Recombinant Media Labs SF (in collaboration with Gray Area Foundation For the Arts) is excited to announce +DIALOG, a symposium series inviting local and global artists, scholars and polymaths to present and discuss their work in an intimate environment.

In a time when the information we consume is unprecedentedly estranged from its origins, +DIALOG will provide a forum to commune, collate and derive fresh context direct from the source.

“A Natural History of Media”

Media technologies have become the last best hope for a dated modernist march into the future only because they are imagined to have no nature. In fact, nature has gone in and out of circuit with modern communications technologies since their inception; natural radio was heard two decades before radio was invented; and communications technologies have never merely been about communications.

To present these ideas and field your questions, Recombinant Media Labs and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts welcome Douglas Kahn. Douglas Kahn is a historical theoretician of experimental arts and music; is the author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts; and has three new books forthcoming on experimental music, the arts and early computing, and electromagnetism and the arts. He is a Guggenheim Fellow on the historical discovery of natural radio and is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University of California at Davis.

“Electric”

Kahn’s presentation of “A Natural History of Media” is paired with a presentation of “Electric,” a new project by Chris Kubick, which explores the raw sonic edges and subtle mythologies of the basic source material underlying electronic music: electricity itself. Chris Kubick is an artist, composer, and sound designer tracing the boundaries between sense and non-sense, signal and noise, representation and formlessness. His work has been seen and heard in venues such as Whitney Museum and The New Museum (New York), MOCA and the Getty Center (L.A.), and many others.

Schedule:
7:00 – 7:30pm reception
7:30 – 9:00pm presentations
9:00 – 9:30pm Open Q & A
9:30 – 10:30pm Networking and drinks

Press inquiries, general questions and suggestions are welcome.