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Garnet Hertz will provide an overview of his origins in Saskatoon and his work as an artist and researcher over the past three decades in a talk titled "Creative Hacking: A Century of DIY Electronic Culture".The talk will start with an overview of his art and design work that originated in Saskatoon in the early 1990s. Often playing with and against technology, his work includes robots controlled by living cockroaches, arcade cabinets that drive down the street, and devices designed to take away people's cell phones.
He will also provide an overview of 2023 book from MIT Press titled "Art + DIY Electronics", described by Tina Rivers Ryan, the Editor in Chief of ArtForum magazine, as "groundbreaking". "Hertz argues that the DIY electronic artists who 'kludge' their own technologies constitute an important artistic countercultural practice that is an urgent response to the escalating failures of our technological infrastructures.”
MIT Press describes the monograph as follows:
"A systematic theory of DIY electronic culture, drawn from a century of artists who have independently built creative technologies.
Since the rise of Arduino and 3D printing in the mid-2000s, do-it-yourself approaches to the creative exploration of technology have surged in popularity. But the maker movement is not new: it is a historically significant practice in contemporary art and design. This book documents, tracks, and identifies a hundred years of innovative DIY technology practices, illustrating how the maker movement is a continuation of a long-standing creative electronic subculture. Through this comprehensive exploration, Garnet Hertz develops a theory and language of creative DIY electronics, drawing from diverse examples of contemporary art, including work from renowned electronic artists such as Nam June Paik and such art collectives as Survival Research Laboratories and the Barbie Liberation Organization. Hertz uncovers the defining elements of electronic DIY culture, which often works with limited resources to bring new life to obsolete objects while engaging in a critical dialogue with consumer capitalism. Whether hacking blackboxed technologies or deploying culture jamming techniques to critique commercial labor practices or gender norms, the artists have found creative ways to make personal and political statements through creative technologies. The wide range of innovative works and practices profiled in Art + DIY Electronics form a general framework for DIY culture and help inspire readers to get creative with their own adaptations, fabrications, and reimaginations of everyday technologies."
Bio: Garnet Hertz is Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts, and is Associate Professor of Design at Emily Carr University. His art and research investigates DIY culture, electronic art and critical design practices. He has exhibited in 18 countries in venues including SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, and DEAF and has won top international awards for his work, including the Oscar Signorini Award in robotic art, a Fulbright award, and Best Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). He has worked as Faculty at Art Center College of Design and as Research Scientist at the University of California Irvine. His research is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his work has disseminated through 25 countries including in publications like The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News. More info: http://conceptlab.com/
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
PAVED Arts, 424 20th St W, Saskatoon, SK S7M 0X4, Canada,Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
