Still from Leena Joshi Prophet TV.
Introducing Black Box 3.0
Festival Overview from Producer and Co-curator Molly Mac
It has been a pleasure to produce Black Box 3.0 and to curate for a number of the festival exhibition programs this year. While production and curation often go hand-in-hand in organizing any exhibition or any festival, at Black Box 3.0 these roles are especially intertwined. Festival Founder Julia Fryett and I set out to organize a festival that highlights strong creative practices, explores rigorous conceptual topics and addresses the urgent social issues inherent to a contemporary conversation about art and technology. At the same time we realized that with our tight budget and short timeline, the form of the festival experience would be largely determined by the hows, wheres and whos of the festival production process.
While my experience as an Alice Gallery curator, critical media educator, arts organizer and video installation artist informs my role as Black Box 3.0 festival producer, it has been the outpouring of support, encouragement and feedback from friends, artists, educators and organizers living and working in Seattle that make this year's festival truly special.
Black Box 3.0 links artists, cultural producers and creative technologies to critical conversations about place, identity and social change in Seattle and beyond. The 2016 festival highlights experimentation, listening and organizing in art, technology and public life.
I have produced and co-curated four of the six distinct festival programs: Impossible Documents, Fwd:<no-reply>@TheAlice, LISTEN: it’s a sound show, and ROT: Compost vs. Surgery. These festival programs engage with existing institutional platforms and utilize funding available for the festival to highlight resistance to dominant power structures within art, cinema, online worlds, tech and public life.
Critiques of power resonate at every level of the festival, from artworks to exhibition designs to partnerships. Black Box 3.0 explores themes of nostalgia, corporate malaise, migrations, inequity, digital bodies and generational divides and much more. As the festival begins, I have my first true chance to take a step back from the closeup details of hows and wheres and whens of production to walk through Black Box 3.0 as a whole, and I am excited now to take a first walk-through of this festival program plan with the Black Box 3.0 community.
Still from Sarada Rauch Pointing.
Black Box 3.0 opens with an exhibition and party celebrating the outcomes of Art Hack Day: Erasure, a joint program with Seattle Design Festival. For this special event, Julia Fryett and Yasaman Sheri will co-curate a final presentation of works produced during Art Hack Day. This exhibition sets the tone for a provocative conversation about new directions in art and technology particularly timely for a Seattle audience, asking: What stays? What goes? Who decides? Is anything ever truly erased?
Crosscut Arts Salon’s conversation, Tech and The Democratization of Art kicks off the first week of the festival. A strong selection of partner programs at INCA, ZGF Architects, I Want You Studio. Topics range from the use of social networks to protect the lives of trans women of color, to virtual reality for architectural renderings, to GIFs for social change. Robot’s Building Robots exhibition at The Hedreen features a range of artworks addressing labor, artificial intelligence and algorithmic consciousness in the digital era.
Annie Grosshans Strategies for Hindsight
On Saturday, Sept 24, Impossible Documents gathers artists and cultural producers to celebrate the dimensions of creative practice that are impossible to document for grant applications, academic presentations, or even art gallery exhibitions. Artists, activists and the Black Box 3.0 community speak to and celebrate the “impossible” dimensions of their practices. Topics will include virtual geographies, the use of social documentary in legal practice, proof of "public benefit," feminist avatars, direct action organizing, immigration and white privilege.
On Sunday, Sept 25th, The Consult presents a video installation and exhibition in a Belltown hair salon. In this unique program, the impersonal standardization of the Yelp interface and the hyperpersonal, idealization of Bitmoji avatars collide. The Consult is an Black Box exhibition prototype where technology mediates a conversation between a local Seattle artist and a local Seattle business that is not directly linked to the technology industry.
Katherine Behar
Black Box 3.0 Week 2 continues with opening receptions for Allison Kudla’s algorithmic living wall, Tenacity and Fwd:<no-reply>@TheAlice, a multimedia exhibition of video games, screen-capture performances and video installations that interrogate the power dynamics of social isolation in online and digital worlds. On Friday 9/30, the world premiere screening of 13 Chambers takes place at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, where 13 filmmakers explore the uncanny, the supernatural and the sublime.
Saturday 10/1 introduces a wide range of festival activities. First, the festival highlights an exciting partner program, Tracie Morris’s performance at UW Bothell Convergence on Poetics. Then, we invite our audiences to the Georgetown neighborhood for public programs at Interstitial, Mount Analogue and The Alice. The capstone of the Georgetown outpost of Black Box 3.0 is LISTEN, it’s a sound show at Equinox Studios. LISTEN is a one-night, large scale auditory exhibition that features sound art, narrative artwork, music, oral history and spoken word. LISTEN Co-curator Emily Pothast and I have designed an urgent, non-hierarchal experience where performers, immersive installations, videos, sound-making sculptures and the viewing audience negotiate a shared sound space that politicizes different types of listening.
Kerry Downey
Black Box 3.0 festival development is improvisational and interdisciplinary. It plants seeds for ongoing thought, action, and creation. The festival both ends and looks ahead with ROT: Compost vs. Surgery. Throughout the festival design process, strong exhibition concepts grew out of seemingly unlikely opportunities and invitations to engage Black Box programs. When festival director Julia Fryett asked if we were interested in curating a video screening related to Seattle Art Museum’s Big Picture: Art After 1945, this challenged me to explore my own tendency to understand video art in relation to traditions of painting, performance and cultural resistance, beyond the tradition of cinema. In ROT, Alice Gallery cohort S. Surface and I continue an ongoing curatorial dialogue about bodies, aging identity, health and community expressed through strong physical and morphological presence in creative practice. Surface and I particularly appreciate moments when Art talks to other Art about topics that are NOT Art. I am excited to be able to engage this idea in ROT and throughout Black Box’s programs.