avatar dancing with claudia hart

lecture, 10 nov,  7 - 9 PM

@ Galeria Galateca

FREE ENTRANCE

I started working with 3D animation 21 years ago, in 1995.  I started teaching it almost immediately after in commercial productions schools or engineering schools.  In these environments I was the only woman, and a contemporary artist, showing her work in experimental galleries which were mostly in Soho, in NYC.  It was my secret life.  I never talked about it to my students.

My hormone inundated adolescent male students made a point of producing for their class assignments only female avatars that looked like Playboy pinups, as violent, and as pornographic as they could muster. In response, my strategy was to deploy female sensuality in counterpoint to their porn.  It was my first avatar choreography.

This will tell the story of the evolution of my avatar dance language as emerging from these politicized and feminist beginnings: The Seasons -2007,  Caress - 2011, Recumulations - 2011, Dark kNight - Song of the Avatars - 2013, The Alices - 2013, Alices Walking - 2014, The Dolls - 2015, Alice Unchained - 2017.

BIO

Claudia Hart has been active as an artist, curator and critic since 1988. She works with digital trompe l'oeil as a medium, directing experimental theater and dance, as well as making media objects of all kinds.  Hart deals with issues of representation, the role of the computer in transforming cultural  values about human identity and what might be called the “natural” in our world today.  Her intention in this is to  de-masculinize the culture of corporate technology by inserting the irrational and the personal into the slick, overly-determined Cartesian world of digital design. Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, the New Museum, and the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14.  She works with Transfer and bitforms galleries, both in New York.  Claudia lives in Chicago, where she is a tenured professor at the School of the Art Institute, in the department of Film Video, New Media and Animation.