Negativland: In Conversation

Friday, January 26th at 3pm, join ISSUE in collaboration with NYU Tandon School of Engineering for a special artist talk with Negativland, moderated by NYU’s Academic Director of Integrated Design & Media, Scott Fitzgerald. The discussion will focus on their work and the ethics of appropriation, fair use, and AI from the 1990s to the present. This event will follow ISSUE’s 2024 Winter Season Opening on the evening of Thursday, January 25th with Negativland and VALISE at First Unitarian Congregational Society, featuring video by real-time cinema visual artist SUE-C.

The IDM x ONX Speaker Series is free with RSVP to the general public. Non-NYU visitors must have a photo ID and will receive an email pass the day of the event.

Since 1980, the multimedia collective known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sounds, images, objects, and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and "culture jamming" (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement. Their art and media interventions pose both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, ownership, propaganda, power, and perception in the United States of America. Their work is now referenced and taught in many college courses in the US, has been written about and cited in over 150 books and legal journals, and they sometimes lecture about their work in the USA and in Europe.

Scott Fitzgerald is an artist and educator whose work examines the interdependence of culture and emerging technology. His installation, video, and experiential work has been exhibited and installed throughout the USA, Europe, Middle East, and China. He regularly runs workshops on using technology in the arts and was the head of documentation for the open source Arduino platform. He is a partner in Lightband Studio.