Art + Technology: Midnight Moment

New media artist Nancy Baker Cahill examines systemic power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally and have earned her profiles in The New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and other publications. Her work has been exhibited internationally at museums and galleries. Baker Cahill was an artist scholar in the Berggruen Institute’s inaugural Transformations of the Human Fellowship, and a 2021 resident at Oxy Arts’ ‘Encoding Futures,’ focused on AR monuments. She is a TEDx speaker and a member of the Guild of Future Architects.

Immersed in 1960s downtown New York art scene, Joan Jonas studied with the choreographer Trisha Brown for two years and was influenced by the work of John Cage and Claes Oldenburg. Adopting the idea of art-as-process, she turned from painting and sculpture to performance art. In the early 70s, her work became increasingly symbolic, gamelike, and ritualistic. By the 80s, she began to create complex, nonlinear narratives premised on literary and historical texts, including science-fiction, medieval Icelandic sagas, and, more recently, the writings and biography of the art historian Aby Warburg. Her most recent work explores the relationship between new digital media and performance in multichannel video installations.

Interdisciplinary artist and performer Kish Robinson explores personal identity and socio-cultural expectations through works in music, film, installation, and the written word. Her most extensive project is Kilo Kish, a solo music project spanning ten years that has garnered features in Vogue, W Magazine, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Dazed, The Guardian, and Billboard, among others. Her music videos and films have screened at the Getty Center, The Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Image and Sound in Brazil. Kish has exhibited performance and film works with two solo installations at HVW8 Art + Design Gallery in Los Angeles. Kish is now supporting her recent album release, American Gurl, and working on creative direction projects in Los Angeles.

New media artist and Creative Technologist LaJuné McMillian creates art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. McMillian has shown and spoke about their work at Pioneer Works, National Sawdust, Leaders in Software and Art, Creative Tech Week, and Art && Code’s Weird Reality. The artist was previously the Director of Skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and Figure Skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology. They have continued their research on Blackness, Movement, and Technology during residencies at Eyebeam, Pioneer Works Barbarian Group, and Barnard College.

Associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University Charlotte Kent, PhD, has a particular interest in historical frameworks for art practices, with a research focus on contemporary digital culture and the absurd. She writes for assorted magazines and various academic journals. She is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.

Jean Cooney is the Director of Times Square Arts, the public art program presenting the work of contemporary artists in the world’s most iconic urban places. Over the course of the program’s twelve year history, Times Square Arts has worked with hundreds of emerging and established artists across a diverse range of disciplines to activate the district’s public plazas, vacant spaces, and electronic billboards, including the Midnight Moment program - the world’s largest and longest-running digital public art program, presented nightly on over 90 digital displays, 364 nights a year.