MA in Critical Studies Sponsors TBA's NIGHT SCHOOL Featuring Zach Blas
September 13, 2022
In partnership with the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and the Time Based Art (TBA) Festival, PNCA's MA in Critical Studies is sponsoring the NIGHT SCHOOL series. The NIGHT SCHOOL was created to articulate alternative ways of learning and expression through evening performance-lectures that highlight experimental creative research that blurs the boundary between art and academia in an effort to "disrupt established forms of knowledge sharing and production." [PICA]
Tomorrow night, September 14th, Zach Blas will give a lecture-performance that "explores a religious-un/conscious thriving in today's tech industry. Blas [explores] a computational world of divine judgment, where artificial intelligence exists alongside corporate gods, mystical glyphs, religious icons, occult sigils, and captured bodies, and where emotional crying is a symbolic language of quantification."
Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. His practice spans moving image, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction. Recent exhibitions include the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art; British Art Show 9; Positions #6, Van Abbemuseum; Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI at the de Young Museum; The Body Electric at the Walker Art Center; and the 12th Gwangju Biennale. His 2021 artist monograph Unknown Ideals is published by Sternberg Press. In many of his works he challenges technology in conversation with social practices and identities, like religion and sexuality.
LOCATION
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), 15 NE Hancock Street, Portland, OR, 97232
DATE
Sept. 14 at 6:00 pm