MVR is an event series focused on new forms of exchange between body and technology. With the decreasing size and cost of computer vision, digital components and advances in virtual reality, we are faced with a new awareness of the impact of current digital practices on the physical body. MVR provides a platform for learning and discussion concerning the new interaction between body and information, device, and action.

@ Babycastles
137 W 14th St, NYC

Babycastles is a collective with roots in New York’s D.I.Y. culture dedicated to building platforms for diversity in video games culture at every level from creators to consumers, connecting the independent game developer community with the broader New York art community, identifying exciting new voices in game creation from around the world and providing them exposure to new audiences.

Presenters:
Jessica Feldman
Gene Kogan
Tega Brain
Ranjit Bhatnagar

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Jessica Feldman is a New York-based intermedia artist with a background in sound, sculpture, and installation. She moves among the worlds of new media art, electronic music, academia, and activism. Her works include sculptures, performances, interventions, installations, videos, and compositions. Many are site-specific, public, participatory, and/or interactive, and deal with the relationships among the body, technology, (the) media, and intimate psychological and communal social dynamics revealed by contemporary systems of control. Pieces have been performed, installed, and exhibited internationally at art galleries, museums, concert halls, public parks, city streets, tiny closets, boats, the New York City subways, and the internet. New York venues include Socrates Sculpture Park, White Box, The Kitchen, LMAKProjects, Roulette, The Stone, and many outdoor locations. Her work has received awards from NYSCA, the LMCC, the Max Kade Foundation, Columbia University, Meet the Composer, and the Experimental Television Center, among others. She teaches sound art, physical computing, and interactive technologies in the Graduate Media Studies program at The New School and previously taught in the sculpture department at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She received an MFA in Intermedia Art from Bard (2007), an MA in Experimental Music from Wesleyan (2005), and a BA in Music from Columbia (2001) and currently is completing a PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU.

Gene Kogan is an artist and programmer who is interested in generative systems and the application of emerging technology into artistic and expressive contexts. He writes code for live music, performance, and visual art. He contributes to open-source software projects and gives workshops and demonstrations on topics related to code and art. He is a contributor to openFrameworks, Processing, and p5.js, an adjunct professor at Bennington College, and a former resident at Eyebeam.

Tega Brain is an Australian born artist and environmental engineer whose eccentric engineering intersects art, ecology and engineering. Eccentric engineering reimagines technologies to address their scope and politics, with a focus on systems that enact more-than-only-human agendas. Her work takes the form of site specific installations, dysfunctional devices, experimental infrastructures and information systems. Tega is a 2016 fellow with the Processing Foundation and is contributing to the p5js project. She is an Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase and also works with the School for Poetic Computation, NYC. She has been an artist in residence at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City and at the Environmental Health Clinic at New York University. In 2013 she was awarded a Creative Australia Fellowship for early career artists from the Australia Council for the Arts.

Ranjit Bhatnagar discovered sound art around age 14, listening to weird late night programs on KPFA. He now works with interactive and sound installations, with scanner photography, and with internet-based collaborative art. Recent works have been exhibited at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, the Parc d’aventures scientifiques in Belgium, Flux Factory in Queens, in the Artbots series at Eyebeam Atelier and the Pratt Institute in New York, and the Mermaid Show at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn. He recently taught “Mister Resistor” at Parsons School of Design, a studio course and rock band with homemade instruments. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Ranjit received a BA from U.C. Berkeley and an MS from the University of Pennsylvania, and was certified carnie trash by the Coney Island Sideshow School in 2002. He lives in Brooklyn next to a nice big park.