Ebon Fisher's Bio-Positioning Systems at ArtSPACE, Sept. 25

HOBOKEN, N.J. – Ebon Fisher, an Affiliate Associate Professor in Stevens Institute of Technology’s College of Arts and Letters, will deliver a one-evening presentation, “Bio Positioning Systems,” on September 25, 2008, at ArtSPACE, New Haven, Conn. The ArtSPACE exhibit previews Fisher’s new website system, designed for the Art & Technology program in the College of Arts & Letters. The website takes the shape of a red, nerve-like structure, which courses through the 2nd floor of Stevens’ Morton building. This event is part of ArtSPACE’s series, “Strange Positioning Systems (SPS),” curated by Caterina Verde, artist-in-residence at Stevens.

Taking a third position in the nature vs. technology conflict, Fisher calls himself a “media breeder.” His media projects involve the cultivation of hybrid living systems, positing that digital media technology is just another process in the planet’s biosphere.

“I cultivate relationships between people, machines and other living things,” said the artist. “It’s time to move beyond the human- centered worldview of art and civilization and begin a more ecological approach to creativity.” Fisher will talk about the significance of nerve forms and networks in his work and present elements of his evolving transmedia world, the Nervepool.

Fisher has been exploring nerves, networks and inter-coding systems in nature since teaching media at MIT’s Media Lab in the mid-1980s.

Looking further into community-based media rituals in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1990s, he helped to build vital channels of communication that helped to propel the struggling neighborhood into a major international cultural hot spot. Fisher explored a variety of unusual strategies for mixing people and communications technologies and documented these community-based rituals in diagrams of information flow. These diagrams gave rise to symbols of network ethics, Zoacodes, which Fisher has floated in a variety of media, including the Internet and television. One of Fisher’s Zoacodes has served as a basis for the SPS project logo. The text component of that Zoacode is “Behold the Unclear,” a humorous celebration of the vital confusion that seems to run through the veins of the information age.

For more information: www.strangepositioningsystems.org

Ebon Fisher's work: www.Nervepool.net

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.

Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,040 undergraduate and 3,085 graduate students, and a worldwide online enrollment of 2,250, with a full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty of 140 and more than 200 full-time special faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.  

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