ATC Lecture: Mark Tribe November 23, 2009

"What is Utopian becomes... the commitment to imagining possible Utopias as such, in their greatest variety of forms." - Fredric Jameson, 2005

The world is far from perfect; this we know. Yet dreams of perfection surround us. Why is it that we can't help dreaming of a world without inequity, a world in which tyrants find themselves transformed into saints and everyone has enough to eat?

The Utopian Spirit animates novels and revolutionary manifestoes, separatist enclaves and cultural gatherings in the high desert. One might even go so far as to say that it is a defining characteristic of modernity. But as the macropolitics of the new world order make it increasingly difficult to imagine radically different futures, we are beginning to see new manifestations of utopian desire: modest eddies of local autonomy in the global flow of hegemonic power.

Mark Tribe is an artist and occasional curator whose interests include art, technology, and politics. His artwork has been exhibited at Toronto's Trinity Square Video, New York's Park Avenue Armory and Moscow's National Center for Contemporary Art.He has organized curatorial projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, and inSite_05. He is the co-author, with Reena Jana, of The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010), and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006). He is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, where he teaches courses on digital art, curating, open-source culture, radical media, and surveillance. In 1996, he founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. He received a MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego in 1994 and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 1990. http://marktribe.net

Official Website: http://bcnm.berkeley.edu