Panel 1: Opening Discussion-The INDEX Festival

Moderated by: Victoria Keddie and Kristin Trethewey, organizers of the INDEX Festival

Wed, Aug 3, 2011, 6PM-9PM

This is the first of a four part panel series. This discussion will celebrate the opening of the INDEX festival with international voices that represent the community of media festivals and a focus on technology and art. This panel begins a conversation about the landscape, process and preservation within contemporary digital culture.

A vernissage for To Have And To Hold will follow the panel discussion from 7-9PM with artists Andrew Graham, Janos Stone and Matthew Spiegelberg. The exhibition To Have And To Hold looks at the tension between artists who are reacting and responding to digital culture through the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture. Mirroring the language or aesthetics of digital culture, these artists move back and forth between the terrain of man and machine within their process. This show will remain at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center throughout the month of August 2011.

PANELISTS

Malcolm Levy, New Forms Festival, Vancouver, Canada

Over the past 15 years Malcolm Levy’s focus has been around projects at the intersection of art, culture and technology. Working in experimental film, installation art and documentary, Malcolm began his career co-founding capitalmag.com in 1999 and the New Forms Festival in 2000 (where he continued to work as Director until 2007). He has created film, writing, interactive and installation works including projects for CBC / 120seconds, Virtual Museum Canada, Tech TV, Mobile Muse, MUTEK, Project Stitch, VIDFEST and Assignment Zero. Malcolm’s films and video installation works have been presented in India, Australia, China and Canada. He directed ‘Shambhala’ (2001-2008) over the course of 9 years, a documentary following the life and times of the festival by the same name, and is currently in post-production of ‘Walking on Glass’ (2006-2008), a story following religion, politics, development and the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. Malcolm currently works as the Lead Curator / Producer of the CODE Live, taking place during the Olympic Arts Festival at Vancouver 2010.

Cornelia Lund, Fluctuating Images, Berlin, Germany
Cornelia Lund is a media theorist and curator living in Berlin. She holds a PhD on “French Poetry Illustrations” from the University of Stuttgart, where she has also worked as a research associate at the International Center for Cultural and Technological Studies from 2001 to 2004. Since 2004, together with Holger Lund, she has been running fluctuating images (Stuttgart/Berlin), a platform for contemporary media art (www.fluctuating-images.de). From 2009 to 2010 she has been working on a DFG research project on German documentary film at the Potsdam Film & Television Academy (HFF Konrad Wolf), currently she is teaching in the MA Intermedia at the University of Applied Sciences Vorarlberg in Austria. She has widely published on the relationship of image and text, moving images and sound as well as dance and film, and she is co-editor, together with Holger Lund, of “Audio.Visual – On Visual Music and Related Media” (2009).

Ceci Moss, Rhizome, New York City, US
Ceci Moss is a freelance writer, musician, DJ, and curator. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at NYU. Her research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice, digital technology and perception, the materiality of media, postmodernism and digital art preservation. From 2007-2011 she was Senior Editor of Rhizome, where she is presently a Staff Writer. She writes and edits the online contemporary art and music blog A Million Keys. For the past ten years, she’s programmed the weekly radio show Radio Heart on KALX and East Village Radio. She studied Sociology, History and French at UC Berkeley, and Critical Theory in Paris, France at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III/Centre parisien d’études critiques.

Nathalie Bachand, Elektra Festival, Montreal, Canada
Nathalie Bachand is in charge of development for Elektra. She recently led a project for publication highlighting the ten years of the festival, Angles Digital Arts (2009), with texts by Daniel Canty, Vincent Bonin and Chatonsky and has also contributed to the collective Unusual Tactics: Towards a research methodology in practice Art (2004). She holds a Master of Fine Arts and has completed doctoral studies in education and practice of art from UQAM. Currently involved on the boards of the Centre des arts actuels Skol and CQAM, she also works on the editorialboard of the journal Inter, art actuel.

MODERATORS Victoria Keddie +Kristin Trethewey