Prof. Evan Meaney's "We Will Love You Forever," at Conversations at the Edge
Video Data Bank and School of the Art Institute of Chicago present media artist Evan Meaney at Conversations at the Edge
Thursday, March 21st, 6.00 p.m.
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St., Chicago
2007-17, Evan Meaney, United States, multiple formats, ca. 60 min + discussion.
Mixing humor and pathos, the work of media artist and game designer Evan Meaney meditates on the transience of human experience and its representation in digital media. Meaney often uses corrupted and failing data as source material, exploring human efforts to collect and preserve in the face of entropy. He presents a selection of work from the past decade, including the video essay Big_Sleep™ (2015), which juxtaposes the expansive yet deteriorating 20th-Century archive of newsreel cameraman William Birch with Meaney and Amy Szczepanski’s Big_Sleep™ Media Encoder — a program that conserves digital material, but makes it permanently inaccessible — and the virtual reality artwork ++We Will Love You Forever (2017), which reflects on the creative impulse and efforts to create archives of human code — digital and DNA — on the moon.
Evan Meaney is an artist, game designer, and researcher who teaches new media practices at the University of South Carolina where he serves as head of the Media Arts program. Meaney has been an artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Experimental Television Center, a founding member of GLI.TC/H, a super juror for IndieCade, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Lab, and a contributor to the Atlantic. His creative works have found audiences all over the world, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Oi Futuro in Rio de Janeiro, and the US Library of Congress. Currently, Meaney is developing a number of personal projects while collaborating with a team of engineers on virtual reality applications for predictive maintenance. His time-based artworks are available through SAIC’s Video Data Bank.
Conversations at the Edge is a dynamic weekly series of screenings, artist talks, and performances by some of the most compelling media artists of yesterday and today. CATE is organized by the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Video Data Bank.
Evan Meaney, image from ++ We Will Love You For Ever, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and SAIC's Video Data Bank