"Networked Art" Participants

ABSTRACT
In the proposed paper I intend to consider practices of media art taken within the context of the discourses of transmediality and the sublime. Digital technology creates phenomena that provoke new modes of perception and new sensory experiences, including those evoking a sense of something that is beyond representation, a feeling traditionally belonging to the aesthetic framework of the sublime. I am particularly interested in the analysis of affective qualities of the experience of transition across media borders and of the potential realm beyond the closed loops of these borders. I would like to explore possible connections between the concept of the beyond and the idea of the “in between” space of electronic transmission, challenging the presupposition about computation being the most objective and neutral means of translation between different media languages.
What kind of meaning does this translation produce on the level of phenomenological and aesthetic inquiry, but also in terms of increasingly complicated cultural relations? What is in this transfer or transposition from one medium to another, in this interstice created by transmedial operations that courts the modern consumerized sensibility? What is the correlation between “technological contamination”, sensorium and the unutterable? How can “hypermediacy” (J.D.Bolter) as a strategy of disruption of the seamlessness of technological use contribute to the discussion of liminality effect? Finally, what are the strategies via which new media art enacts the sensorial tensions of transmediality?
The examples will include practices representing diverse types of rendering relations: visual and acoustic interpretations of physical data (“psychogeophysics” projects by micro_research group), mutually affected recombinations of movement, speech and written text (“BodyText” by Simon Biggs and Sue Hawksley), as well as interactive projects, involving smell and gesture by Russian group “Where the Dogs Run”.

BIO

She holds MA in Philosophy (Ural State University, Russia, 2005) and MA in Art History (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, 2007). She is currently completing her PhD in Philosophy (Aesthetics) at the Ural Federal University (Ekaterinburg, Russia) and is a PhD fellow at the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, University of California, Davis (USA).
She has been an initiator and curator of the “Art. Science. Technology” program at the Ural branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts (Ekaterinburg) where she has curated a number of international exhibitions, educational series and conferences. She has taught classes on media art theory and history at the Ural State University, Danube University, Krems, University of Arts, Linz (Austria) and has participated in many international conferences and workshops including in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Copenhagen, Oxford, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Irvine, Trondheim.
She is an author of articles and essays in Russian and international editions and is a co-editor (with Nina Sosna) of the anthology Media: Between Magic and Technology (Moscow-Ekaterinburg: Armchair Scientist, 2013, in Russian). She served as a member of the Jury of PRIX Ars Electronica-2012 and the selection committee for PRO&CONTRA, a symposium and media art contest based in Moscow, Russia.
Ksenia has been awarded a Fulbright fellowship (2005-2007 for MA studies in the U.S.), IFA curatorial fellowship (2009-2010, for research at the ZKM Karlsruhe), Danish Government Scholarship (2012, for research at the Aarhus University).
Her research interests lie within the spheres of media art theory and history, aesthetics, philosophy, techno-cultural studies, and curatorial studies. In her dissertation she fathoms the concept of the ‘technological sublime’ in relation to media art as a term that addresses the potential and the ambiguities arising from the power of media technologies, informing the debate with a historically grounded epistemological discourse (e.g. of the negative order of representation).

Selected publications:
1. ‘Sounding Cartographies. In Search for the Sublime’// Mobile Network Culture, special edition of Leonardo Electronic Almanac, ed. by Hana Iverson and Mimi Sheller, forthcoming in 2013.
2. ‘The Technological Sublime in Media Art’// “The Garden of Digital Delights”, Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis, peer-reviewed journal, forthcoming in 2012.
3. (with Marc Barasch) ‘Mission to Earth: Terrestrial Proprioception and the Cyber-Sublime’// The Projected and Prophetic: Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace, and Science Fiction, edited by Jordan J. Copeland, Rodopi Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-84888-087-0.
4. Art Focus for Technologies: Charm and Challenge, NCCA, Ekaterinburg, 2011, editor and author of exhibition catalogue.
5. ‘Marking the Territories. Teleart and Locative Media’// DI (Dialogue of Arts Magazine), 2, 2011 (in Russian).
and others.