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DANM Fest featured symposia, exhibitions, performances

By Dom Massaro, Chair, Digital Arts and New Media Program

DANM Festival 2006 featured speakers from both U.S. coasts, Australia and Canada, as well as exhibitions and performances.

The UCSC Digital Art New Media (DANM) Festival 2006 brought visibility to the DANM community and served as a platform for an inspiring and productive dialogue among participating practitioners and theorists working in the field of digital media art.

Sponsored by Porter College and the DANM M.F.A. Program, this interdisciplinary arts event took place on campus and at the Museum of Art and History in downtown Santa Cruz, on the first weekend of May.

The symposia, organized mainly by DANM faculty, featured speakers from the East and West Coasts, Australia, and Canada. The panels were wide in scope and covered topics such as the relationship between live performance and digital art, the influence of biotechnology in artistic production, the relevance of algorithmic techniques in the making of diverse forms of art, and the role of virtuosity in a technology-enhanced performance.

The work of highly regarded media artists Jim Campbell, Paul DeMarinis, and Camille Utterback were featured in “Physical | Digital,” an exhibition at the Museum of Art and History. The show was universally well received, particularly Utterback’s installation in which visitors could affect the development of a perpetually evolving video projection.

The DANM Festival also became a bridge to the local community through a collaboration with the Santa Cruz Film Festival and its director, Jane Sullivan, who offered her advice and support in the presentation of the DANM Festival’s screening of experimental video works.

Many DANM students exhibited their work at the Porter Sesnon gallery in an exhibition called “Blink.” This show gave students the opportunity to present their work to a larger and more specialized audience than they may have had otherwise.

A music performance on the last evening of the festival featured pieces by luminaries of the Bay Area experimental music community. John Bischoff played several pieces using electronically triggered bells and custom electronics. Laetitia Sonami used her glove controller, an evening black lycra glove studded with a myriad of sensors, in conjunction with Sue Costabile and her “synthesized” cinema made from photographs, drawings, watercolors, hand-made papers, fabrics and miniature interactive lighting effects to weave a rich combination of sound and light with high and low-tech electronics.

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