Luc Courschene, The Construction of Experience

The Media Arts & Technology Program Visiting Lecture Series Presents

4 P.M. / Monday, April 15 / Free
1241 Art & Art History Building

Luc Courchesne presents a survey of his works by between 1985 and 2001 that characterize early developments in new media art and the quest shared by many artists of this generation for an increasingly interactive and immersive genre. Courchesne will also try to position new media art as we know it within a larger project that started with the panorama artists of the 19th century and whose ambition is to turn spectators into visitors.

Luc Courchesne was born in 1952 in St-Léonard d'Aston, Québec. He studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (Bachelor of Design in Communication, 1974), and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (Master of Science in Visual Studies, 1984).

He began his explorations in interactive video in 1984 when he co-authored Elastic Movies, one of the earliest experiments in the field

with Ellen Sebring, Benjamin Bergery, Bill Seaman and others. He has since produced more than a dozen installations including Encyclopaedia Chiaroscuro (1987), Portrait One (1990), Family Portrait (1993), Hall of Shadows (1996), Landscape One (1997), Passages (1998), Rendez-vous (1999) and The Visitor (2001).

His work has been shown extensively in galleries and museums worldwide: Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales, New York's Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo's InterCommunication Center (ICC), Paris' La Villette, Karlsruhe's ZKM/Medienmuseum, Montréal's Musée d'art contemporain among others. His installations are part of the collections of the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the ZKM/Medienmuseum (Karlsruhe), the NTT InterCommuncation Center (Tokyo) and the Museum of Communication (Bern).

Luc Courchesne was awarded the Grand Prix of the ICC Biennale '97 in Tokyo and an Award of Distinction at Pris Ars Electronica 1999 in Linz, Austria.

Based in Montreal, Luc Courchesne is professor of information design at the Université de Montréal and president of the Société des arts technologiques. Marc Lavallée and Étienne Desautels have been his two main collaborators since 1996.

The UCSB Digital Media Arts Lecture Series' has been initiated to introduce
to the campus and the Santa Barbara community a broad range of activities in contemporary digital media arts of the last 15 years with an emphasis on visual arts related practices that occur at the intersections of technology and culture. The invited speakers will consist primarily of practitioners and theorists with interdisciplinary backgrounds, who will address a range of issues dealing with the theory and practice of digital media.

The Lecture series is sponsored by a special Humanities HFA Research &
Curricular Initiative grant, in conjunction with the Media Arts & Technology graduate program, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the department of Art Studio. All lectures are free and open to the public.