Intersect
August 2023
INTERSECT is a collaborative project by Kevin Sweet and Sharifa Lafon of Denver Digerati. This project focuses on the work and stories of Colorado-based performance artists who engage in innovative combinations of art, science, and technology, which is explored through exhibitions and documentary films. Season 1 includes: Phillip Stearns, Debora and Jason Bernagozzi, Elle Hong, and Denver Digerati artist in residence, Raquel Meyers. As part of the first season, a pop-up exhibition was displayed at the CU Experience Gallery that incorporated projection onto the windows of the gallery. This project was supported by the Colorado Department of Film and Television, the University of Colorado Denver, the University of Colorado Boulder, and produced by Denver Digerati.
Phillip Stearns (He/Him) is a Denver based, self-identified grizzled veteran of electronic art, working with both physical and digital media. A major through line in his work is the use of media technologies to reveal hidden worlds that are integral to our daily existence but reside just beyond our sense perceptions. He has performed and exhibited work internationally in art festivals, museums, and galleries including Tate Britain, Park Avenue Armory, NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, ELEKTRA BIAN, Transmediale, FILE, Festival de Arte Digital, Thoma Foundation, Denver Art Museum, Zhangzhou Museum of Art and Haus Der Elektronischen Künste.
Artist Debora Bernagozzi works primarily with the mediums of video, photography, and fiber. She received her BFA in Video from the Atlanta College of Art in 1999 and her MFA in Electronic Integrated Art from Alfred University in 2002. Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, including at the Denver Art Museum, Burchfield Penney Museum, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival. She was awarded artist residencies at the Experimental Television Center, Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center, and in Kuala Lumpur.
Jason Bernagozzi is an artist whose work examines and critiques the codes embedded within the psyche of media culture. Their work uses the real-time features of video and electronic media as a way to engage with interdisciplinary concepts as a dialogical system of emerging languages. They are particularly interested in the potential of non-human agents as collaborators in the artistic endeavor as a way to explore new concepts that exist outside the sphere of human assumption and logic. Bernagozzi’s work has been supported through numerous grants and awards from organizations such as the New York State Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts and has been exhibited nationally and internationally at exhibitions such as the European Media Art Festival in Osnabruk,Germany; the Festival Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques in Marsaille, France; the Ilman Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea and the Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Raquel Meyers (Cartagena, Spain b. 1977) works with obsolete technologies like the Commodore 64, Teletext, typewriters or fax machines mixed with photography, animation and embroidery, among other techniques. She defines her practice as KYBDslöjd [mecanografía expandida] whose significance can be defined roughly as <a manual skill with a keyboard>. It is based on and refers to the typewriter, Concrete Poetry, Demoscene and Brutalism. The keystrokes contribute to the execution, while poetry contributes to a system, through revealing the architecture of PETSCII, the raw and unadorned character set of Commodore 64. Her work has been shown in art centers, galleries and festivals such as Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Xpo Gallery Paris, P21 Gallery Seoul, La Casa encendida, Liste Art Fair Basel, La Gaîté lyrique, Tokyo Blip Festival, Square Sounds Melbourne, Vector Festival, LABoral, the Digerati Emergent Media Festival (Formerly Supernova), iMAL, SeMa Nanji, VISION’R, Mapping, Piksel, Shibuya Pixel Art, LEV, MFRU, HeK, Fylkingen, and PlatteForum.