This program takes place at PHOTOFAIRS; program is free with fair admission.
Join ICP at PHOTOFAIRS for a conversation centered on transmedia playwright and artist Kat Mustatea’s first-of-its-kind augmented reality book, Voidopolis. Arts writer Charlotte Kent, Dante scholar and professor Arielle Saiber, and ICP faculty and photographer Alexey Yurenev join Kat Mustatea to discuss the intersection of technology, language, photography and the photobook.
Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) photobook with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante’s Inferno as if it were the dystopian experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic. It features images that are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter “e”—in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec’s A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter—by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that were ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: its garbled pages can only be deciphered with an AR app, and they decay at the same rate over a period of one year, after which the decay process restarts and begins again.
Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist working at the forefront of live performance and cutting edge technology. Her experiments with language and new narrative forms enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the computational uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human in the digital age.
Her TED talk, about AI as a form of puppetry, offers a novel take to the meaning of generative art-making. Her work has been presented at a variety of venues including New York Live Arts, The Cube at Virginia Tech, Ars Electronica Linz, New Images Festival Paris, and Stanley Picker Gallery London, among others. She is currently an artist member of ONX Studio (funded by Onassis Foundation) and has recently held residencies and fellowships at TED, New Museum’s NEW INC incubator, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, the Orchard Project, and New York University’s ITP/IMA Program.
Born in Bucharest to Romanian / Ukrainian parents, Mustatea immigrated with her family to the United States as a child in the 80’s, among the few able to leave Romania during the Ceauşescu regime. She lives and works in New York City.
Charlotte Kent, PhD, is the Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University and an arts writer. Contributing to numerous arts and culture magazines (Aperture, Art Review, Hyperallergic, Wired, etc) and academic journals (Leonardo, Design and Culture, Visual Studies, etc.), she is also an Editor at Large for The Brooklyn Rail, and co-editor with Katherine Guinness of the book, Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (forthcoming, Intellect Books). She presents essays regularly for museum and catalogs, and acts as a consultant to assorted arts agencies and institutions. She is Scholar-in-Residence at NXT Museum where she co-curated with Jesse Damiani the first RealTime exhibit, Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems. She is a graduate of the CUNY Graduate Center, St. John’s College, Phillips Academy Andover, and the Writer’s Institute.
Alexey Yurenev is a photographer, visual researcher and educator interested in how technology shapes the production of knowledge and collective memory. Yurenev’s documentary projects have been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, Topic and Literary Hub. His work has been acknowledged by organizations such as Photographer of the Year International and Silurian Society of New York and nominated for an EMMY and Shorty awards. In 2020, Yurenev co-founded a platform dedicated to innovative visual strategies FOTODEMIC.org and became a faculty member at the International Center of Photography in New York. Yurenev holds an MFA in Photography & Society from The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague and is currently based between New York and Amsterdam.
Arielle Saiber is Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at John Hopkins Saiber's books include Images of Quattrocento Florence: Writings on Literature, History and Art co-edited with Stefano U. Baldassarri (Yale, 2000); Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Ashgate/Routledge, 2005); and Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2017).
Saiber publishes primarily on Dante, on the intersections between premodern Italian literature and mathematics/science, and visual interpretations of Dante’s Commedia. She has also published on early print history, science fiction, and experimental electronic music. Her current research is on “altered states of consciousness” in medieval and Renaissance Italian literature.
