Art Clay, New Media (including Soundart, Performance, Compostion)
Biography
Art Clay is an artist and collaborator who was born in New York and twitters between his life in Basel and world presence working between the borders of the arts, the sciences, and society. As an artist, he has been awarded prizes for performance art , media art, design, music theater, and composition.
He has exhibited in major museum across the world and is at present, involved with several in several long running projects including a performative sound art tour and a several exhibitions featuring his work including a solo retrospective in the near future.
He has been supported by governmental agencies, art councils, private foundations, and industry partners such as Presence Switzerland, Pro Helvetia, Swissnex China, Swissnex Singapore, Migros Kulturprozent, Mondrian Foundation, Japan Foundation, Arts Council England, Canada Council for the Arts, Procedural, HP, LG Electronics, and many others.
He developed artworks and implemented project with renowned institutes such as EPFL, ETH Zurich, University of the Arts Zurich, Xian Academy of the Arts, NTU and NUS of Singapore, Jiaotong University Shanghai, University of Victoria BC, Sogang University, Seoul National University, Singapore Polytechnic, Politecnico di Milano, and for various private and government agencies and institutions including Biocon Labs, SAST, A2Star, and more.
As an educator, he has taught over the past ten years at various art schools and universities in Europe and Asia including Zurich Hochschule der Kuenste, Luzerne University of Arts & Science, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Sogang University, and NCCU Taipei.
In his spare time, he acts as a collaborator for Virtuale Switzerland, festival for virtual arts in Switzerland; and acts as a consultant for the Seoul Bioart Festival, an event platforming potentials between new technologies in the life sciences and the new arts exploring speculative design and wet media.
Artists Statement
I am a media artist and a collaborator who finds myself twittering between the borders of the arts, the sciences, and society.
My main area of interest that motivates me to create art and which permeates most all of my works, is what I have come to term the „Performative Surround“, which is a term designating the use of electronic technology in performative art that pertains to the immersive quality of the setting in which the an artwork take place and how the technology used in the work is used to articulate the performer’s presence through the multi-sensuality of electronic media to the viewer.
Artworks that I have created with the Performative Surround concept in mind enable me as the performing artist to blur the divide between performer and public by directly involving them in the performative act through the powers of inclusion. When an artwork utilizes sensor networks (for example GPS) inclusion becomes possible and communication between performer and public is interactively networked in real time, leading to a dialoging with the public and transforming them from passive viewers into active participants.
The goal of my latest works is to allow performer and public to be virtually networked by the expansion of the real into virtual and to explore issues in media enhanced performance and its re-embodiment into the domains of hyper-reality that can be tangibly experienced.
Main works involving the theory of the Performative Surround:
- China Gates, music for gongs and satellites
- GoingPublik, music for interactive score
- HoerRoom Beijing/Biel, sound artwork for pendulum speakers
- HoerRoom Wiesbaden, sound artwork for suspended percussion
- Book of Stamps, stamping book for collaborative landscapes
- The Church According to Marshal McLuhan, immersive and interactive environment