Interview: Mark Tribe (New York)
Interview Duration: 00:19:42
Interview Topic: In this interview Mark talks about how “protest” and the expressions of “protest” are at play in his creative practice. This interview is focused on The Dystopia Files. This project is an archive of video clips depicting public interactions between police and protesters in North America since 1999. Typically shot on city streets during protest actions of various kinds, this footage portrays scenes of ritualized conflict that are by turns familiar and shocking. Mark has shot some of the material , and he has gathered the rest from activists, observers, civil rights lawyers (who obtain video shot by police in the course of legal proceedings), and other artists and media makers. He shows excerpts from the archive in installations, performances and single-channel videos. Mark thinks of protest, and the policing of protest, as public performance, and he is interested in the ways in which video mediates these performances and inflects their position in the public sphere.
Bio: Mark Tribe is an artist and occasional curator whose interests include art, technology, media theory, and politics. His art work has been exhibited at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), the DeCordova Biennial, and the National Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow. He has organized curatorial projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, and inSite_05. Tribe is the author of two books, The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010) and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006), and numerous articles. He has lectured at UC Berkeley, Goldsmiths, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, MIT, and Harvard. He is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, where he teaches courses on radical media, the art of curating, open-source culture, digital art, and techniques of surveillance. In 1996, Tribe founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. He received a MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego in 1994 and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 1990. He splits his time between New York City and Providence.