This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). See the conference website for information as well as event registration.

Jason Hughes (@hughesalicious) of the STAMP Gallery and I (@Praxis_In_Space), organized an invited panel session that addresses the link between new media and art and a gallery exhibit for the day of the conference.  When we organized the panel and exhibit, we felt it was important to give artists a place at the conference to discuss and share their perspectives on the influence of new media and the web.

The aims of the panel are to highlight the ways in which art often reflects ubiquitous social changes (namely the presence of new media) and the ways the creative and artistic uses of new media are pushing/challenging academic understandings of new media. More importantly, in the spirit of this conference, we will foster a discussion that will engage what role(s) social theory(ies) and/or practices have in their epistemological approach to new media and art.

We are pleased to announce the panelist will be Krista Caballero, Cliff Evans (@cliffevansnet), and Alberto Gatián (@nootrope) and Jeremy Pesner (@The_Pezman) will be moderating the panel.

[descriptions of the art projects after the jump] 

Krista Caballero is an interdisciplinary artist whose work unpacks cultural myths relating to the “American” West, technology, gendered land use, and ideas of the sublime. Her work strives for an integrated approach where questions of mental, social and environmental ecology might activate imaginations, shift perceptions and reveal the connections between our vision of the environment and our understanding of society and self. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University and in 2009 attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Caballero is currently the Associate Director of the Digital Cultures and Creativity Program at the University of Maryland.

Cliff Evans’ works are a mash-up of unrelated styles that mesh effortlessly using the medium of video. Evans uses a rich variety of imagery sources, such as Northern Renaissance devotional paintings, and blends these into present-day single and multi-channel digital video pieces resulting in cohesive works that portray his outlook on the modern and future worlds. Evans graduated in 2002 from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA where he was recently visiting faculty in video arts. Evans is represented in Washington DC by Curator’s Office.

Alberto Gaitán is a multi-media artist living and working in the DC area since 1980. He has worked collaboratively in cross-media projects with musicians, poets, choreographers, visual artists, software programmers and engineers, and has built solo pieces that mashup different disciplines. His process pieces sonify and visualize aspects of physical and data spaces to expose the potential and limits of transcription and the impossibility of communion with the massively parallel processes at work in the ecosphere and noosphere.  More about his work can be found here: http://curatorsoffice.com/gaitan.

We hope that you will attend the panel session for what promises to be a very interesting discussion about the enmeshing of new media and art!