An Evening with SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY

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New media artist and poet SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY presents a program that traces uses of computing in moving-image art, from broadcast and playback to interactive software environments, net art desktop practices, and performance. Focused on the concept of “real time,” the program culminates in a software piece developed by HOLLOWAY and collaborator Nick Briz that brings HOLLOWAY's recent project ._SUITABLE_FOR.EXE[CUTION] to life through algorithmic language and pop-ups. In lieu of a standard recording of ._SUITABLE_FOR.EXE’s performances, held at Performance Space New York in October 2021, this new piece communicates the essence of what took place through a series of browser windows, mapping thresholds between physical and digital space beyond simple dichotomies. Across her work, HOLLOWAY envisions constraints and glitches, lack and obsolescence, longing and control, participation and play, and access and audience as ideas that can bleed into each other online.

This artist-curated screening revisits Chicago’s lively artistic scene of the 1970s, which saw the flourishing of computer-generated video art (including Jane Veeder’s 1982 Montana, the first computer-graphic animation to enter MoMA’s collection). At the same time, HOLLOWAY’s wide-ranging selection seeks to reveal cinema and media histories in which Black, queer, and BDSM practices can be inscribed. In pushing “new” media against its own narrative and possible futures, the artist embraces a form of production that collapses poetry, theory, and code. This artist-curated screening features Tom DeFanti, Phil Morton, Dan Sandin, Bob Snyder, Rylin Harris; Jane Veeder, Pamela Z, Jon Satrom, Yung Jake, and Tale of Tales (Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn), along this new piece by HOLLOWAY.

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