Art, Code and Narrative

James Coupe, Sanctum. Commissioned by the Henry Art Gallery, with support from the Barton Family Foundation, Linden Rhoads and DXARTS. http://jamescoupe.com/?p=1740

Skill Share: A Northern Lights.mn SymposiumMarch 27-28, 2015 at the Soap FactoryFree, registration required for both days on EventBriteSponsored by the Jerome Foundation

Join us for a conversation on art, surveillance and narrative plus an afternoon knowledge-share of information every artist working with media in the public sphere needs to know.  Part artist talk, part skills fair and part happy hour, this gathering aims to build knowledge, peer learning and expand networks around contemporary digital art in conjunction with Art(ists) on the Verge.

Friday, March 27, 7 pmJames Coupe: Metadata and Meta Narratives
Co-presented with What’s Up Pop Up by Sarah Lutman and Associates

Using surveillance systems, social media, and neuroscience, James Coupe makes art that approaches narrative in unusual ways. Some works are composed by using pre-existing literary or cinematic templates as a framework; others take social media as a narrative framework in itself. For example, in (re)collector, a city-wide surveillance camera network attempted to reconstruct Antonioni’s classic film, Blow Up, from people’s everyday activities; and in Today, too, I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days, Facebook’s profiling algorithms are used to generate films that use people’s status updates as scripts.

The talk will consider the use of narrative in Coupe’s work alongside a discussion of metadata, surveillance and autonomous systems.

James Coupe is an artist and associate professor at the University of Washington’s renowned DX Arts program.