Curator: Patrick Lichty
Patrick Lichty is a media “reality” artist, curator, and theorist of over two decades who explores how media and mediation affect our perception of reality. He is best known for his work as an Artistic Director of the virtual reality performance art group Second Front, and the animator of the activist group, The Yes Men. He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow and Whitney Biennial exhibitor as part of the collective RTMark. His book, Variant Analyses: Interrogations of New Media Culture was released by the Institute for Networked Culture, and is included in the Oxford Handbook of Virtuality.
Jurors
Roger Boulay (he/him) is an artist, curator, and educator based in Winona, Minnesota. He has exhibited his work nationally, including solo exhibitions at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, MN, the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY and at Gallery 19 in Chicago, IL. He is the recipient of a 2018 Southeastern Minnesota Artist Council grant and the 2018-19 recipient of the Professional Excellence award at Winona State University.
Cynthia Beth Rubin
Cynthia Beth Rubin is a new media artist whose works frequently evoke cultural memories and the imagined past by intertwining photographic elements in complex layers of representation and abstraction. Recently, Rubin's work has shifted from explorations of the vestiges human history into conversation with Nature. She is interested in how Nature affects our built environment, and how both the microscopic plankton and the macroscopic landscape are part of our world.
Rubin began experimenting with digital media in the early 1980's. The transition from painting to the electronic arts prompted new experimentation in both subject and formats of presentation of her imagery. Working in still images, moving images, and with inter-activity, Rubin now works independently and in collaboration.
Brandon Gellis, Director, University of Wyoming
As a new media artist his creative practice is deeply rooted in his love of working across digital and analog media to explore and create speculative narratives and aesthetics through generative and computer visualizations, virtual, augmented and mixed realities, physical computing, 3D-digital design & 4D motion graphics, and digitally-interactive installation.
He creates intricate, multimedia exhibitions focused on intersections art and science and experienced through digital technologies (i.e., augmented, computational and emergent-digital approaches). For Gellis, the act of digitally-manipulating moments and memories in time and place ensure temporality – altering their relevance, significance and existence – without recognition of their original state or value. Each augmented image, frame, sequence and interaction serves as a window into new, unresolved realities.
Negin Ehtesabian
Negin Ehtesabian is an interdisciplinary artist, illustrator, and designer. Ehtesabian studied Visual Communication at the University of Tehran and Animation at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK. Her artistic practice involves collaborative new media, illustration, design, and intercultural art and research projects. The artist’s recent focus has been on interdisciplinary and collaborative art projects and book art.
Wade Wallerstein
Wade Wallerstein is a digital anthropologist and curator whose work addresses the emotional, embodied aspects of our online experiences. Founder of Silicon Valet and Co-director of TRANSFER Gallery, Wallerstein has brought his deep engagement in the internet art community to Gray Area Festival, resulting in a far-reaching roster of artists and thinkers grappling with what it means to be human in the digital age.