Building Regenerative Media Art Ecologies
Technologies are not simply objects but embodiments of the social, cultural and political forces that bring them into being. Media art – and R&D labs and residencies in this field – can be a stage for rehearsing and examining ideologies that inhere in such technologies as AI, XR and gaming platforms. In this talk, Chang discusses the thorny relationship between media art, technology, and capital. Through the example of Leonardo’s CripTech Incubator, a disability, art and technology fellowship seeking to remake the creative design cycle through an accessibility lens, she shares one model that strives towards a regenerative, community-centered media art ecology.
As a curator, writer and educator, Vanessa Chang builds communities and conversations about art, technology and human bodies. She is Senior Program Manager at Leonardo/ISAST. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and teaches in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. Most recently, she curated Recoding CripTech at SOMArts Cultural Center, Intersections at the Leonardo Convening at Fort Mason Center for the Arts, and Artobots, a CODAME festival of art, automation and artificial intelligence. She was also lead investigator for The Grid: Art + Tech Report (2020). She has appeared on NPR’s On the Media, State of the Art, Disability Visibility, and Ö1’s Repairing the Future, and her curatorial work has been profiled in such venues as Art in America and KQED Arts. Her writing has been published in Wired, Slate, Noema, Los Angeles Review of Books, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Journal of Visual Culture, among other venues.
Our lecture series is made possible by generous support from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program.