Landscape Techne: A Book Launch & Discussion

On the occasion of the publication of book The Future Is Present by Philip Glahn and Cary Levine, artist Kristen Neville Taylor, Ulises co-founder Ricky Yanas, and Glahn will discuss the relationship between art, technology, and the environment in their respective practices and research as well as the possibilities and challenges of what happens when artists and activists engage with the histories and continuities of progress, production, and utopia.

In The Future Is Present, Philip Glahn and Cary Levine tell the fascinating history of the visionary art group Mobile Image—founded by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in 1977—which appropriated emerging technologies, from satellites to electronic message platforms. Based in Los Angeles, this under-studied collective worked amid urban crisis, a techno-boom, consolidating media power, and ascendant neoliberal politics. Mobile Image challenged fundamental conventions of the public sphere, democracy, communication, and political participation, as well as notions of power, representation, and identity.

Philip Glahn is associate professor of critical studies and aesthetics at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia. Cary Levine is associate professor of contemporary art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The current article is part of a larger book project on the work of Mobile Image and the intersections of art, politics, and communication technologies.

Kristen Neville Taylor is an Philadelphia artist whose diverse practice combines drawing, sculpture, and glass which converge playfully in installation style environments. Her work considers the impact of the stories we tell about nature calling attention to the systems and events that establish definitions and shape public perception of the environment. She is a co-founder of The Green Sun, a multifaceted project focused on the intersection of art and policy as they relate to the history of energy, energy democracy and possible energy futures. Taylor’s work has been shown at Vox Populi, the Woodmere Art Museum and the Philadelphia Art Alliance (Philadelphia), Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland), Richard Stockton and Rowan University Art Galleries (New Jersey), and Expo Chicago. She has organized several exhibitions including Landscape Techne at Little Berlin, The Usable Earth at the Esther Klein Gallery, and she co-curated Middle of Nowhere in the Pine Barrens. Taylor is the recipient of the Pew Fellowship, Laurie Wagman Prize in Glass, a RAIR Recycled Artist-in-Residence, and a Penn Program for the Environmental Humanities Artist-in-Residence.

Host or Publisher Ray Philly