing theme in Murphy’s practice. Her installations, websites, and virtual environments are set up as a series of interlocking spaces that encourage wandering, displacement and discovery. Like the naturally occurring geometric forms referenced in her work, they organically branch out from each other as a dense array of unfolding structures. The title for her exhibition at YBCA, Liquid Vehicle Transmitter, alludes to the fluid property found in much of Murphy’s output.

For her new installation, emergent entity chant array, Murphy has designed a type of fractal involving self-similar patterns at varying scales. Constructed out of a precisely configured assemblage of 3D printed sculptures, LED lights, light boxes, and wood cut forms, the installation resembles a real life version of her complex and dizzying internet-based works. Like Murphy’s virtual video game environments, emergent entity chant array plays upon the visitor’s perception of both space and dimension, encouraging the exploration of elevated states of consciousness.

Deeply post-humanist in her approach, Murphy views her creative process as a form of meditation in which she seeks an intuitive, harmonious relation with the tools used to produce her work. Her intricate arrangement of forms focuses her own energy and that of the viewer, drawing them in. This sense of an attuned connection with an audience is also an active element in the art collectives of which she is a member, MSHR and Oregon Painting Society.


EVENT

Architecture and Computation with Keller Easterling and Erica Robles (Part of PROGRAM: Media and Literature at NYU)


Dates:
Fri Nov 09, 2012 18:00 - Fri Nov 09, 2012

Location:
New York, New York
United States of America

Join us on November 9th at 6PM for "Architecture and Computation" with speakers Keller Easterling (Architecture, Yale) and Erica Robles (MCC, NYU). This will be the first event in this year's PROGRAM: Media and Literature lecture series.

Architecture and Computation

19 University Place, Great Room
New York, NY 10003
Map: http://goo.gl/maps/f2ad3

http://www.programseries.com

Free and Open to the Public

"PROGRAM" is an interdisciplinary event series organized by graduate students within New York University’s Media, Culture and Communication, English, and Comparative Literature Departments. Intentionally broad in scope, the series will present talks that explore the cultural, historical, aesthetic and political impact of software and programming logic.

This first event in our year-long lecture series explores the intersection of architecture and the logic of computation. How does computation structure our physical world, and in what ways has the function of computational media been applied to the spaces we inhabit?



Keller Easterling (Yale University, Architecture)


Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure and Political Arts
Repeatable formulas and spatial products make most of the space in the world. Now, not only buildings but also entire cities have become spatial products that typically reproduce free zone world cities like Shenzhen or Dubai. Space has become a mobile, monetized, almost infrastructural, technology, where infrastructure is not only the urban substructure, but also the urban structure itself. Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of this matrix space. Massive global infrastructure systems, administered by mixtures of public and private cohorts and driven by profound irrationalities, generate de facto, undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them—a wilder mongrel than any storied Leviathan for which we have studied political response. Infrastructure space is one crucible within which multiple fields of analysis encounter ample complexity, and it tutors special approaches to both form making and political arts.


Keller Easterling is is an architect, urbanist, writer, and Professor of Architecture at Yale University. Her latest project is titled Extrastatecraft.

Erica Robles (New York University, MCC)

Mediated Congregation: The Crystal Cathedral and God’s Place in a Networked WorldThis talk focuses on an often-overlooked institution that has helped produce and legitimate transformations in 20th century social life: the church. Through an analysis of the Crystal Cathedral Robles situates Protestant spatial production within a broader project of cultural re-formation whereby collective life became conducted via increasingly mediated, mobile, and distributed arrangements. For more than half a century, this influential Southern California ministry helped reshape the style and material conditions for worship. At its height, the Crystal Cathedral was perhaps the most visible Protestant church in the world.

Robles will render three distinctive and successive portraits of the church as a drive-in theater (1955-1957), an indoor-outdoor/television church (1962-1970), and then a globally-broadcast, glass and steel cathedral (1980 – 2012). Each site was a re-imagining of the socio-technical conditions for communion. Together, these portraits will trace a trajectory from the post-war to the present whereby the church helped determine technological and architectural meanings. By designing for mediated congregation, ministries like the Crystal Cathedral inscribed the production of broadcast and then networked geographies with spiritual significance. In so doing, they also translated Christian cosmology into a new technological regime.

Erica Robles is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.


Upcoming 2012-2013 PROGRAM events


Media Archaeology with Matthew Kirschenbaum and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, March 1st, 2013

Values in Technological Design with Geoffrey Bowker and Sara Hendren, April 12th, 2013

http://www.programseries.com/

The series is sponsored by NYU's Information Futures, the Humanities Initiative, and the Departments of Media Culture, and Communication, English, and Comparative Literature.


EVENT

Music, Language, Thought V


Dates:
Fri Dec 10, 2010 00:00 - Wed Dec 08, 2010

Music, Language, Thought V

Friday, December 10th 2010 / 3:00 - 7:00pm

Myles Jackson (History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, NYU): “The Role of Physicists in Measuring and Defining Nineteenth-Century Musical Aesthetics”

Kevin Bell (English, SUNY Albany): “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City: Sound as Break in Christopher Harris’s “Still/Here"”

Ana María Ochoa (Music, Columbia University): “Orality and Orthography in Nineteenth-Century Colombia”"

Gary Tomlinson (Music, University of Pennsylvania): “Paleolithic Formalism”

Reception to follow

http://musiclanguagethought.wordpress.com

New York University / Silver Center for Arts and Science / 100 Washington Square East / Department of Music, Rm 220, 2nd floor

Sponsored by the departments of Music and Comparative Literature; with support from the NYU Humanities Initiative

Music, Language, Thought” is an interdisciplinary event series organized by graduate students within New York University’s Music and Comparative Literature Departments. Broadly speaking, the series focuses on the relationship between music and language, and our speakers will examine its theoretical ramifications for politics, aesthetics and historiography. The project stems from ongoing conversation and collaboration between graduate students within these two departments, and will continue on an annual basis.

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