Research Colloquium at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey presents

Robin Oppenheimer and Alex Mateesco

SIAT graduate presentations

Wednesday November 29, 2006 at 1:30 pm

Room 3875, SFU Surrey Campus, third floor Central City Tower in the Research Labs

Robin Oppenheimer

Robin Oppenheimer Ph.D. Dissertation Research

I am researching the historic collaboration between ten experimental U.S. artists and thirty Bell Laboratories engineers that resulted in the 1966 production of “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” at the New York City Armory, attended by over 10,000 people. This was the first time that artists from the avant-garde worked with engineers from a major corporation to produce large-scale multi-media public performances driven by the “new” electronic technologies of the day (wireless radio, infrared video, Doppler sonar, etc.). I am focusing on how the artists and engineers from two very different cultures communicated (or didn’t), the origins and aspects of their collaborative processes and practices, and the significance of these findings to contemporary cultural, educational, and technological practices. I will show clips of rare films from the “9 Evenings” performances and recent interviews with some of the artists and engineers to illustrate the collaborative nature of this historic event.

Related websites:

http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Kluver.html (short film with John Cage)

http://www.conceptlab.com/interviews/kluver.html

http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/labnotes/0204/history.html

http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/projets/eat/index.html (extensive archival materials)

Robin Oppenheimer Bio

Robin Oppenheimer has worked in the media arts field since 1980, running two media arts centers in Atlanta, Georgia and Seattle, Washington. She has also produced numerous large-scale media arts projects, curated video art exhibitions, written about the media arts field, taught media arts history and aesthetics, and was the first Media-Arts-Historian-In-Residence at the Bellevue Art Museum in 2000, where she researched and presented the history of the Bellevue Film Festival (1967-81). She has been a Ph.D. candidate in SIAT since September 2005.