Born 1977 in Detroit, Michigan. Lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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.
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.
