| Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Vanessa Chang

Director of Programsat CODAME
San Francisco,
United States
Focus area: AI (Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Deep Fakes), Art History, Augmented Reality, Cultural Practices, Social Practice, Dance, Choreography, Generative Practices, Generative Art, Net Art, Performance Art, Theater Studies, Sound, Acoustics, Surveillance, Security, Telepresence, Urban Planning, Built Environment, Video, Film, Writing, Literature, Poetry

As a curator, writer and educator, Vanessa Chang builds communities and conversations about art, technology and human bodies. She is Director of Programs at Leonardo/ISAST. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where she was a Geballe Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and also ran the Graphic Narrative Workshop. She was lead investigator for The Grid: Art + Tech Report (2020) and taught in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. Most recently, she curated Recoding CripTech at SOMArts Cultural Center, Intersections at the Leonardo Convening at Fort Mason Center for the Arts, and Artobots, a CODAME festival of art, automation and artificial intelligence. She has appeared on NPR’s On the Media and State of the Art,  and her curatorial work has been profiled in such venues as Art in America and KQED Arts. Her writing has been published in Wired, Slate, Noema, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Visual Culture, and Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, among other venues.

Podcasts

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EPISODE NOTES (click through for transcript and more)

We talk Ars Electronica, an annual festival for art, technology and society in Linz, Austria. In a collaboration with Ars Leonardocast, Kenneth Azurin and Dawn Faelnar interview Dutch fashion and textile designer Hellen van Rees about her projects at Ars 2018. Leonardo’s Vanessa Chang introduces [Anti]disciplinary Topographies for Ars 2021. The first winner of the Prix Ars Electronica, Brian Reffin Smith, reviews Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art edited by Sharon Hecker and Silvia Bottinelli.

 

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EPISODE NOTES (click through for transcript and more)

Artist, playwright and technologist Kat Mustatea discusses with Leonardo senior program manager Vanessa Chang her award-winning digital performance VOIDOPOLIS, a take on Dante's Inferno played out in New York City: born on Instagram, premiering this year in Augmented Reality, and culminating in experimental book form. Edith Doove reviews the book A History of Art History by Christopher S. Wood, newly released in paperback.