Natalie Bookchin, Interdisciplinary artist, professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (USA)

Natalie Bookchin is an interdisciplinary artist working with moving image, sound, and media archives. Bookchin’s work been exhibited and screened around the world including at MoMA, LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Tate, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA LA, the Whitney Museum, the ICP Museum, the Kitchen, and La Virreina Center for the Image, Barcelona. She has received awards and fellowships from California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Durfee Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, California Community Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Daniel Langlois Foundation, a COLA Artist Fellowship, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the MacArthur Foundation, a NYSCA Individual Artist Fellowship, a NYSCA/MAAF award, and most recently a Bellagio Arts Fellowship. Her artwork has been commissioned by the Tate, Creative Time, LACMA, and the Walker Art Center among others. She is a professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Abstract

Can a person's subjectivity and humanity escape the reach of the algorithm?

What about the resonance of the silence of another, the spaces between their words, or the feeling when their gaze meets yours? Can those feelings or experiences be quantified? With algorithms present in nearly all aspects of daily life, what remains beyond their control? For many years in my art practice, I have explored these questions, searching for the emancipatory potential in unlikely situations, working with archives of “data”—videos and sounds— that people make and share. I search for something irreducible that can’t be easily monetized, for the ways that people act together, sometimes without knowing it, and for the potential for social solidarity in a society where the conditions for such alliances are rapidly disappearing.

Chair: Madalena Miranda (NOVA FCSH, ICNOVA)

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