CCA News
Curatorial Practice Alum Jaime Austin to Present at Media Modes Conference
Posted on Thursday, October 22, 2009, by Lindsey Westbrook
Jaime Austin, who graduated last spring from the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice, has had a paper accepted to the prestigious Media Modes Graduate Student Conference, which will take place on November 14 at New York's School of Visual Arts. Of the 24 presenters, Austin is the only one from a West-coast school. The others are all current students or recent alumni from highly respected graduate programs in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia.
Austin is already making a mark in the curatorial field; upon graduating she beat out some fierce competition to be named assistant curator of the 2010 01SJ Biennial.
Media Modes focuses specifically on the intersection between art and technology. This year's keynote address will be delivered by the noted scholar Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University.
Austin's paper, titled "Space, Identity, and Embodiment—On Lynn Hershman Leeson's The Dante Hotel and Life Squared," is based on her CCA thesis research. In 1973, when the artist Lynn Hershman created a site-specific installation in a rented hotel room in San Francisco's Hotel Dante, virtual space existed solely in memory and ideation. By 2006, when she regenerated The Dante Hotel within Second Life (a free 3D virtual world where users can socialize and create via voice and text chat), it was actually possible to inhabit, own, and occupy virtual space.
The Dante Hotel and Life Squared invite an investigation of issues of identity, embodiment, and the changing nature of space within the work of one artist over a 33-year span. The two works' fluid repurposing of space reveals how, largely due to the explosion of digital technology, society's relationship to space has shifted from privileging the actual to glorifying the virtual.
Download and read the full text of Austin's paper and all the other submissions at the Media Modes website.