Due to Notre Dame's decision to move all courses online through at least April 13, Dr. Gloria's Sutton's lecture has been cancelled.
Join the Department of Art, Art History and Design for a lecture titled "Pattern Recognition: A Critique of the Immersive within Contemporary Art" by MFA walkthrough critic Dr. Gloria Sutton. The lecture will take place on March 16 at 9 am in room 200, Riley Hall.
Through a close reading of selected time-based media art projects Sutton argues that analog and digital images share material processes conditioned by their fundamental roles as storage media rather than as mechanisms of image capture (cameras or lenses). The term “Pattern Recognition” refers to the cognitive process by which newly acquired information is paired with historical knowledge to form a new understanding—in this case, to make sense of the plurality of image technology within contemporary art (e.g. monoprinting, scanners, and algorithms), as well as how contemporary art itself has interpolated modernist image paradigms by critically adapting digital behaviors. This talk traces the way that much of contemporary art can be understood through the following four concepts: 1. Interface instead of a Medium; 2. Iteration over Originality, 3. Compositing rather than Assemblage and 4. the way Compression, not Abstraction has become the dominant means of making an image with less information within contemporary art. The talk closes by offering a critique of the immersive, a term that has become a default descriptor for time based media often unmarked by the lived experiences of race, gender, class, and ability that not only shape and condition how people experience art, but also regulate and legislate their bodies in real time and real space. Ultimately, Pattern Recognition, outlines how digitality—a term which historically marks digital image technology’s complete integration into contemporary culture as ubiquitous and ordinary while also considering the deeper effects it has on the ways we picture and relate to one another—both reveals and occludes the mutual embeddedness of media and identity within contemporary art.
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Dr. Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Northeastern University and a Research Affiliate in the Art Culture Technology Program at MIT. Her scholarship examines the material history and theoretical frameworks of time-based art as it enters the circulatory networks of public life. Sutton’s book The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema (MIT Press) was the first study of a signal member of the American avant garde whose experimental art works combined the logic of painting, film, video, photography, dance, television, computer programming and architecture to anticipate the current ways contemporary art operates under the pressure of digital networks. Sutton’s recent essays have centered on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and algorithms (SFMoMA); Hans Haacke and notions of animacy (New Museum); Elaine Summers and Intermedia (MoMA); Simone Forti’s holograms (LACMA); Yayoi Kusama’s mirror rooms (Hirshhorn) and acts of encoding/decoding in Bruce Nauman’s installations (Schaulager). She is currently working on a monograph on the artist Shigeko Kubota.