Garnet Hertz

Last updated
Garnet Hertz
Garnet Hertz.jpg
Born
Known forArtist, Designer, Writer
TitleCanada Research Chair of Design and Media Art
AwardsFulbright 2003, Oscar Signorini 2008, Canada Research Chair 2013, Canada Research Chair 2019
Academic background
Education University of Saskatchewan
Alma mater University of California Irvine
Doctoral advisor Mark Poster
Other advisors Simon Penny
Notable ideas critical making
Website https://conceptlab.com/

Garnet Hertz (born 1973) is a Canadian artist, designer and academic. [1] Hertz is Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Art and is known for his electronic artworks and for his research in the areas of critical making and DIY culture. [2] [3]

Contents

Work

Hertz is known for robotic artworks that are a synthesis of living insects and electronic machinery. His Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot (2007) uses a giant Madagascan cockroach to control a robot that moves through the gallery space. [4] [5] [6] [7] In his 2001 work Fly with Implanted Web Server, viewers of a specific URL browsed web pages served from inside a biological organism. [8] [9]

Several of his works involve the repurposing of obsolete media technologies. [10] [11] His work OutRun turned an arcade video game cabinet into a street-driveable vehicle. [12] [13] As the vehicle is driven, it converts the a camera view of the real street into an 8-bit video screen view that the driver uses to navigate. [14] [15] [16]

Hertz's publishing works are generally focused on alternative electronic culture in design and art, and include a 10-booklet zine series titled Critical Making, [17] a booklet titled Disobedient Electronics, [18] and a media archaeology book titled A Collection of Many Problems. [19] With Jussi Parikka, Hertz co-authored a paper entitled "Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method," which was nominated for the 2011 Transmediale Vilem Flusser media theory award. [20]

He is also author of the academic monograph titled Art + DIY Electronics by MIT Press in the Leonardo series in 2023. [21] The project is described by curator Tina Rivers Ryan as follows: "In this groundbreaking study, Hertz argues that the DIY electronic artists who 'kludge' their own technologies constitute an important artistic countercultural practice that is an urgent response to the escalating failures of our technological infrastructures." [22]

In 2024, Hertz taught a university course at Emily Carr University titled "How To Appreciate Graffiti". The course featured several guests, including Smokey D, a well-respected Vancouver graffiti artist. [23]

Academic career

Hertz is the Canada Research Chair in Design + Media Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. [24] Hertz was previously Research Scientist and Artist in Residence in the Department of Informatics at the University of California Irvine and was also Faculty in the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design. [2] He has also worked at the University of Regina. [25]

Awards

In 2003, Hertz won a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Award to pursue graduate studies at the University of California Irvine in an interdisciplinary program in art, computer science and engineering. [26] In 2008, Hertz won the Oscar Signorini prize for robotic art. [27] In 2013, Hertz was awarded a Canada Research Chair as Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts. [28] In 2019, Hertz was awarded a second term as Canada Research Chair as Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts. [29]

Related Research Articles

Noise music is a genre of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music includes a wide range of musical styles and sound-based creative practices that feature noise as a primary aspect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interactive art</span> Creative works that involve viewer input

Interactive art is a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some interactive art installations achieve this by letting the observer walk through, over or around them; others ask the artist or the spectators to become part of the artwork in some way.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic art</span> Art that uses or refers to electronic media

Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media. More broadly, it refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music. It is considered an outgrowth of conceptual art and systems art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Survival Research Laboratories</span> Machine performance art group

Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) is an American performance art group which pioneered the genre of large-scale machine performance. Founded in 1978 by Mark Pauline in San Francisco the group is known in particular for performances where custom-built machines, often robotic, compete to destroy each other. The performances, described by one critic as "noisy, violent and destructive", are noted for visual and aural cacophony created by the often dangerous interactions of the machinery. SRL's work is related to process art and generative art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Carr University of Art and Design</span> Canadian art school in Vancouver, Canada

The Emily Carr University of Art + Design is a public university of art and design located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Founded in 1925 as the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts, it is the oldest public post-secondary institution in British Columbia dedicated to professional education in the arts, media, and design. The university is named for Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr, who was known for her Modernist and Post-Impressionist artworks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander R. Galloway</span> American academic

Alexander R. Galloway is an author and professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He has a bachelor's degree in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and earned a Ph.D. in literature from Duke University in 2001. Galloway is known for his writings on philosophy, media theory, contemporary art, film, and video games.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norman White</span>

Norman White is a Canadian New Media artist considered to be a pioneer in the use of electronic technology and robotics in art.

Ken Gregory (1960) is a Canadian media artist who works with DIY interface design, hardware hacking, audio, video, and computer programming. He is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Kenneth E. Rinaldo is an American neo-conceptual artist and arts educator, known for his interactive robotics, 3D animation, and BioArt installations. His works include Autopoiesis (2000), and Augmented Fish Reality (2004), a fish-driven robot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Casey Reas</span> American artist

Casey Edwin Barker Reas, also known as C. E. B. Reas or Casey Reas, is an American artist whose conceptual, procedural and minimal artworks explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas is perhaps best known for having created, with Ben Fry, the Processing programming language.

Jussi Ville Tuomas Parikka is a Finnish new media theorist and Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is also (visiting) Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art as well as visiting professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. In Finland, he is Docent of digital culture theory at the University of Turku. Until May 2011 Parikka was the Director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) research institute at Anglia Ruskin University and the founding Co-Director of the Anglia Research Centre for Digital Culture. With Ryan Bishop, he also founded the Archaeologies of Media and Technology research unit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maker culture</span> Community interested in do-it-yourself technical pursuits

The maker culture is a contemporary subculture representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture that intersects with hardware-oriented parts of hacker culture and revels in the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. The maker culture in general supports open-source hardware. Typical interests enjoyed by the maker culture include engineering-oriented pursuits such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing, and the use of computer numeric control tools, as well as more traditional activities such as metalworking, woodworking, and, mainly, its predecessor, traditional arts and crafts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Critical making</span>

Critical making refers to the hands-on productive activities that link digital technologies to society. It was invented to bridge the gap between creative, physical, and conceptual exploration. The purpose of critical making resides in the learning extracted from the process of making rather than the experience derived from the finished output. The term "critical making" was popularized by Matt Ratto, an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Ratto describes one of the main goals of critical making as a way "to use material forms of engagement with technologies to supplement and extend critical reflection and, in doing so, to reconnect our lived experiences with technologies to social and conceptual critique." "Critical making", as defined by practitioners like Matt Ratto and Stephen Hockema, "is an elision of two typically disconnected modes of engagement in the world — "critical thinking," often considered as abstract, explicit, linguistically based, internal and cognitively individualistic; and "making," typically understood as tacit, embodied, external, and community-oriented."

Laura Kikauka is a Canadian installation and performance artist. Kikauka is known for her sculptural installations and performances incorporating found objects and electronics.

Media archaeology or media archeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media through close examination of the past, and especially through critical scrutiny of dominant progressivist narratives of popular commercial media such as film and television. Media archaeologists often evince strong interest in so-called dead media, noting that new media often revive and recirculate material and techniques of communication that had been lost, neglected, or obscured. Some media archaeologists are also concerned with the relationship between media fantasies and technological development, especially the ways in which ideas about imaginary or speculative media affect the media that actually emerge.

Christopher Csíkszentmihályi is an American artist and technologist. He is an associate professor of information science at Cornell University.

Erkki Huhtamo is a media archaeologist, exhibition curator, and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Departments of Design Media Arts and Film, Television, and Digital Media.

Max Dean is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tony D. Sampson</span> British critical theorist (born 1964)

Tony D. Sampson is a British academic author who writes about philosophies of affect, digital media cultures and labour, marketing power, design/brand thinking, social and immersive user experiences and neurocultures. He is best known for his widely cited and debated academic publications on virality, network contagion and neuroculture. This work is influenced by the 19th century French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde and concerns contemporary analyses of viral phenomena and affective and emotional contagion on the Internet. In 2017 Sampson published The Assemblage Brain, a book about the culture of the affective brain explored through digital media, the neurosciences, business (marketing), cybernetics and political power. His most recent publication, A Sleepwalker's Guide to Social Media (2020), explores the power dynamic of a post-Cambridge Analytica social media environment wherein the marketing logic of virality/growth helps to inflame contagions of race hate, posing a threat to democracy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Jolliffe</span> Canadian media artist (1964–2021)

Daniel Jolliffe was a Canadian media artist and art professor who created works of art, design and performance projects using technologies such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS). His interactive kinetic work and public art has been exhibited in the United States, Canada and abroad.

References

  1. "Artist/Maker Name "Hertz, Garnet"". Canadian Heritage Information Network. Retrieved 14 November 2024.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  2. 1 2 "Critical Making". We Make Money not Art. 11 January 2013. Retrieved 31 May 2016.
  3. Gunn, Ali. "FutureEverything 2014: Tools for the Unknown Future". The Skinny. Retrieved 31 May 2016.
  4. Jeffrey A. Lockwood (22 July 2010). Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. Oxford University Press. pp. 289–. ISBN   978-0-19-973353-8.
  5. Andrew Pickering (15 April 2010). The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. University of Chicago Press. pp. 241–. ISBN   978-0-226-66792-8.
  6. Matthias Rauterberg; Marco Combetto (1 October 2006). Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2006: 5th International Conference, Cambridge, UK, September 20-22, 2006, Proceedings. Springer. pp. 32–. ISBN   978-3-540-45261-4.
  7. Cecilia Di Chio; Alexandros Agapitos; Stefano Cagnoni (24 March 2012). Applications of Evolutionary Computation: EvoApplications 2012: Málaga, Spain, April 11-13, 2012, Proceedings. Springer. pp. 218–. ISBN   978-3-642-29178-4.
  8. Corrado Federici; Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons; Ernesto Virgulti (2005). Images and Imagery: Frames, Borders, Limits : Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Peter Lang. pp. 20–. ISBN   978-0-8204-7423-6.
  9. Susan Schreibman; Ray Siemens; John Unsworth (26 January 2016). A New Companion to Digital Humanities. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 48–. ISBN   978-1-118-68059-9.
  10. Jussi Parikka (23 April 2013). What is Media Archaeology?. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 121–. ISBN   978-0-7456-6139-1.
  11. Gary Hall (22 April 2016). Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities. MIT Press. pp. 209–. ISBN   978-0-262-03440-1.
  12. Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction: OutRun by Garnet Hertz". Wired. Retrieved 4 June 2016.
  13. Mark Frauenfelder (15 April 2011). Roll Your Own. "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". pp. 50–. ISBN   978-1-4493-9759-3.
  14. Huffman, John Pearley. "Game Boy: How a Sega OutRun Game Cabinet Became a Car". Car and Driver. Retrieved 4 June 2016.
  15. Jansson, Mathias. "Videogame Appropriation in Contemporary Art: Racing Games". Furtherfield. Retrieved 4 June 2016.
  16. Mone, Gregory (7 February 2012). "Building a Drivable OutRun Arcade Cabinet". Popular Science. Retrieved 4 June 2016.
  17. Debatty, Regine (2013-01-11). "Critical Making (We Make Money Not Art Review)". We Make Money Not Art. Retrieved 2022-10-27.
  18. Sterling, Bruce. "Garnet Hertz lecturing on disobedient electronics". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2022-10-27.
  19. Hubeek, Laurent (18 September 2010). "'A Collection of Many Problems' by Garnet Hertz – A Review". University of Amsterdam.
  20. "Zombie Media Talk: Garnet Hertz (ca) and Jussi Parikka (fi) present their "Zombie Media" project | transmediale". Transmediale.de. 2011-02-03. Retrieved 2014-01-22.
  21. Hertz, Garnet. "Art + DIY Electronics (MIT Press)". MIT Press. Retrieved 2022-10-27.
  22. Rivers Ryan, Tina. "Review, Art + DIY Electronics". MIT Press, Art + DIY Electronics. MIT Press. Retrieved 30 January 2023.
  23. Kulkarni, Akshay. "Vancouver art students to learn about graffiti from one of the city's masters". CBC News Vancouver. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 17 January 2024.
  24. "Discover: First Canada Research Chairs Appointed at Emily Carr". Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Retrieved 31 May 2016.
  25. "LinkedIn: Garnet Hertz". LinkedIn. Retrieved 31 Dec 2023.
  26. "U of S Ag Professor and Fine Arts Alumnus Receive Prestigious Canada-U.S. Fulbright Awards". University of Saskatchewan. Retrieved 5 July 2016.
  27. Parikka, Jussi. "CTheory Interview Archaeologies of Media Art". CTheory. Archived from the original on 18 April 2016. Retrieved 31 May 2016.
  28. "Canada Research Chairs October 2014 Recipients List". Government of Canada. Retrieved 29 November 2019.
  29. "Canada Research Chairs Spring 2019 Recipients List". Government of Canada. Retrieved 29 November 2019.