Exhibitions

LEA New Media Exhibition: Interview with Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Posted by on

 

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul
LEA Editorial Assistant: Ebru Surek

Jonah Brucker-Cohen opens the exhibition Re-Drawing Boundaries. The Re-Drawing Boundaries online exhibition is a first of a series that will focus on thematic conceptual and aesthetic frameworks focusing on artists that have been seminal in their chosen fields. The exhibition is curated by Jeremy Hight, with Senior Curators Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an adjunct assistant professor of communications in the Media, Culture, Communication dept of NYU Steinhardt School of Culture Education. He is co-founder of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA Group) and a recipient of the ARANEUM Prize sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Art, Science and Technology and Fundacion ARCO. His writing has appeared in numerous international publications including Wired Magazine, Make Magazine, Neural, Rhizome.org, Art Asia Pacific, Gizmodo and more, and his work has been shown at events such as DEAF (03,04), Art Futura (04), SIGGRAPH (00,05), UBICOMP (02,03,04), CHI (04,06) Transmediale (02,04,08), NIME (07), ISEA (02,04,06,09), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (04), Whitney Museum of American Art’s ArtPort (03), Ars Electronica (02,04,08), Chelsea Art Museum, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art (04-5), Museum of Modern Art (MOMA – NYC) (2008), and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008).

Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA),  ISSN No: 1071-4391
LEA International Curatoriate:
Lanfranco Aceti & Christiane Paul (Senior Curators), Jeremy Hight (New Media Curator), Vince Dziekan (Digital Media Curator)


Alerting Infrastructure! Jonah Brucker-Cohen, 2003. Alerting Infrastructure! is a physical hit counter that translates hits to the web site of an organization into interior damage of the physical building that web site or organization represents. The focus of the piece is to amplify the concern that physical spaces are slowly losing ground to their virtual counterparts. The amount of structural damage to the building directly correlates to the amount of exposure and attention the web site gets, thus exposing the physical structure’s temporal existence.


PoliceState, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, 2003. PoliceState is a Carnivore client by Jonah Brucker-Cohen that attempts to reverse the surveillance role of law enforcement into a subservient one for the data being gathered. The client consists of a fleet of 20 radio controlled police vehicles that are all simultaneously controlled by data coming into the main client. The client looks for packet information relating to domestic US terrorism. Once found, the text is then assigned to an active police radio code, translated to its binary equivalent, and sent to the array of police cars as a movement sequence. In effect, the data being “snooped” by the authorities is the same data used to control the police vehicles. Thus the police become puppets of their own surveillance. This signifies a reversal of the control of information appropriated by police by using the same information to control them.

LEA New Media Exhibition: Interview with Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.