POPULARITY
UCLA Arts alumnus, artist, and filmmaker Zach Blas joins the podcast to discuss his upbringing in Point Pleasant, West Virginia; his initial interests in film and what ultimately inspired his passion for art and technology; his life-saving experience as a Tori Amos groupie; and his current work and contribution to the exhibition Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at LACMA, party of Getty's region-wide initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide.
Secession Podcast: Artists is a series of conversations featuring artists exhibiting at the Secession. This episode is a conversation between the artist Zach Blas and the curator Christian Lübbert. It was recorded on March 8, 2024 in the context of the exhibition: Zach Blas CULTUS 8.3. – 9.6.2024 Zach Blas's practice spans moving image, computation, installation, theory, performance, and fiction. As an artist, filmmaker, and writer, Blas draws out the philosophies and imaginaries residing in computational technologies and their industries. For his exhibition at the Secession, he developed CULTUS, a new installation that features AI-generated imagery, text, and sound, alongside computer graphics and motion-capture performances. More The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast. Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard Editing Director: Zach Blas & Christian Lübbert Editor: Paul Macheck Programmed by the board of the Secession Produced by Christian Lübbert
Listen to the performance lecture 'Expositio, Iudicium, Lacrimae, or, Does an AI God Have an Ass?' by exhibiting artist Zach Blas exploring the idea of religious-un/conscious thriving in today's tech industry. Charting his encounters with various artificial intelligence gods, Blas tells of a computational world of divine judgment and devout submission, where artificial intelligence exists alongside mystical glyphs, occult sigils, captured bodies, and corporate transcendence. Through a consideration of religious sermons, offerings of worship, and spiritual iconography, an AI religiosity is traced, in which flesh becomes biometric and emotional crying transmutes into a symbolic language of holy quantification.
Photography has been used as a tool to record our bodies from the creation of the first mugshots in the late 19th century to recent developments in facial recognition technology. In the first episode of Mirror with a Memory, artist Zach Blas and filmmaker and scholar Manthia Diawara will discuss what it means to leave it to machines to verify our identities.
Image via: Andy Adams instagram. In this episode of Explain Me we talk to Andy Adams (FlakPhoto on instagram), a culture producer and long time digital director. Andy is the founder of FlakPhoto Projects, an international community of photographers that operates in a parallel path to the one Powhida and Johnson come from—the New York based studio and museum world. Andy, William, and Paddy began working online around the same time—2003-2005, so we start our conversation there. We track through the exuberance and possibility we saw online in the early aughts, the economic collapse of the late aughts, and fraught political environment we’re now navigating. Subjects include: The signature Flak Photo style, the ethics of documentary photography, and the the postponed Guston show at the Tate. References and reading: Instagram: @photographersvote #photographersvote Two Museums Tried to Sell Art. Only One Caught Grief About it. New York Times Guston Can Wait. Nikki Columbus, N+1 Contra-Internet, Zach Blas, e-flux Journal
In this episode Jared speaks with Zach Blas, an artist, filmmaker and writer whose videos and mixed media installations draw queer readings on American mythologies around tech, psychedelia and the Californian Ideology, expanding these through the language of science fiction.Born in West Virginia, studying in California, and now at home in London where he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, Zach has presented work for the likes of de Young Museum, San Francisco, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Gwangju Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery, London and more.
Zach Blas in conversation with Laurel Ptak, Art in General's Executive Director & Curator, on the occasion of Blas's exhibition Contra-Internet at Art in General and his lecture-performance Metric Mysticism at e-flux. Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of capture, security, and control. Currently, he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent works respond to biometric governmentality and network hegemony. Read more about the exhibition, on view through April 21, 2018, at artingeneral.org Read Zach Blas' essay in e-flux journal #74 (June 2016): "Contra-Internet"
Global Control and Censorship | Vortrag ZKM_Lecture Hall 01/14/2016 Are there strategies to confront digital surveillance? Zach Blas and Hans Bernhard from Ubermorgen.com pursued this question in their talks. Zach Blas is currently presenting one possible approach in the »GLOBAL CONTROL AND CENSORSHIP« exhibition: Masks Protect against »Facial Recognition«. With »Masks«, Blas places himself in the tradition of masked resistance, such as with the Pussy Riot and Anonymous, who refuse to be identified and punished by wearing masks. /// ZKM_Vortragssaal 14-01-2016 Wie können wir der digitalen Überwachung und der allgegenwärtigen Lesbarkeit persönlicher Daten entgehen? Masken schützen uns vor Gesichtserkennung und Identifizierung. Der maskierte Widerstand wie etwa bei Pussy Riot oder Anonymous macht sich diese Strategie zunutze. In dieser Tradition entwickelt Zach Blas amorphe »Masks«, die aus den Gesichtsdaten mehrerer Personen zusammengesetzt sind. Seine Arbeit »Facial Weaponization Suite« wird in der Ausstellung »GLOBAL CONTROL AND CENSORSHIP« gezeigt. Er diskutiert mit Hans Bernhard von UBERMORGEN.COM Möglichkeiten, sich den dominanten Formen der politischen Repräsentation zu widersetzen: durch Maskieren und Verstecken.
Global Control and Censorship | Vortrag ZKM_Lecture Hall 01/14/2016 Are there strategies to confront digital surveillance? Zach Blas and Hans Bernhard from Ubermorgen.com pursued this question in their talks. Zach Blas is currently presenting one possible approach in the »GLOBAL CONTROL AND CENSORSHIP« exhibition: Masks Protect against »Facial Recognition«. With »Masks«, Blas places himself in the tradition of masked resistance, such as with the Pussy Riot and Anonymous, who refuse to be identified and punished by wearing masks. /// ZKM_Vortragssaal 14-01-2016 Wie können wir der digitalen Überwachung und der allgegenwärtigen Lesbarkeit persönlicher Daten entgehen? Masken schützen uns vor Gesichtserkennung und Identifizierung. Der maskierte Widerstand wie etwa bei Pussy Riot oder Anonymous macht sich diese Strategie zunutze. In dieser Tradition entwickelt Zach Blas amorphe »Masks«, die aus den Gesichtsdaten mehrerer Personen zusammengesetzt sind. Seine Arbeit »Facial Weaponization Suite« wird in der Ausstellung »GLOBAL CONTROL AND CENSORSHIP« gezeigt. Er diskutiert mit Hans Bernhard von UBERMORGEN.COM Möglichkeiten, sich den dominanten Formen der politischen Repräsentation zu widersetzen: durch Maskieren und Verstecken.
Global Control and Censorship | Vortrag ZKM_Lecture Hall 01/14/2016 Are there strategies to confront digital surveillance? Zach Blas and Hans Bernhard from Ubermorgen.com pursued this question in their talks. Zach Blas is currently presenting one possible approach in the »GLOBAL CONTROL AND CENSORSHIP« exhibition: Masks Protect against »Facial Recognition«. With »Masks«, Blas places himself in the tradition of masked resistance, such as with the Pussy Riot and Anonymous, who refuse to be identified and punished by wearing masks. /// ZKM_Vortragssaal 14-01-2016 Wie können wir der digitalen Überwachung und der allgegenwärtigen Lesbarkeit persönlicher Daten entgehen? Masken schützen uns vor Gesichtserkennung und Identifizierung. Der maskierte Widerstand wie etwa bei Pussy Riot oder Anonymous macht sich diese Strategie zunutze. In dieser Tradition entwickelt Zach Blas amorphe »Masks«, die aus den Gesichtsdaten mehrerer Personen zusammengesetzt sind. Seine Arbeit »Facial Weaponization Suite« wird in der Ausstellung »GLOBAL CONTROL AND CENSORSHIP« gezeigt. Er diskutiert mit Hans Bernhard von UBERMORGEN.COM Möglichkeiten, sich den dominanten Formen der politischen Repräsentation zu widersetzen: durch Maskieren und Verstecken.
Global Control and Censorship | Vortrag ZKM_Lecture Hall 01/21/2016 In this talk, artist and writer Zach Blas discussed the emerging militancies and subversions of the Internet, or what he calls »contra-internet practices«. Oriented from a feminist and queer perspective, Blas engages topics of post-capitalism, dildotectonics, utopian plagiarism, and social media exodus, constructing a contra-internet praxis that both refuses the control logic of »the Internet« and builds alternatives to its infrastructure. /// ZKM_Vortragssaal 21-01-2016 In seiner Lecture diskutierte der Künstler und Autor Zach Blas die aufkommende Militanz und die Subversionen gegen das Internet, oder wie er es nennt, »contra-internet practices«. Ausgerichtet an einer feministischen und queer Perspektive, beschäftigt sich Blas mit Themen des Postkapitalismus, »Dildotektonik«, utopischen Plagiarismus und dem Exodus aus Social Media. Dabei entwirft er eine »contra-internet« Praxis, welche sowohl die Logik der Kontrolle des Internets ablehnt, als auch alternative Infrastrukturen erbaut.
Omar Kholeif chairs a panel discussion with three artists whose practices subvert and problematize entrenched notions of how the body is mediated through human-made technologies.
In February 2015 the IMA hosted a series of lectures and artist’s presentations titled 'Factory/studio/tumblr*' that responded to Hito Steyerl’s exhibition 'Too Much World' (13 December 2014–22 March 2015). As part of the symposium artist Zach Blas speaks on the notion of the contra–internet and puts his theory into context by sharing details of some of his recent participatory anti-surveillance artworks. *Event title taken from Hito Steyerls e-flux journal essay, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?“ (no 492013).