James Powderly and Eun-Jung Son: Artists Talk
Date: Wednesday, January 18, at 7PM
Artist in Residence program of the Tobacco 001 Cultural Centre (Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana) once a year invites a guest in cooperation with an NGO, this year with Ljudmila.
James Powderly and Eun-Jung Son, the artists who have just started the residency will present their previous work at Ljudmila's Digital Dish on Wednesday, January 18.
Powderly will first introduce activities of Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) – an art group dedicated to development and dissemination of experimental open source technologies for urban communication. The GRL is also associated with Free Art and Technology Lab (FAT Lab) that currently connects 21 hackers, artists, programmers, engineers and designers who are interested in expanding the collaborative use of public spaces. Later, he will present a 24 hours endurance performance Torture Classics that was enacted live in 2010 at Gyeonggi Creation Center in Daebudo (South Korea) and streamed on-line. The artist was subjected to horrific pop music that saturates our radio waves and tortured by the experienced interrogator Hans Bernhard of UBERMORGEN.COM. The performance was a resonance of torture procedures executed by numerous governments of the present time and the artist’s personal experience of six days of incarceration in a Bejing jail during the Olympic Games in 2008.
In the second part of the presentation Eun-Jung Son will speak about a special workshop method Dream Move for children combining sports, media art and programming designed to encourage physical activity.
James Powderly is a designer and educator working in the fields of open-source, creative technology design, aerospace robotics, tattoos, rock'n'roll, education and media art since 1996. His art and design work has been exhibited on six continents and he has two artworks in the permanent collection of the MoMA in NYC. His first feature-film premiered at the Film Festival in 2008. He has participated in numerous international residencies and fellowships with organizations like the Eyebeam OpenLab and the Gyeonggi Creation Center, and won numerous awards, including the Design of the Year in Interactive Art from the Design Museum, London, the Golden Nica and Award of Distinction from Ars Electronica, the Swiss Art Award at Art Basel, the Future Everything Award and the Excellence Prize from the Japan New Media Art Festival. James is the co-founder of both the award-winning Graffiti Research Lab and the international, open-source art pioneers, The Free Art and Technology Lab. He was also part of the team that created and operated the Mars Exploration Rover and the Phoenix Lander for NASA. James worked as an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School for Design and is currently an Assistant Professor at Hongik University. Time Magazine included James on their list of the “Top 10 Guerilla Artists” of all time. James currently lives in Seoul, South Korea and has started his own design studio, called Nasa Factory.
Eun-Jung Son has been involved in educating young people since 2006. She has a degree in Visual Communication Design from Soongeui Women’s College and a degree in Education fromKorea University. She has taught young people, including children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome, and conducted educational workshops in Korea, Malaysia and Africa. She is the founder of an internationally-renowned, innovative education program, called Dream Move, that combines technology, creativity and physical education. She is the CEO and co-founder of NASA Factory, a design studio based in Seoul.
Nasa Factory, which translates to “screw factory” in Korean, is an art and design R&D studio based in Seoul, South Korea that specializes in new media technology, design services and original equipment manufacturing for the arts, entertainment and commercial industries. Nasa Factory was co-founded in 2011 by James Powderly and EJ Son.
In collaboration with the portal ArtistTalk.eu.
The Ljudmila program at KUD France Preseren Trnovo and the Ljudmila Society, laboratory for science and arts, are both supported by the Slovene Ministry of Culture and MOL - Department of Culture.