The ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART features ELLEN PEARLMAN
www.digitalartarchive.at
"First I’m gonna take you to La La Land, then to dystopia land."
Ellen Pearlman, Keynote at RIXC Festival 2017
For Ellen PEARLMAN, dichotomy is a centrally recurrent motif. Across her oeuvre as artist, curator, director, and scholar, Pearlman makes visible the aesthetic and innovative qualities in digital technology (e.g. cybernetics and telematics), while at the same time also their destructivity (regarding issues of public surveillance, environmental pollution, and government control). In Pearlman’s performances, she combines dance with image and sound in data visualisations, translating bodily movement and experience into their technological correspondents and opposites.
Ellen Pearlman is co-founder of several media art research projects and artist residency programmes, including Art-A-Hack and ThoughtWorks Arts Residency. Based in New York, she achieved her PhD at Hong Kong City University. Lecturing all over the world, including at the first collaborative laboratory on cyborg art at Parsons/The New School, Pearlman’s telematic and interactive video performances have been shown at major media art festivals such as Microwave Festival, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, RIXC Festival.
ARTWORKS
Pearlman’s media artworks address issues of human communication and connection through performative explorations and telematics methods, with influences from Asian culture, Buddhist and Zen thought. During her PhD research at the School of Creative Media (City U, HK), Pearlman developed Noor: A Brain Opera (2015). Within a fully immersive 360-degree environment, a performer moved through the audience wearing a wireless EEG headset, her brainwaves displayed on screen, and changing in accordance to her mood and in response to the audience. The performance discussed the hazards and hopes for cybernetic innovation, while raising the question: "is there a place in human consciousness where surveillance cannot go?"
In the video dialogue Surveillance Siddhi (2014), Pearlman searched for the meaning of being human in terms of privacy, individuality, authority, and the state. Using robotized voices, and enhanced visual processing developed by MIT’s CSAIL Lab, Pearlman created digital imagery as poetic as it was disturbing.
Explore Ellen Pearlman’s work on her artist profile on the Archive of Digital Art
BOOKS & QUOTES
In her extensive writings as book author and art journalist, Ellen Pearlman explores the histories and intersections between religion, Buddhism, dance, performativity, and modern technology. Her book Nothing and Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avantgarde (2012) drew a comparison between the art scene in America during the late 1950s to early 1960s and Zen Buddhism’s emphasis on "enlightenment at any moment" and "living in the now".
"Zen thinking permeates Western arts: the mid-century pivot to Eastern influence is a truism of previous generations, but curiously absent from contemporary mastications of history. Ellen Pearlman gets it all right: Nothing and Everything is the perfectly balanced lesson—art, and change, and friendship" wrote John Reed, novelist and book editor of The Brooklyn Rail, on Nothing and Everything.
ELLEN PEARLMAN AND MEDIAART/HISTORIES
Browse through the Media' Art Research Thesaurus and search for Keywords related to Pearlmanʼs work in order to find visual comparisons and conceptual bridges with the Graphic Print Collection of the Goettweig Collection.
Keywords: Telematics art, performance, immersive environments, surveillance, brain sensors, post-human, embodiment, telepresence
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ADA: THOUSANDS OF ARTWORKS
Since its foundation in 1999, the ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (former Database of Virtual Art) has grown to be the most important online archive for digital art. In cooperation with established media artists, researchers and institutions it has been documenting the rapidly evolving world of digital art and its related fields for more than a decade and contains today a selection of thousands of artworks at the intersection of art, science and technology. ARTISTS and SCHOLARS are invited to join the community and set up their own archive pages.
EXPANDED DOCUMENTATION FOR THE NEEDS OF DIGITAL ART
Due to the processual, ephemeral, interactive, technology-based and fundamentally context-dependent character of digital art, it is at risk for becoming extinct without an adequate documentation. Therefore, the ADA is based on an expanded concept of documentation, which takes account of the specific conditions of digital art.
ARTISTS represented, among many others: Rebecca ALLEN, Suzanne ANKER, Cory ARCANGEL, Roy ASCOTT, Louis BEC, Maurice BENAYOUN, Paolo CIRIO, Charlotte DAVIES, FLEISCHMANN & STRAUSS, Masaki FUJIHATA, Ken GOLDBERG, Agnes HEGEDÜS, Lynn HERSHMAN LEESON, Ryoji IKEDA, Eduardo KAC, Ken RINALDO, KNOWBOTIC RESEARCH, Lev MANOVICH, George LEGRADY, Golan LEVIN, Rafael LOZANO-HEMMER, Joseph NECHVATAL, Michael NAIMARK, David ROKEBY, Jeffrey SHAW, Julius v. BISMARCK, Paul SERMON, Karl SIMS, SOMMERER & MIGNONNEAU, STANZA, Nicole STENGER, THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD, Peter WEIBEL, et al.
Advisory board: Christiane PAUL, Roy ASCOTT, Erkki HUHTAMO, Gunalan NADARAJAN, et. al.
ADA TEAM:
Oliver GRAU (Head of Scientific Conception)
Janina HOTH, Wendy COONES, Ann-Christin RENN, Viola RÜHSE, Devon SCHILLER (Editorial Team)
Contact us at digitalart.editor@donau-uni.ac.at