Laura J. Kurgan at Summer School as School 2018
July 30, 2018, 19:00
Venue: Boxing Club

Summer School as School
July 16 – August 2, 2018

Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina is pleased to announce the presentation “The Black Marble and the Connectome” by Laura J. Kurgan, part of Summer School as School 2018 Public Program.

These two maps have become iconic images that circulate often in the media to represent networks. The Black Marble, a composite of satellite imagery taken from space every night of lights on earth, is an icon of an electrified and networked globe. The Connectome, a wiring map of the electronic connections between neurons, the billions cells which build our brains, is an icon of the new science of the networked brain. Do these maps have anything in common? I will present two recent public installations using the data which constitutes these maps to talk about their limits, their potentials, and perhaps what connects them.

Laura Kurgan teaches architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning at Columbia University, where she is Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) and the Director of Visual Studies. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013). Her work explores themes ranging from digital mapping technologies to the ethics and politics of mapping, and the art, science and visualisation of data. Her work has appeared at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Altria, MACBa Barcelona, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Museum of Modern Art. She was the winner of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship in 2009. Her recent research includes a multi-year SIDL project on "million-dollar blocks" and the urban costs of the American incarceration experiment and an exhibition on global migration and climate change, Native Land: Stop Eject, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

Her work has appeared at the Venice Architecture Biennale; the Whitney Altria; MACBa Barcelona; the ZKM in Karlsruhe; and the Museum of Modern Art (where it is part of the permanent collection). She has published articles and essays in Atlantic Magazine, Volume, Grey Room, Assemblage and Else/Where Mapping, among other books and journals.