Kris Paulsen | Ohio State University (original) (raw)

Books by Kris Paulsen

MIT Press, Leonardo Book Series, 2017

Catalogue for Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions at Columbus Museum of Art (9/23-2/24). Essays by ... more Catalogue for Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions at Columbus Museum of Art (9/23-2/24). Essays by Kris Paulsen, Elizabeth Povinelli, Sarah Rosalena and Kathryn Yusoff. Edited by Kris Paulsen.

Edited Journals by Kris Paulsen

Media-N, 2023

https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/issue/view/100 Guest edited by Brian Michael... more https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/issue/view/100

Guest edited by Brian Michael Murphy (Bennington College) and Kris Paulsen (The Ohio State University), this special issue of Media-N features articles, artist projects, reviews, and an interview that address the ways that the material conditions of data and art are shifting, and how thinkers, artists, and scholars can offer crucial scaffolding for understanding how we arrived here. Our contributors present prehistories of data models we take for granted and provide historical contexts that clarify what is new and what is not, helping us to see where we now might be headed. NFTs, DNA data, the sensuous traces of e-waste, facial recognition software trained on marginalized subjects, and the institutionalized processes of dispossessing human subjects from their colonial contexts all present ways in which data comes to have an afterlife that haunts our present and potential futures.

Media-N, May 2014

Edited by Kris Paulsen & Meredith Hoy. Essays by Tung-Hui Hu, John Harwood, Nicole Starosielski,... more Edited by Kris Paulsen & Meredith Hoy.
Essays by Tung-Hui Hu, John Harwood, Nicole Starosielski, Brooke Belisle, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Brian Michael Murphy, among others."

Essays by Kris Paulsen

Great Expectations: Prospects for the Future of Curatorial Education

Media-N, 2020

This essay adapts the concept of "shitty automation," developed by Brian Merchant to name frustra... more This essay adapts the concept of "shitty automation," developed by Brian Merchant to name frustrating experiences with automated systems, to describe how human input-our labor, bodies, biases, prejudices, and desires-remains invisibly present in automated systems. Tracing a lineage of automation from Jacques de Vaucanson's Canard Digérateur (1739) and Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical Turk (1770) to contemporary artist Trevor Paglen, who uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create artworks, this essay considers how humans "stay in the loop" in automation and what "shitty automation" reveals about human culture, our desires, and the evolution of AI.

Representations, May 2013

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Apr 2013

This lea publication has a simple goal: surveying the current trends in augmented reality artisti... more This lea publication has a simple goal: surveying the current trends in augmented reality artistic interventions. There is no other substantive academic collection currently available, and it is with a certain pride that lea presents this volume which provides a snapshot of current trends as well as a moment of reflection on the future of ar interventions.

X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Jan 2012

Open! Platform for Art, Culture & The Public Domain, 2020

This essay by art historian and media theorist Kris Paulsen is part of a series of essays and art... more This essay by art historian and media theorist Kris Paulsen is part of a series of essays and artist contributions that together form an interdisciplinary study into how we feel and touch in our technologically mediated, dematerialized digital cultures and how this is expressed in our social and artistic practices. Paulsen looks to the fantasy of bodiless space to see how our bodies were pulled into that place and to see how we might make visible our fleshy capture in immaterial space.

Chapter from Early Video Art and Experimental Film Networks, edited by Francois Bovier (ECAL/Pres... more Chapter from Early Video Art and Experimental Film Networks, edited by Francois Bovier (ECAL/Presses du Reel, 2017), 174-197

Wexarts.org, 2020

Essay on Gretchen Bender's work up at the Wexner Center for the Arts

Signs and Society, 2018

P A P ER S ES S IO NS WO RK S HO P S P RE-S Y M P O S IUM EVENTS L O CA TIO NS DIRECT TO VIDEO: S... more P A P ER S ES S IO NS WO RK S HO P S P RE-S Y M P O S IUM EVENTS L O CA TIO NS DIRECT TO VIDEO: STEPHEN BECK'S CAMERALESS TELEVISION

Catalogue Essays by Kris Paulsen

Zach Blas: Unknown Ideals, 2021

Catalog essay on Zach Blas's Icosahedron. Sternberg Press.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Shade My Eyes , 2020

Catalogue essay for Isca Greenfield-Sanders at Miles McEnery Gallery

Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, 2014

Reflections: The American Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art , 2019

MIT Press, Leonardo Book Series, 2017

Media-N, 2023

https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/issue/view/100 Guest edited by Brian Michael... more https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/issue/view/100

Media-N, May 2014

Great Expectations: Prospects for the Future of Curatorial Education

Media-N, 2020

Representations, May 2013

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Apr 2013

X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Jan 2012

Open! Platform for Art, Culture & The Public Domain, 2020

Wexarts.org, 2020

Essay on Gretchen Bender's work up at the Wexner Center for the Arts

Signs and Society, 2018

Zach Blas: Unknown Ideals, 2021

Catalog essay on Zach Blas's Icosahedron. Sternberg Press.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Shade My Eyes , 2020

Catalogue essay for Isca Greenfield-Sanders at Miles McEnery Gallery

Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, 2014

Reflections: The American Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art , 2019

These images make a still life of the clothed body. A body part touches a membrane, blooms into s... more These images make a still life of the clothed body. A body part touches a membrane, blooms into specificity, erupts into light and texture. The part held back shrinks, is gray, lurks in the background, a shy or menacing shadow of its full self. A cheekbone comes through fully freckled. The hands, caught in precise detail, are in the process of buttoning or unbuttoning a lab coat. They look older, as if the hands and the freckled cheek had led different lives within the one body. Surprised, we look again. An eye pressed into a literal eye contact leaves its mark on the membrane while the rest of the body becomes the withered limb of an awkward afterthought. A woman with a black-and-white scarf brings part of a forearm into vivid contact with the skin threshold, but her legs, left behind, now seem too far back on her torso, a little off angle, too small to do their own work. What comes through is an opening onto contact, slippage, surprise: a wondering.

in The Sun Placed in the Abyss (Columbus, OH: The Columbus Museum of Art, 2016), 2016

Shana Lutker, SUR

Conversation with Shana Lutker on her recent work.

How To Remain Human, 2015

Essay on Carmen Winant's work for MOCA Cleveland Catalog.

Open This End: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Blake Byrne, 2015

works by Steve McQueen, Jennifer Steinkamp, Martin Kersels.

Christian Marclay: The Clock, 2013

Catalog essay for the Wexner Center for the Art's presentation of Christian Marclay's The Clock.

Using glass to explore a provocative range of artistic and intellectual concerns, Josiah McElheny... more Using glass to explore a provocative range of artistic and intellectual concerns, Josiah McElheny (*1966 in Boston) produces dazzling fabricated objects that address such subjects as the nature of visual perception, the narratives of modernism, and the origin of the universe. Since 2007 he has produced a series of sculptures and a film inspired by The Light Club of Batavia, a 1912 text by German Expressionist writer Paul Scheerbart. This publication focuses on McElheny’s Light Club works, which investigate the role of glass in utopian ideas about modernist architecture, and features essays by curator Bill Horrigan and film scholar Thomas Gunning, shorter texts by visual artists Jeff Preiss and Jason Simon, a commentary by classicist Richard Fletcher, a conversation among Horrigan, artist Doug Ashford, and curator Helen Molesworth, entries on McElheny’s art objects by art historians Lisa Florman and Kris Paulsen, and the script, by poet Rachel Zolf, for McElheny’s 2012 Light Club film.

Walker Art Center, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jPXG3XDPFQ Zach Blas and Kris Paulsen discuss Blas’s newly comm... more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jPXG3XDPFQ

Zach Blas and Kris Paulsen discuss Blas’s newly commissioned work, Icosahedron (2019), as well as the artist’s broader practice. An artificially intelligent crystal ball that predicts the future of prediction, the commission is inspired by Silicon Valley’s obsession with certain thinkers of the future such as Ayn Rand, Stewart Brand, Ray Kurzweil, and Michio Kaku. Coined by Blas as a meta-work to The Body Electric, Icosahedron speaks to contemporary society’s preoccupation with the future, viewed through the intersection between technology, fantasy, and science fiction.

Wexarts.org, 2021

https://wexarts.org/film-video/lynn-hershman-leeson-conversation Artist and filmmaker Lynn Her... more https://wexarts.org/film-video/lynn-hershman-leeson-conversation

Artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson discusses her multifaceted 50-year-career with Ohio State's Kris Paulsen in this Wex-only virtual talk.

Lynn Hershman Leeson is one of our most celebrated and influential media artists. Among her many awards and recognitions, she is the recipient of an ACM SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a USA Artist Fellowship.

Known for her work on time-based and computational media, Kris Paulsen is associate professor in Ohio State’s Department of History of Art and the author Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (MIT Press, 2017).

Urban Arts Space, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYWIqz6cnsI James Bridle discusses Ways of Being with Kris Paulsen

Interview with Mary Lucier in Aperture.

WexBlog/Wexner Center for the Arts, Jul 9, 2012

CAA Reviews, 2024

Review of Tai Shani: My Bodily Remains at the Contemporary Arts Center (11.2023-4.2024)

X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Nov 2007

Design & Culture, Nov 2013

X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, May 2012

X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Sep 2008

The MIT Press eBooks, 2017

Design and Culture, Nov 1, 2013

effect, the organizers could have triggered a true realization of its omnipresence, thus bridging... more effect, the organizers could have triggered a true realization of its omnipresence, thus bridging the gap between the design realm and the public and allowing them to later make informed decisions. At a time when design education is put through such a stern test in the UK, with major cuts aimed at ever-more-expensive art and design schools, it might be preferable to show mundane but effective forms of design rather than exceptional but remote demonstrations of technological skill and beauty. Although various participants – including speakers at the V&A – chose to focus on issues of Britishness and national competitiveness, it would seem that the LDF helps in looking at design mechanisms through another lens. Indeed, by choosing to focus on the city rather than the nation, the organizers have been freer to address the internationality of design. The LDF makes the point that designers train, work, and travel in cities (rather than in nations as a whole), and thus that the cities where they work are more important than their national origin.

Leonardo electronic almanac, 2013

This paper examines the phenomenal effects of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s 1977 satellit... more This paper examines the phenomenal effects of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s 1977 satellite artwork, Satellite Arts 1977 . Most accounts of live feedback video works from the 1970s stress the “narcissism” of the encounter with one’s own body on the screen. This essay, however, argues that while Satellite Arts does collapse the distinction between self and other, it does not result in the narcissism Rosalind Krauss claims is inherent to video. Satellite Arts , instead, models a version of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “chiasm,” and diagrams what phenomenological experience might be like when mediated through a television screen. In doing so, Galloway and Rabinowitz hypothesize an ethics of engagement with others in mediated environments. Through their interventions in time, space, and place Galloway and Rabinowitz model what it might be like to be simultaneously real and virtual, self and other, subject and object, seer and seen, here and there, now and then.

Media-N, 2020

This essay adapts the concept of “shitty automation,” developed by Brian Merchant to name frustra... more This essay adapts the concept of “shitty automation,” developed by Brian Merchant to name frustrating experiences with automated systems, to describe how human input—our labor, bodies, biases, prejudices, and desires—remains invisibly present in automated systems. Tracing a lineage of automation from Jacques de Vaucanson’s Canard Digérateur (1739) and Wolfgang von Kempelen’s mechanical Turk (1770) to contemporary artist Trevor Paglen, who uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create artworks, this essay considers how humans “stay in the loop” in automation and what “shitty automation” reveals about human culture, our desires, and the evolution of AI.

Signs and Society, 2018

The resolution of publicly available satellite photography is limited to 50 cm a pixel. Every pix... more The resolution of publicly available satellite photography is limited to 50 cm a pixel. Every pixel in a satellite image is a single, solid color. The reasons for the resolution limit are tactical as well as protective: according to forensic architect Eyal Weizman, it maintains the privacy of individuals on the ground as well as makes the consequences of state violence harder to investigate. A uniformly colored pixel can be evidence of a drone attack or proof that it never happened. The indexical evidence ambivalently sustains both interpretations. If camouflage has been traditionally thought of as a blending into the contiguous environment, often geared toward a camera's gaze, in this essay I look to the reorientation of camouflage away from the adjacent surroundings and toward the mediating structures of the interface and database. The objective of camouflage is now to merge into arrays of information and to slip below the threshold of detectability. This essay examines the work of artists and activists, such as Hito Steyerl, Zach Blas, and Adam Harvey, who strategize ways of becoming "rogue pixels" hiding in "the cracks of our standards of resolution," resisting the means by which our bodies are indexed on virtual interfaces and algorithmically parsed as data. F orensic architect Eyal Weizman studies satellite images of the earth's surface and the buildings, roads, and other man-made structures that dot its contours. He looks for evidence of state violence, armed conflict, human rights violations, and ecological disaster. But witnessing and testifying to material events-at a distance and on high-is not easy, even with modern technology at one's fingertips. The resolution of publicly available satellite photography is limited to 50 cm a pixel (see fig. 1). Every pixel in a satellite image is a single, solid color. This limitation is not dictated by the hardware, which can render images with much finer detail, but by software for the sake of privacy: at this resolution, publicly available images cannot picture the human body

Media-N, 2018

In this review of the 2015 documentary, Here Come the Videofreex, the author questions Rasking an... more In this review of the 2015 documentary, Here Come the Videofreex, the author questions Rasking and Nealon’s choice of a traditional chronological approach to a discussion of the importance of the Videofreex, particularly to our contemporary understanding of citizen journalism and the ubiquity of cameras in everyone’s back pocket. Instead, Paulsen asks questions about the importance of the Videofreex self-removal from mainstream media to rural New York and their relationship to other radical video collectives of the time.

Design and Culture, 2013

Representations, 2013

In this essay I challenge the rhetoric of the “death of the index” in contemporary media and film... more In this essay I challenge the rhetoric of the “death of the index” in contemporary media and film theory. Rather than being “dead” in the digital age, I argue, the index reemerges as a particularly helpful category for understanding mediated information, “digital doubt,” and experiences through virtual interfaces.