Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State Street
Join us for a performance and talk by visionary digital artist Claudia Hart.
Live captions for this in-theater program will be available HERE.
Hart's "artwork can open the same kind of paradoxical space between our tangible and virtual experiences…This is an uncanny, poetic space, full of strange collisions between what we expect and what we actually experience.” – Katie Peyton Hofstadter, Flash Art
Since the late 1980s, esteemed digital artist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Claudia Hart has used 3D simulations technology to produce subversive works on identity and experience across the virtual and physical worlds. Taking shape through physical installations, mixed reality sculptures, projection-mapped performances, and what she calls “Digital Combines”—hybrid works that combine the virtual and physical—these projects explore the poetic threshold between the concrete and abstract. In this special evening, Hart debuts a new live performance titled MEMORY THEATER (2023) in which she recites autobiographical tales alongside video simulations of past artworks, bringing together her past, present, and imagined selves. The curator and technologist Kelani Nichole joins her afterward for an in-depth conversation about the performance, related projects, and the central questions that have driven Hart's career.
2019–23, USA, 60 minutes plus discussion
Format: digital video and live performance
In English
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ABOUT
Claudia Hart has been active as an artist, curator, and critic since 1988. She was an early adopter of virtual imaging and 3D animation in fine art and developed the experimental 3D program for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums including the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been shown at the New Museum and produced at the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14; at Pioneer Works, New York, where she was a technology resident in 2018; and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, University of California, Berkeley where she is currently a fellow. She lives in New York and is represented in the US by bitforms gallery.
Kelani Nichole is a technologist and founder of TRANSFER, an experimental media art gallery exhibiting decentralized networks and virtual worlds in contemporary art since 2013. Her inventions range from software-enabled immersive exhibition formats to new forms of cultural infrastructure. Currently she is building a new cultural organization as Head of Experience at E.A.T_WORKS, advising artists and institutions on Web 3 strategies.
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VISITOR INFORMATION
Tickets are free for SAIC students, $5 for SAIC/AIC faculty and staff, and $12 for the general public. Unless otherwise noted, SAIC student tickets are released five days prior to showtime. Tickets must be picked up in person from the Gene Siskel Film Center box office. A student ID is required.
The Film Center is fully ADA accessible. Theaters are hearing-loop equipped. CATE events are presented with real-time captions (CART). For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu.
For current COVID-19 protocols, please visit the Gene Siskel Film Center’s COVID-19 page.
