2022 Artists in Residence
Jane Jin Kaisen – Spring 2022
Jane Jin Kaisen (born in on the Jeju Island, South Korea) is a visual artist living in Copenhagen who works with video installation, experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text. Her artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse communities. Her work is best known for its visually striking, performative, and feminist qualities in which past and present are brought into dialogue with each other. Engaging topics such as memory, migration, border theory, and translation, she activates the field where subjective experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories. Jin Kaisen will join the Center for Advanced Media Studies as well as the initiative on “Building Anti-Racist Coalitions and Intersectional Knowledge in the Face of Anti-Asian Violence” at Johns Hopkins for an artist residency in 2022.
Eduardo Kac – Spring 2022
A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web ’80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced “Katz”) emerged in the early ’90s with his radical works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of robotics, biology and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience (Uirapuru) to the cultural impact of biotechnology (Genesis); from the changing condition of memory in the digital age (Time Capsule) to distributed collective agency (Teleporting an Unknown State); from the problematic notion of the “exotic” (Rara Avis) to the creation of life and evolution (GFP Bunny). At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kacopened a new direction for contemporary art with his “transgenic art”–first with a groundbreaking piece entitled Genesis (1999), which included an “artist’s gene” he invented, and then with “GFP Bunny,” his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000). Kac’s work has been exhibited internationally, and is in the permanent collections of the Tate, London; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. Kac’s work has been featured both in contemporary art publications, contemporary art books, and in the mass media. Kac has received many awards, including the Golden Nica Award, the most prestigious award in the field of media arts and the highest prize awarded by Ars Electronica. He lectures and publishes worldwide. His work is documented at www.ekac.org. Eduardo Kac will join us for a residency and exhibition at the SNF Parkway Theater in Baltimore during the Spring of 2022.
Haoran Chang
Haoran Chang is a multidisciplinary artist who uses video installation, virtual reality, and digital print in exploring the social construction and digital mediation in contemporary society. Chang’s installation Wen Xi: Tracing Fire (on view in the Parkway’s Dietz Lounge and the second floor lobby, March 26-April 2) zeroes in on the historic Wen Xi Fire that happened in 1938 in Changsha, China. By tracing the representations of this traumatic event, Chang explores how the “reality” of the historic event is mediated by cultural memories which become a “virtual” story of the past. Chang deploys a variety of digital media in developing this project, from documentary, to virtual reality, digital print, and photogrammetry. Each of them becomes a different tangent line to differentiate the function of this past story. While the past, present, and future do not exist chronologically in the timeline of this installation, they nevertheless converge into different kinds of “digital debris.” Like the formation of a rock, each of these media helps in calibrating the location of this historic fire. Chang will join us in the fall of 2022 as an Artist in Residence.