This week Woodstock held a Digital Media Festival with lots of great art and media works presented and friends coming up from NYC. As part of the Festival, an excellent digital media exhibition is installed at the Artistree Gallery, very near to the MBR park.

Artistree Gallery Director Adrian and Festival Chairman David McGowan with the awesome Stephanie Rothenberg (artist, friend, prof at Uni Buffalo and organizer of the ISEA2012 Econotopias theme) as she presents her latest work at the opening Friday night.

I finally got to meet Karolina Sobecka, the creator of the great Puff project that uses the emissions system of you car to produce a visual representation of CO2 emissions. Here she is presenting Puff at the Gallery opening and speaking with the Chris Thompson, Chief Curator & Director of Exhibitions at Burlington City Arts.

The Artistree Gallery version of Puff responded to human CO2 emissions.

Another intriguing work in the exhibition was Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle, where he performs ‘makeovers’ that allow people to hide from ubiquitous computer vision surveillance identification systems. Above is a ‘before’ and below, ‘after’ – handsome AND mysterious!

Saturday after the opening, Adam was under the tent giving makeovers all day. Unfortunately, I didn’t get one, because I was participating in a master class at Dartmouth given by the MoMix Dance Company. MoMix was founded by Dartmouth alum Moses Pendleton and they perform and give workshops there often. We worked with big wobbly pink noodles to create various shapes and illusions. Hmm, I suppose one could use a big pink noodle to fool a surveillance camera, but invariably not without arousing suspicion!

Another cool project I didn’t get to try was the Cell phone race by Tim Clark where you put your phone on vibrate and try to receive calls as quickly as possible to vibrate your way to the finish line. I heard the competition got a bit ugly.

However, I did get a chance to be a part of a panel on Artists vs Curators with Stephanie, curator Barbara London of MOMA, Paddy Johnson the Founding Editor of Art Fag City and festival organizers Joe McKay and Marcin Ramocki. Topics of discussion included challenges in preserving works of digital media, a proposed new ‘.art’ url suffix and its implications for defining ‘what is art,’ the ‘cult of the curator’ online, ‘speculative design’ when art lives as proposal only.

Where does art live anyway? Animated gif from Artfagcity exhibition Graphics Interchange Format by Kevin Bewersdorf

Finally, also caught a panel called ‘Telling True Stories’ about digital journalistic storytelling that was very inspiring. It featured Annie Correal the content manager for Cowbird, a platform that allows users to post aural stories with images. The stories are fascinating and engaging, a kind of social media ‘This American Life’ (although also international.) The panel also featured the comics journalist Dan Archer, who has taken the Joe Sacco style of graphic novel to a new dimension in his work with victims of human trafficking, histories of Alcatraz and many others. Inspiring, important and influential work!