SVA Art in the First Person Series: The Vanishing Points of Treece on Monday, February 15 @ 6:30pm

I'm so delighted to be part of SVA's Art in the First Person series and have the opportunity to discuss my new book, Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects, with photographer Dina Kantor. Her Treece series is a significant part of my discussion on photography in Chapter 6. 

Monday, February 15, 2016 @ 6:30 pm | 133 West 21st Street, Room 101C

Left: VANISHING POINTS by Natasha Chuk (Intellect, Ltd., 2015); Right: Dina Kantor, Treece Water Tower 2012

My essay, The Importance of Abstraction, featured In First Person Scholar

As the title suggests, The Importance of Abstraction discusses what I believe is the most significant feature of video games, and pushes for additional abstract thinking and conceptualizing in games. It was presented at the Different Games Conference earlier this year, and now lives here among several other select papers in this special issue.

My book cover and description. (Out on September 15, 2015)

interartive: ORIGINAL VS. COPY | special issue #75

My essay, The Language of Repetition, was published in Interartive's special issue on the topic of the original versus the copy. 

The crux of Vanishing Points.

This is a passage from the introduction to Jed Rasula's book, Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (p. xi).

The Importance of Abstraction @ Different Games 2015

I'm participating in the Different Games 2015 Conference this weekend, April 3-4 at NYU's MAGNET Center in Brooklyn where I will present The Importance of Abstraction in the session called On the Nature of Video Games.

Group Exhibition: Naturally Synthetic at Made in NY Media Center by IFP | March 5–27, 2015

Images (L to R): Dana Miller, A Theory of All Things #2455 (2012); Daniel Lopera, still from In Utero, Being Life, Doing Death, Next State? (2014); Kimberly Witham, Still Life with Watermelon and Chipmunk (2011); Caryn Cline, still from Left Side, Riverside (2011); Erica Magrey, screenshot from Face, Porthole, Window, Glovebox (2013)

Naturally Synthetic is a group exhibition I curated featuring video and photographic works by Caryn Cline, Daniel Lopera, Erica Magrey, Dana Miller, and Kimberly Witham.

NATURALLY SYNTHETIC
CURATED BY NATASHA CHUK
March 5–27, 2015
Opening reception: Thursday, March 5, 6-9pm
Refreshments will be served.

Made in NY Media Center by IFP
30 John Street
Brooklyn, New York, 11201
(718) 729-6677

Hours: daily 9am – 10pm

NATURALLY SYNTHETIC | With the ability to extend sight, memory, and interaction, our media tools foster a naturally synthetic hub through which nature and experience are visualized, made accessible, and become normalized, achieving something that feels naturally synthetic.

The artists selected for this group show make subtle use of their chosen medium to capture and construct synthetic environments that serve to analyze or question things like humanity, what it means to be alive, and under what conditions can fantasy and reality become enmeshed.

Database Aesthetics, Moving Images, and Digital Art

This is what I'll be discussing this weekend at the SWPACA Conference (February 11-14, 2015) in Albuquerque, NM.

Zero is the beginning.

Today is the last day to catch the ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s exhibition at the Guggenheim NYC. Amazing!

View fullsize

Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, ZERO 3, July 1961

Otto Piene, Venus of Willendorf, 1963

Dina Kantor's Treece

Last night I attended Dina Kantor's opening at A.I.R Gallery in Dumbo where she's exhibiting images from her photographic series Treece. This is the body of work that inspired a significant part of one of my chapters in Vanishing Points, for which I also had the pleasure of interviewing Kantor. The exhibition features many images I hadn't seen before or have included in my publication, plus there are some found images and artifacts on display from the now dissolved town.

The exhibition runs from June 26 - July 20, 2014.

A.I.R. Gallery | 111 Front Street #228, Brooklyn, NY. | GALLERY HOURS: Wed-Sun, 11AM - 6PM

Antonioni's Giving into the Game

After putting together what turned out to be a very colorful discussion on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Guy Debord's notion of psychogeography for my Writing and Orality class, I couldn't resist including this memorable closing scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up. I'm very happy to make this kind of introduction.

All the Best, Alice

Located within these pages of the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media (at the School of Visual Arts) annual department journal All the Best, Alice Spring 2014 issue, is my short essay, The In-Betweenness of Cinema, which accompanies the incredible filmic work of three department alumni: Sharon Mooney, Bo Wang, and Ivan Cortazar.

The journal is beautifully designed and filled with a range of striking images by talented students in the department. It's definitely worth thumbing through its entirety.

Read my essay here.

More talk of invisibility: Friday, Feb. 21, 2014

This past weekend I turned my attention to Christian Marclay's The Clock to discuss time, perception, and the sneaky relationship to presence and absence at the Southwest Popular/American Culture conference in Albuquerque, NM. My paper, A Cinema of Perpetual Invisibility, is derived from a chapter of my soon-to-be-published book, Vanishing Points.

Rendering (the) Visible II: Figure Conference | Feb. 6-8, 2014

This weekend I'm headed to the Rendering the Visible II: Figure Conference, organized by Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where I'm presenting a paper called The Color of Absence in a panel called Phantoms. This paper is derived from my research for Vanishing Points, and focuses on two brilliant film works of invisibility: Guy Debord's Hurlements en faveur de Sade and Nam June Paik's Zen for Film.