Video still from "God's Eye View" by Adam Simmons, commissioned for Habitats April 14 - May 14 (2016)

As I've mentioned before I have been working on another enormous multimedia/intellectually demanding project and the time has come to let PORT readers and everyone else know. I've been helping with the U of O's 6th annual What Is? conference titled What Is? Media and co-curating the interwoven exhibition Habitats featuring feminist/artificial intelligence art pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson (who will speak at PAM on the 15th). Check out the official Habitats page for the full list of artists. Yes, this is at the U of O in Portland and the exhibition is free to everyone, conference attendance not required.

The conference itself has a tremendous lineup with speakers from MIT, The New York Times, Oxford and Stanford etc. Panels will be of interest to any intellectual interested in; gender, materiality, technologies, curation (I'm a participant my presentation is some of my best writing), literacies, cinema, nutrition, pornography and installation art.

Habitats is an installation art heavy multi-media exploration of media (in the broadest definition)as a habitat. Portland hasn't seen a large group show like this in a long time and it features; virtual reality, architecture, drones, proposed hybridized human organs, artificial intelligence, hacked video games, honey bees, wolf packs and more. It opens on Thursday April 14th at 7:00 at the University of Oregon's Portland campus beneath the Made in Oregon sign.

PR Statement: "The exhibition emerges at the University of Oregon in Portland's Light Court Commons, in collaboration with the WHITE BOX Gallery, and the Library & Learning Commons. HABITATS has been organized in conjunction with the sixth annual WHAT IS...? Conference-Experience on the themes of medium and media. The question, WHAT IS MEDIA? will have many answers and illicit even more questions, but curators, Jeremy Swartz, Jeff Jahn, and Cris Moss, expect that this participatory experience will engage artist-artifact-audience as a process of meaningful discourse. As such, art is a medium of communication, and communication is a medium--or environment--of art. These artists have cultivated their idiomatic hives/swarms/flocks/packs, and their mediums are enacted as HABITATS."

*Update with images:


Habitats (installation view), Styrobot (bg) Michael Salter, Alvarium (fg) Laura Fritz


Lynn Hershman Leeson's Agent Ruby


Carbonfeed by John Park & Jon Bellona (fg) David Heskin (bg)


Tabitha Nikolai's Mutatis Mutandis


Brenna Murphy's 1st Oculus Rift piece


Agi Haines' Electrostabilis Cardium


Anne Blackburn


Work by Crystal Schenk (fg) Damien Gilley (bg left) Modou Dieng (bh right)


Portland Immersive Media Group

Adam Simmons God's Eye View


Alvarium, Laura Fritz


(center) Styrobot, Michael Salter, (left) prints by Wade Larsen