The ATS visiting artist and lecturer series will present internationally esteemed media art curator, Zhang Ga. His talk, The Posthuman as a Condition of Art: Rethinking New Media Art, will take place on Wednesday, October 25, at 4:15 in the ATS Flex Space.
ZHANG Ga is an internationally recognized media art curator. He is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Art and Technology at China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), and Senior Fellow at the Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program of University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Since 2015, he directs Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, China’s first non-profit art organization dedicated to media art. Previously, he was a Professor at the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, and Associate Professor of Media Art at Parsons School of Design, and has held visiting positions at the MIT Media Lab, Stanford University, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and The Graduate Center, CUNY. In his capacity as Consulting Curator of Media Art at the National Art Museum of China from 2007–2014, he curated the widely acclaimed international media art triennial series including Synthetic Times (2008, A Beijing Olympics Cultural Project); Translife (2011), and thingworld (2014), among others. These large-scale exhibitions critically investigated and examined global media art trends, and generated intellectual discourses about art, technology and culture, and have received extensive mediacoverage including the New York Times, China Daily, Artforum, ArtAsiaPacific, and The Art Newspaper, and numerous others. His most recent curatorial projects includeunREAL: The Algorithmic Present at House of Electronic Arts Basel (June 2017, Switzerland) and Datumsoria: The Return of the Real at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (September 2017, Germany). He served as jury member and nominator for Prix Ars Electronica, VIDA|Art and Artificial Life International Award, Franklinfurnace’s Future of the Present Award, and the Rockefeller New Media Art Fellowship, to name a few. He has lectured and given keynote addresses on media art and culture around the world in venues such as Relive: International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology Histories (Melbourne), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), National Art Center (Tokyo), Künsthalle Zurich (Zurich), São Paulo State University (São Paulo), South Australian Art Museum (Adelaide), UC Berkeley, and Columbia University, among others. He has edited several books and authored essays that were published by the MIT Press, October, Flash Art International, Liverpool University Press and Tsinghua University Press. He also serves on the editorial board of Leonardo Books, published by the MIT Press.