Nancy Mauro-Flude

Nancy Mauro-Flude is an artist and theorist who researches how we articulate the resonances and dissonances between performing arts and computer culture. Under various pseudonyms she actively works to fuse radical forms of open culture by introducing experimental pedagogy with a particular focus upon relatively conservative and weakly networked regions. She is a professor in the Communications and New Media Department, National University Singapore. Founder of Miss Desponias Critical Media Salon miss-hack.org and long term member of the https://genderchangers.org home brewed since 1998, working to actively change the ‘gender’ of technology. Involves projects such as: systerserver.net, eclectictechcarnival.org, TacticalMagick.net, Microbites.me

Presenting

The Aesthetics of Transmission

Transmission (as defined technically) is signal transference from (and to) one, or many, locations by means of signals (light, electrical) or radio waves. That being so, it is posited that an ‘aesthetics of transmission’ backgrounds a technical definition of transmission, and foregrounds emergent forms which are not premised on the visual, but are nonetheless often visually engaging. One of the motivations for developing an aesthetics of transmission is the desire to push the consciousness of the artist and audience deeper into the various fields of code and sensory perception. The spread of the communicative field is never wholly complete, one cannot predict every instance, nor control the production and reception of every variable in the sending of a relay, code or a signal, nor in the multitude of ways that they may traipse. Example projects that will be discussed are situated at the very horizons of perception, where meaning may flicker on and off like a relay switch or an interrupted signal transmission. It is an aesthetic that accommodates artworks that deliberately explore an excess of transmission, a transmission gone awry (that is dissonant and does not reach its target), or a transmission that moves and shapeshifts through a series of states to reach its receiver.

Exhibiting

Starlight is a Wireless Signal

Starlight is a Wireless Signal is a networked art work, a is a cosmogonic ritual, traces of code parsing through the network, are intertwined with translucent light images, in which tendrils and elements are evoked in the telematic tableau vivant. The work explores how we deal with the tensions of ephemeral collaboration and physical separation as we negotiate relationships of presence filtered through computational media and networks. Starlight is a Wireless Signal is a meditation it asks what it means to be human by giving a poetic account of how we automatically engage with ubiquitous transmissions. We have always navigated by the stars, and now as a species, we regularly and increasingly, habitually use networked communication systems (GSM, Bluetooth, Wifi, RFID, QR, AR, radio). These omnipresent transmissions and signals are a new kind of fictional species that exist with/in us. It questions what is happening now information technologies are building new habitats, cosmographies and cosmologies?