Members Only: June + July Season Launch Party
May 29, 2014
Free event for Northwest Film Forum members!
Northwest Film Forum members: join us on May 29 for a celebration of our new June/July season, summer drinks, and Beneath the Pirate Bay, a free discussion with visiting digital artist Nicolas Maigret and professor James Coupe from the University of Washington.
In Maigret's The Pirate Cinema (May 29 - 31), a live "visual concert" reveals the hidden activity and geography of real-time peer-to-peer file sharing, happening 24/7 via BitTorrent. We'll talk with Maigret and Coupe about the beautiful and restless world of visual media online, personal and public screens, and the power and meaning of surveillance in our everyday life.
ABOUT NICOLAS MAIGRET
Nicolas Maigret is an artist working in digital art and sound since 2001. His work exposes the internal workings of media, through a reflection on their errors, their dysfunctions, their limitations or failure thresholds. After completing studies in inter-media art, Maigret joined the LocusSonus lab in France, where he explored networks as a creative tool. He teaches at École des beaux-arts de Bordeaux and cofounded the collective Art of Failure in 2006. He is also involved with the project Plateforme, an artist-run centre in Paris.
ABOUT JAMES COUPE
James Coupe is an associate professor in the DXArts program at the University of Washington. A British-born artist, he examines the power and meaning of surveillance in our everyday life by working with advanced surveillance technologies, including high definition video cameras, facial recognition software, and computer algorithms derived from popular search engines and social media sites. His work contemplates the relationship we have with systems: how on the one hand they organize and control our behaviors, while on the other revealing aspects of who we are as humans. This is a dichotomy that results in numerous paradoxes found in James's work: exhibitionism/voyeurism, subject/object, public/private, observer/observed, etc. James's work directly engage with systems rather than simply illustrate or represent them, i order to find out how they author the world around us.