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DIGIVILLE
Cynthia Beth Rubin - artist’s talk and presentation of work
10 April 2008
At: Lighthouse, 28 Kensington Street, BN1 4AJ
The Collaboration Experience:
Working across Disciplines, Borders, and Attitudes
Cynthia Beth Rubin
A discussion of the pitfalls and benefits of collaboration, drawing from personal experience, and from discussions with other artists who have collaborated in the creation of new works.
New Media forms of artistic practice seem to be made for collaboration, as artists can now merge varying elements pictorial, sound, and interface elements, as well as working between 2D and 3D. Nonetheless, we are not trained to be collaborators, and finding our way in this territory is not always easy, as we face differing assumptions about process, aesthetic, and ownership. In the growing global world, cross-cultural collaboration may be the key to breaking down barriers between technologically advanced wealthy countries and those artists with limited access to resources, but how can we take that step in a way that keeps the conversation among equals?
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Cynthia Beth Rubin is a Digital Artist working in still images, interactive works, and moving images. Trained as a painter in the era of abstraction, she began making digital works in the early 1980s. Recalling cultural legacies of times and places beyond her own experience, her imagery draws on the subjective qualities of memory and empathy.
Rubin's current projects include a collaboration with the Senegalese photographer Djbril Sy, and a series of images from a secluded natural reserve where she drew in pen and ink as a student, thus forming a bridge with herself as a young artist. Rubin's inter-active collaboration with the composer Bob Gluck, Layered Histories, was installed in the Jewish Museum in Prague during the Spring of 2005, and was shown at SIGGRAPH, ACM Multi-Media, and the DeLeon White Gallery in Toronto, among other locations. Her public art projects include one of the first digitally designed large-scale murals, and a current stain-glass project involving numerous committee meetings and negotiations. She has previously collaborated on a virtual reality project, assorted computer science research projects, and an early computer animation. She has experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of collaboration.
The current recipient of an individual artist’s fellowship in New Media from the Connecticut Commission of the Arts, Rubin has also received numerous other awards, including grants from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the New England Foundation on the Arts, and various artist residencies in France, Canada, Scotland, and the USA. Rubin’s work has been written about in numerous publications, including Bruce Wands' book The Art of the Digital Age. Her work is discussed in detail in The Computer in the Visual Arts by Anne Morgan Spalter; INA (Paris) published a text on the artistic Web site Memoirs in an edition of Dossiers de l'audiovisuel on "arts en réseau" (art on the web), and an extensive article on her work by Jef Trombeur and an accompanying CD was published by Création Numérique, and. other articles have been published in Russia, Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Brazil, and the UK.
Rubin is a native of Rochester, NY and holds degrees from Antioch College and the Maryland Institute, College of Art (BA and MFA). She currently teaches part-time at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is active in professional organizations such as ISEA and SIGGRAPH.
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