On Tuesday May 10 2016 Joseph Gallivan interviews Jeff Jahn [pronounced Y-ahn], editor of PORT, and video artist Adam Simmons, about Habitats, a group show at the University of Oregon Portland campus. The show asks What is Media? Jahn (one ofthe curators) and Simmons, who is showing a 17 minute video piece, talk about the immersive state of media and how art relates to it.
This show was recorded at KBOO on April 30 and edited by KBOO volunteer Sam Parrish.
Habitats runs at 70 NW Couch St through May 14.
Photos courtesy PORT.
From Jeff Jah's PORT:
As I've mentioned before I have been working on another enormous multimedia/intellectually demanding project and the time has come to let PORT readers and everyone else know. I've been helping with the U of O's 6th annual What Is? conference titled What Is? Media and co-curating the interwoven exhibition Habitats featuring feminist/artificial intelligence art pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson (who will speak at PAM on the 15th). Check out the official Habitats page for the full list of artists. Yes, this is at the U of O in Portland and the exhibition is free to everyone, conference attendance not required.
Habitats is an installation art heavy multi-media exploration of media (in the broadest definition)as a habitat. Portland hasn't seen a large group show like this in a long time and it features; virtual reality, architecture, drones, proposed hybridized human organs, artificial intelligence, hacked video games, honey bees, wolf packs and more. It opens on Thursday April 14th at 7:00 at the University of Oregon's Portland campus beneath the Made in Oregon sign.
PR Statement: "The exhibition emerges at the University of Oregon in Portland's Light Court Commons, in collaboration with the WHITE BOX Gallery, and the Library & Learning Commons. HABITATS has been organized in conjunction with the sixth annual WHAT IS...? Conference-Experience on the themes of medium and media. The question, WHAT IS MEDIA? will have many answers and illicit even more questions, but curators, Jeremy Swartz, Jeff Jahn, and Cris Moss, expect that this participatory experience will engage artist-artifact-audience as a process of meaningful discourse. As such, art is a medium of communication, and communication is a medium--or environment--of art. These artists have cultivated their idiomatic hives/swarms/flocks/packs, and their mediums are enacted as HABITATS."
http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2016/04/habitats_2016_a_3.html
- KBOO