April 21 IDAH Brown Bag Series: Leslie Sharpe "Following Iola: Data Sets and Re-Imagined Spaces of the Arctic"

IDAH Brown Bag Series presents:

Leslie Sharpe, Associate Professor of Digital Art, School of Fine Arts
"Following Iola: Data Sets and Re-Imagined Spaces of the Arctic"


When:
Thursday, April 21, 2011
12-1 p.m.


Where:
IDAH Conference Room E-170D
(In the Hall to the left of the East Tower Elevators)

Artists have long responded to place within observational and experiential frameworks. What happens when that framework is extended to interpreting place through data related to site? Leslie Sharpe, Associate Professor in the School of Fine Arts, will discuss art that uses digital and non-digital data as content that inspires new works about space and its inhabitants. In her lecture she will present other artists' works as well as her own examples of works related to telemetry, animal migration, and human land use in the Canadian Arctic, and read excerpts from her contribution to the forthcoming book, Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change, and the Poles (published by Intellect Press, UK, 2011), where she discusses this understanding of site in relationship to changing ideas and realities of the Canadian North.

Leslie Sharpe is a Canadian Artist and Associate Professor of Digital Art in the School of Fine Arts. Sharpe has been an artist in residence at P.S. 1 Museum/Institute for Contemporary Art in New York, The Banff Centre in Canada, Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, and most recently at Ivvavik National Park in the Canadian Arctic. Her work has been exhibited at the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Banff Centre (Canada), Observatori festival (Spain), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Finland), and in New York at P.S. 1 Insitute of Contemporary Art, Exit Art, The New Museum, Artists Space, and Franklin Furnace. Her writing has been published in Leonardo Electronic Almanac/MIT Press, Framework, New Observations, and in the forthcoming Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change and the Poles. Sharpe works primarily in installation and locative/mobile media projects, from works drawing on genre (crime stories to ghost stories), history, and technology. Her recent works draw on human and animal movements through the Canadian Arctic (including her own) within the contexts of technology, environment and human/animal relationships to place.