The School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents Digital Diving: A “Cut and Paste” Update. Moderated by Suzanne Anker, chair of the BFA Fine Arts Department at SVA, the symposium will explore the uses and abuses of digital technologies as they effect knowledge acquisition and its manipulation. “New media” models of the visual and alterations in community configurations will be the focus of the discussion . The panelists are Lauren Cornell, Joseph Nechvatal, Judith Solodkin, Bruce Wands and McKenzie Wark. The event takes place Tuesday, February 27, 7pm at School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd Street, New York City. Admission is free.

Panelists include:
Lauren Cornell is Executive Director of Rhizome and oversees and develops the organization’s programs all of which serve to promote and contextualize contemporary art that uses new technologies.

Joseph Nechvatal is a digital artist who produces computer robotic-assisted paintings that focus on political issues. His work has been exhibited in one-person shows in Paris, Munich, New York and Marseille, and is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among others. He has published numerous essays on digital art as well as the impact of media culture on modern life.

Judith Solodkin is president of Solo Impression, Inc., a fine art publisher that has printed editions for the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery, London, among others. She is currently working on print editions that employ digital embriodery.

Bruce Wands is chair of the MFA Computer Art Department at SVA. The department’s web site, www.mfaca.sva.edu, was named among the “100 Best Sites of 2002” for original web art by Yahoo Internet Life. Wands is the author of Digital Creativity: Techniques for Digital Media and the Internet (Wiley, 2001), and Art of the Digital Age (Thames & Hudson, 2006), an illustrated guide to digital art’s major genres.
McKenzie Wark is associate professor of media studies at Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research. He has written several books about new media and cyberspace, including A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), about issues involving intellectual property, and Dispositions (Salt Publishing, 2002), a diary -like “novel” set primarily in New York City.
Moderator Suzanne Anker is an artist and theorist. Anker lectures frequently in the U.S. and abroad on the intersections of art and science. She is the co-author, with the late Dorothy Nelkin, of The Molecular Gazw: Art in the Genetic Age (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004) and host of The Bio-Blurb Show on WPS1 art radio.

For more information, contact Michael Grant, Assistant Director of Communication at 212.592.2011 or mrgrant@sva.edu.