Tuesday, December 9 at 7:00 pm
Multi-disciplinary artists-run spaces, especially those funded with state and federal funding in the 1970-90s in the U.S., supported emerging artists and often challenging cultural content. They additionally provided critical audiences for emerging media arts well before the arrival of digital tools (mid-1990s) when museums were finally seduced by good projection to commonly exhibit media art and the internet offered radically new ways to connect, critique and distribute work. Hill will discuss media arts programming at Hallwalls in the 1980s, discovering beekeeping shops ("old" media) in the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s, and harvesting the sweetness, light and medicine of bees in Ohio. Her conclusion suggests how the potential "sting" of contemporary art can function as a component of a cultural immune system. Chris Hill was Video Programmer at Hallwalls from 1983-94.
Chris Hill is a media curator and has taught at CalArts, Antioch College, and the Technical University in Brno (Czechia). She received an MFA from SUNY Buffalo, and was video programmer at Hallwalls (Buffalo) from 1983-94. Hill curated Surveying the First Decade: Video Art & Alternative Media (1996), a 17 hour collection distributed by the Video Data Bank, and edited its resource guide Rewind. For Walking Trips in Czech Lands (bilingual website, 1997) she interviewed six artists active in the Czech "parallel" (underground) culture before 1989. She co-directed four Summer Documentary Institutes including surveys on Latin America, East Central Europe, and the US incarceration crisis while teaching at Antioch (1997-2008). Projects reflecting her interest in beekeeping include Sweetness & Labor (2006) and a residency in Prague (2019). Her research interests include re-performing archives, and a recent interactive online project for the Vasulka Kitchen Archive (Brno) is A Navigational Tool for Traversing the Vasulka Mediascape (2023).