Born 1977 in Detroit, Michigan. Lives in Brooklyn, New York.
(they/them/theirs)
Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist whose work crosses multiple forms and disciplines in order to trace the lines of political and symbolic power as it takes shape online. Building on the conceptual tradition, Mandiberg orders and reorders information, remixing the forms in which it manifests or solidifies. While technically sophisticated, Mandiberg’s work eschews the novelty of new technology in favor of an exploration of appropriation, the digital vernacular, the ways in which these new technologies impact our lives, and the politics and poetics of technological subjectivities.
Mandiberg received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BA from Brown University. Mandiberg’s projects have been presented at Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The New Museum, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Denny Gallery, Art-in-Buildings Financial District Project Space, Arizona State University Library/Museum, Eyebeam, and Transmediale amongst others. Mandiberg’s work has been written about widely, including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and The Wall Street Journal.
Mandiberg is a Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and is on the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. Mandiberg is also founder of the New York Arts Practicum and co-founder of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia.
For this upcoming exhibition, launching November 12th, the works will be presented in the digital sphere where they were born. The gallery will present the artworks on a public Zoom every day through the run of the show.
NYFA has awarded $588,000 to 85 New York State artists working in Craft/Sculpture, Digital/Electronic Arts, Nonfiction Literature, Poetry, and Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts.
Read on Zygote Press. The printed broadside has been an important vehicle for information in Western culture since Gutenberg invented movable type, and has kept the printing press front and center in the transmission of ideas among social communities since that time. This exhibition examines both new and existing works: contemporary broadsides, printed posters and ephemera that dialogue with the idea of social justice. Many of the artists will be working in print media, but others will carry the theme of…Read More
Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance), intimate flows June Issue in Neutral. Read on Neutral. There’s a whole thread in media art about defining a portrait not through a face, but intimate data univocally connected to the person. Since our bureaucratic identity is solely made of digital data, as is most of our mediated sociality, this practice progressively reflects our everyday nature. Michael Mandiberg has always been attentive to the changes in our daily structures, developing artworks with an almost…Read More
Michael Mandiberg: My Manifesto View on Garage Dec 13 2017, 6:32pm New York artist Michael Mandiberg takes an organized approach to GARAGE’s My Manifesto series, employing project management app Trello.
Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Michael Mandiberg discusses his project “Workflow” currently installed in various locations at LACMA. Posted: February 15, 2017. View full video. Michael Mandiberg’s solo exhibition Workflow is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles, CA from January 1, 2017 to January 1, 2018. For more details please visit LACMA’s website. Part of Workflow: Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms), a one-year sonic installation in LACMA’s Pritzker Parking Garage elevators, January 1, 2017 – January 1, 2018. View…Read More
“20 Artists for the Trump Era” Artsy Editorial | Jan 19th, 2017 Read on Artsy Donald Trump assuming the office of the United States Presidency today is an event few on either side of the political aisle saw coming a few months ago. And so, as many think about the four years after Inauguration Day and ask what is to be done and what comes next, a natural step is to look around and ask, what country do we live…Read More
MICHAEL MANDIBERG | SIMON DENNY by Ian Cofre Read on the Brooklyn Rail. MICHAEL MANDIBERG FDIC Insured 40 Rector Street, Suite 1500, New York | September 15 – December 15, 2016 SIMON DENNY Blockchain Future States Petzel Gallery | September 8 – October 22, 2016 The process of banks failing due to the subprime mortgage crisis greatly accelerated after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. Facing systemic risk and contagion, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”), a U.S….Read More
Michael Mandiberg: Workflow at LACMA January 1, 2017 – January 1, 2018 Read on LACMA. Workflow is a project by Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Michael Mandiberg. The artist uses self-tracking technology to understand the changing definition of labor in the digital age. The endeavor has multiple components, including a one-year sonic installation, Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms), in LACMA’s Pritzker Parking Garage elevators, and a three-channel video, Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance), which will begin at LACMA’s Ray’s &…Read More
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and MOTI in Breda jointly acquire 17 top items by digital artists Posted: December 2016 Read on Art Daily. AMSTERDAM.- The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and MOTI in Breda are jointly acquiring 17 top digital works by contemporary artists in the Netherlands and abroad who are among the pioneers of digital art. This collaboration is spurred by MOTI’s change of course: it is due to reopen in the course of 2017 as the Stedelijk Museum Breda, where…Read More
Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2016 Time: 7 p.m. Location: 40 Rector St. Suite 1500, New York, NY Please join us for an artist talk with Michael Mandiberg in his exhibition FDIC Insured, moderated by Tina Rivers Ryan. FDIC Insured is a memorial to banks that have failed since the 2008 financial crisis. For 8 years, Mandiberg has been saving the logos of every single failed US bank, and burning them into cast off financial books with a laser cutter. There…Read More
Meditation, Memorial, and Archive of the Failures of a Financial System By Marisa Mazria Katz, October 19, 2016 Read on Creative Time Reports It has been five years since Occupy Wall Street burst onto the scene at Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district. In this month’s editor’s letter, Marisa Mazria Katz speaks with interdisciplinary artist Michael Mandiberg about FDIC Insured, an ongoing visual archive chronicling the failure of banks and subverting the banking system’s aesthetics of permanence and…Read More
Michael Mandiberg: FDIC Insured By R.C. Baker Read on The Village Voice You’ve seen it: the bright bank logo on a storefront you pass every day that one morning has morphed into a different bank’s emblem. Like an ocean’s surface, American capitalism spreads as far as the eye can see, but mysterious and treacherous currents roil its depths. Since 2008, when the financial industry most recently reaped the whirlwind, artist Michael Mandiberg has been collecting the logos of failed banks for…Read More
Art of Failure Bloomberg Businessweek September 26 – October 2, 2016 Issue
“Where Do Banks Go When They Die?” By Seph Rodney, on September 29, 2016 Read on Hyperallergic Did you know that since the start of the last recession that over 527 banks have failed? How would we know? When a bank fails there’s no dying cry, no elegy written for it, no sense that it leaves a hole in the community where it once was. Where does a bank go when it dies? During the process when a bank is…Read More
“Making Art with Failed Banks” By Mark Singer in the September 26, 2016 Issue Read on The New Yorker Michael Mandiberg, an artist whose preoccupations merge digital information with visual representation, has a lot going on. This was also the case eight years ago, when he lived in Brooklyn (Prospect Heights, still does) and was a senior fellow at Eyebeam, a nonprofit that supports artists immersed in technology and playful technologists. “I was noticing that people were giving away books,…Read More
“Go for Broke: Cataloguing failure, one bank at a time” By Juliet Helmke | September 15, 2016 Read on Artinfo “527 is the correct number, a few more failed since info about the project came out,” says artist Michael Mandiberg, counting the number of books that make up his upcoming, site-specific installation “FDIC Insured.” All are cast off investment guidebooks that the artist has repurposed, laser printing their covers with the logo of a US bank that has officially “failed”—meaning it…Read More
“ArtRx NYC” By Jillian Steinhauer on September 13, 2016 Read on Hyperallergic This week is all about books, as Printed Matter’s beloved art book fair touches down in Long Island City, while a new satellite fair pops up in nearby Greenpoint. Plus, don’t miss the celebration of a pioneering performance series and the first retrospective for maintenance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. The FDIC’s Failed Banks When: Opens Thursday, September 15, 6–8pm Where: Art-in-Buildings Financial District Project Space (40 Rector Street, Financial District, Manhattan) Eight years ago this week,…Read More
Market Research: An Interview with Michael Mandiberg By Tina Rivers Ryan Read on Art in America The 2008 recession drew attention to the destabilization of financial markets by a banking sector that skirts the edges of regulation, using purposely inscrutable financial instruments. In response, a number of artists have attempted to represent the social, political, and financial networks that comprise contemporary capitalism. Around the time of the crisis, artist Michael Mandiberg began collecting discarded self-help financial books of the more…Read More
“Don’t bank on it: New York artist’s memorial to financial failures comes to Wall Street “ Michael Mandiberg has recorded the logos of more than 500 banks that closed during the recession for his installation FDIC Insured by Julia Halperin, May 10, 2016 Read on The Art Newspaper
This Is What Happens When You Try to Print Out the Entirety of Wikipedia By Jim O’Donnell, March 2016 Read on Slate. How big is Wikipedia? How many printed volumes would it take to put all of the online encyclopedia on a library’s shelves? I’m only asking about the 5 million or so articles in the English language version—there’s at least that many more in other languages. Now we know, thanks to an artistic installation by New York artist Michael Mandiberg, first…Read More
Read in Artforum. By Jennifer W. Leung, printed in the October issue. MICHAEL MANDIBERG DENNY GALLERY For Michael Mandiberg’s “From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!” at Denny Gallery, the artist displayed a limited run of his Print Wikipedia project, 2015, which makes the online encyclopedia available in proprietary print-on-demand form. Several individual print copies and volumes titled Table of Contents and Contributor Appendix were shelved against a monochromatic wallpaper, these were accompanied by the real-time projection of file conversion and upload to the self-publishing distribution platform Lulu.com. The…Read More
A selection of press highlights for Michael Mandiberg: From Aaaaa! to ZZZap! at Denny Gallery, June 18- July 2: The New York Times: Moving Wikipedia From Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves The Washington Post: Ever wondered what a $500,000 version of Wikipedia would look like? The New York Observer: Artist Converts Wikipedia to Print- Maybe It’s Not Dead After All Vice Creator’s Project: Meet the Man Printing Wikipedia as a Book BBC World: Why print copies of Wikipedia?
Read on Momus. Querying the New Appropriation Art: Is this Cynicism? By Joseph Henry, January 8, 2015 The Denny Gallery may have given themselves a curatorial headache with the title of their current exhibition, Share This! Appropriation After Cynicism. There are more tricky connections and presumptions in that moniker alone than in the web mantras and second-person addresses that typically sign most contemporary shows. To begin, the title suggests there was an appropriation art of cynicism. To most eyes, the…Read More
Michael Mandiberg created this video for MOCA Busan to discuss their two ongoing projects ‘Live Study’ which is accessible on the Whitney Museum’s website, and the ‘Zoom Paintings’ exhibited as part of Denny Dimin Gallery’s virtual program fall of 2020.
From the LACMA site:
Workflow is a project by Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Michael Mandiberg. The artist uses self-tracking technology to understand the changing definition of labor in the digital age. The endeavor has multiple components, including a one-year sonic installation, Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms), in LACMA’s Pritzker Parking Garage elevators, and a three-channel video, Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance), which will begin at LACMA’s Ray’s & Stark Bar on February 16, 2017. Related engagements will take place later in 2017 as the project continues to evolve. The artist will be in residence at 18th Street Arts Center for part of his project.
Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance) is a frenetic stop motion animation composed of webcam photos and screenshots that software captured from the artist’s computer and smartphone every 15 minutes for an entire year; this is a technique for surveilling remote computer labor. The images are paired with the short distillations of what Mandiberg learned each day during the durational performance.
From the LACMA site:
Workflow is a project by Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Michael Mandiberg. The artist uses self-tracking technology to understand the changing definition of labor in the digital age. The endeavor has multiple components, including a one-year sonic installation, Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms), in LACMA’s Pritzker Parking Garage elevators, and a three-channel video, Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance), which will begin at LACMA’s Ray’s & Stark Bar on February 16, 2017. Related engagements will take place later in 2017 as the project continues to evolve. The artist will be in residence at 18th Street Arts Center for part of his project.
Quantified Self Portrait (Rhythms) sonifies a year of the artist’s heart rate data alongside the sound of email alerts. Mandiberg uses himself as a proxy to hold a mirror to a pathologically overworked and increasingly quantified society, revealing a personal political economy of data. The piece plays for one full year, from January 1, 2017 to January 1, 2018, with each moment representing the data of the exact date and time from the previous year.
Video of Michael Mandiberg’s project Print Wikipedia, which was exhibited in From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!, at Denny Gallery, June 18 to July 11, 2015.
The exhibition at the gallery was the performance of the upload of Print Wikipedia to Lulu.com (a print-on-demand website), and exhibition of a selection of volumes from the project.
Print Wikipedia is a both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Mandiberg has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia’s content and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form: Once a volume is printed it is already out of date. The work is also a reflection on the actual transparency or completeness of knowledge containers and history.
Video of Michael Mandiberg’s project Print Wikipedia, which was exhibited in From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!, at Denny Gallery, June 18 to July 11, 2015.
The exhibition at the gallery was the performance of the upload of Print Wikipedia to Lulu.com (a print-on-demand website), and exhibition of a selection of volumes from the project.
Print Wikipedia is a both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Mandiberg has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia’s content and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form: Once a volume is printed it is already out of date. The work is also a reflection on the actual transparency or completeness of knowledge containers and history.
