Sorting Daemons at Agnes Etherington Art Centre

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Sorting Daemons:

Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control

*Exhibition 16 January – 18 April***

Symposium 15 – 17 January

Admission is free. Ellis Hall Auditorium, 58 University Avenue, Kingston, ON

A symposium bringing together leading artists and thinkers on
surveillance in contemporary society will be held at the launch of the
exhibition /Sorting Daemons/. The keynote lecture and reception on
Friday evening will be followed on Saturday by research round table
discussions examining artistic practices and modes of "seeing," and
plumbing the methods and implications of surveillance technologies. The
symposium will conclude on Sunday with a video screening and discussion.

Friday 15 January

*7-8:30 pm, The Rita Friendly Kaufman Lecture*

"Reconsidering Surveillance, from Panopticon to Program, Tracking to
Formulating, 'Closed World' Control to Open-Sourced Security, Apparatus
to Assemblage," Jordan Crandall [biography below]

*8:30-10 pm Reception at the Art Centre Atrium*

Saturday 16 January

*1-2:30 pm, Research Round Tables*

/Data Harvests and the Theatre of the Self/

Moderator: David Murakami Wood

David Kemp, "Data Collection: Every Card Is A Database"

Kathleen Ritter, "Now You See It, Now You Don't"

Cheryl Sourkes, "Live Free Webcams"

* *

*2:45-4:45 pm*

/The Construction of Public Spaces/Public Spheres/

Moderator: Kirsty Robertson

Jonathan Finn, "Seeing Surveillantly: Surveillance as Social Practice"

Antonia Hirsch, "A Plurality of Solitudes"

David Rokeby, "Camera as Projector: The Automated Gaze in Public Space"

Martin Zeilinger, "Us, As Seen through The Eye of The Beholder:
Appropriated Surveillance Footage in Contemporary Media Art and Activism"

Sunday 17 January

*2-3:45 pm, Screening*

/Defiant Gazes/

Artists' videos on surveillance by the Bureau of Inverse Technology,
Tran T. Kim-Trang, Walid Ra'ad, Shelly Silver and Ryan Stec, introduced
by Sarah E.K. Smith, and with a post-screening dialogue with Sarah E.K.
Smith and Susan Lord.

For further information on the exhibition and symposium contact the
Agnes Etherington Art Centre or go to www.aeac.ca <http://www.aeac.ca>.

The /Sorting Daemons/ symposium is held in conjunction with Camera
Surveillance in Canada: A Research Workshop (14 – 16 January) hosted by
the Surveillance Camera Awareness Network (SCAN) and The Surveillance
Studies Centre. Selected sessions of this workshop are open to the
public. For information on the Camera Surveillance Workshop, see
http://www.surveillanceproject.org/projects/scan Note: registration is
not required for sessions flagged in orange text on the site.

The Rita Friendly Kaufman Lecturer

Jordan Crandall (http://jordancrandall.com) is a media artist and
theorist based in Los Angeles, and an Associate Professor in the Visual
Arts Department at University of California, San Diego. Crandall's video
installations, such as the recent 3-channel work /Homefront/, combine
formats and genres deriving from traditional cinema as well as military
and surveillance culture, exploring 21st-century regimes of power and
their effects on subjectivity, identity, sociality, and embodiment. He
is currently completing a new video, /Hotel/, which probes the realms of
extreme intimacy, where techniques of control combine with techniques of
the self and paranoia combines with pleasure. He is the founding editor
of the journal /Version /(http://version.org).

Crandall's work has been presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide
including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; the Neue
Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz; ARTLAB, Tokyo; The Kitchen, New
York; AGORA, Rio de Janeiro; TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam;
and the Whitney Museum, New York. His ongoing art and research project
/Under Fire/, concerning the organization and representation of
violence, has resulted in two catalogues published by the Witte de With
center for contemporary art, Rotterdam, and a new online archive
developed for the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville.

Crandall writes and lectures regularly on technology and culture. An
anthology of his projects and critical writing – entitled /Drive/ – was
published by Hatje Cantz Verlag in conjunction with Zentrum für Kunst
und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe, in 2002. His recent writing
concerns the culture of tracking, which looks at tracking as a
technology, a discourse, and a perceptual modality; contemporary forms
of "readiness" or affective modulation; and the dynamics of emergent
systems. He has lectured at Columbia University, New York; Akademie der
Bildenden Kunste, Vienna; Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran
Museum, Washington, DC; University of São Paulo, Cité Internationale
Universitaire de Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London.

Sorting Daemons /is curated by Jan Allen and Sarah E.K. Smith. This
exhibition and its associated programs and publication are supported by
the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (an agency of
the Government of Ontario), the City of Kingston and the Kingston Arts
Council through the City of Kingston Arts Fund, The New Transparency
SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiative and the Office of the
Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the George Taylor Richardson Memorial
Fund, Queen's University, the Rita Friendly Kaufman Lecture Fund and the
Department of Art. /

The Agnes Etherington Art Centre is located on University Avenue at
Bader Lane, Kingston, ON. 613.533.2190 www.aeac.ca

Image: Kathleen Ritter, /Hidden Camera/, 2006, pigment print, 1/5.
Collection of the artist.