BENJAMIN ROSENTHAL
Benjamin Rosenthal (b.1984, New York, NY, Lives and Works in Kansas City, Missouri) holds an MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis and a BFA in Art (Electronic Time-Based Media) from Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been exhibited internationally in such venues/festivals as the Stuttgarter Filmwinter (Stuttgart, Germany), High Concept Labs at Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL), ESPACIO ENTER: Festival International Creatividad, Innovacíon y Cultural Digital (Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain), FILE Electronic Language International Festival (São Paulo, Brazil), Vanity Projects (New York, NY), Locomoción Festival de Animacion (Mexico City, Mexico), CICA Museum (Gimpo-se, Republic of Korea), PLUG Projects (Kansas City, Missouri), the LINOLEUM Festival of Contemporary Animation and Media Art (Kyiv, Ukraine), and SIGGRAPH Asia (Bangkok, Thailand), among others. He has been in residence at the Fjúk Arts Centre (Husavík, Iceland), Signal Culture (Owego, New York) and the Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, Michigan), the Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, Missouri), and is currently in residence at The Studios Inc (Kansas City, Missouri). His work across media explores what he theorizes as queer “technosexuality” and challenges the supremacy of physical contact in a technocultural age. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Expanded Media in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas, where he has been since 2012, and teaches video art, performance art, experimental animation, graduate seminar and interdisciplinary practices.
ERIC SOUTHER
Eric Souther is a new media artist who draws from a multiplicity of disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, ritual, critical theory, and New Materialism. He develops video instruments that investigate technological & cultural ecologies, agency, and emergence. He looks for new ways of seeing beyond the seductive qualities of an image, and to find unseen connections that help us understand our digital and non-digital existence. His work takes many pathways, which include single-channel video, interactive installation, projection mapping, print, virtual reality, and audiovisual performance.
His work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, NYC, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, and the Museum of Art, Zhangzhou, China. His work has screened in The Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Beyoglu, Instanbul, Cronosfera Festival, Alessandria, Italy, the Galerija 12 New Media Hub, Belgrade, Serbia, the Simultan Festival, Timisoara, Romania, and the Festival ECRÃ of Audiovisual Experimentations, Rio de Janeiro.
In 2016, Eric won the Juried Award for Time-Based at the international art competition ArtPrize. He received his B.F.A. in New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2009 and his M.F.A. in Electronic Integrated Arts from the New York State School of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2011. He currently is an Assistant Professor of Video Art in the Division of Expanded Media at NYSCC at Alfred University.
“the gleaners, and: ritual for signaled bodies”
the gleaners, and: ritual for signaled bodies performs at the edges between body and the external, oscillating and eroding those boundaries. A ritual for creating new worlds and situations for fragmented bodies. Signals pass through the joints of animated and genderless bodies and body parts entangling the body-signal-actions both materially and conceptually as these control mechanisms interfere with pre-animated content. Perpetually shifting surfaces and skins serve as sites of projection and interference, contributing to the further “queering” of the state of these bodies and fragments that are stretched and submerged into and outside of the environment they inhabit, as they encounter desire, distress, and ritualized oscillations. Signals generate both sound and compels movement, the making of the images, and the body further challenges the stability and integrity of the space in its otherworldliness and the spatial relationships it establishes with the audience. At the edge between crisis and satisfaction, the work adopts the role of Millet’s own “gleaners,” making-do on the boundary between sustenance and the devoid.