So, it’s been awhile since I have posted. But that is for good reason; I have just recently gotten back from China and Korea, where I went with a class for the Gwangju Biennale, Busan Biennale, Seoul New Media Biennale and Shanghai Biennale. Our dean, Okwui Enwezor, was the Artistic Director of this year’s Gwangju Biennale, so he took it as an opportunity to lead a class in exploring the bourgeoning contemporary art landscape in Asia, with a special focus on spectacle and the incredible number of biennales taking place there. It was a great trip, much more cultural than the last one I went on with him, and we even found time to go to Beijing and view the aftermath of the Olympics.

More photos after the jump.

Click to enlarge!

On Monday, there will be a panel discussion at my school, the San Francisco Art Institute, happening that I worked in producing, entitled “From Cinema to Machinema” with Lynn Hershman Leeson, Chair of SFAI’s Film department, and Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art moderating and panel participants Henrik Bennetsen, Char Davies, Scott Kildall and Second Front, Howard Rheingold (via Second Life), Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback. To take from the PR material:

A panel discussion and virtual performance event, From Cinema to Machinima—Software, Database, and the Moving Image will explore the many ways in which the digital medium has reconfigured, even transformed, the moving image and thereby redefined concepts of cinema. Whether through software processes or interaction by the viewer, image sequences have become discrete units that can be remixed in new constellations; indeed, once digital interactivity became connected to databases, the possibility of assembling and reconfiguring media elements from a compilation of image sequences opened the way to a host of new cinematic forms.

These emerging cinematic forms include database cinema, interactive narrative or non-narrative films, and machinima—filmmaking within computer games or 3D virtual worlds, such as Second Life, in which characters and events can be controlled either by humans, scripts, or artificial intelligence.

The discussion will be followed by a short performance event in Second Life, which will be broadcast in the Lecture Hall. The panel and Q&A with the audience will be streamed live in Second Life.

More information can be found here and here.

San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 chestnut street campus
7:30–9:30pm
free and open to the public