Announcing the publication of DNA & Fourth of Four: 40-Year Retrospective Exhibition of Digital Art • EZTV in Collaboration with Los Angeles ACM SIGGRAPH.
This book chronicles the first DNA Festival, including the Forth of Four exhibition which I was a part of in 2024.
Edited by Michael J. Mascucci & Victor Acevedo
Published by Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, CA.
Available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon
More info on the exhibition HERE
From Michael J. Masucci on Linkedin:
“I am happy to announce the publication by Santa Monica College (SMC) of a book on the year-long 2024 Digital Arts Festival: DNA Festival Santa Monica. It celebrated over 40 years of collaborations between LA ACM SIGGRAPH and EZTV, and expanded into a multi-venue series of exhibitions, panel discussions, and live performances.
The book has a central focus on the “Fourth of Four” exhibition, a 40-year retrospective exhibition survey of 24 digital artists, curated by Joan Collins, myself, and artist Victor Acevedo (who also designed the book/catalogue). Victor and I also served as the book’s co-editors and contributing essayists, with a scholarly guest essay by Zsofi Valyi-Nagy.
DNA was by far the largest festival within the city that year. In addition to taking place at several campuses of SMC, festival events were held at 18th Street Arts Center and various galleries, including Berman Art Projects, bG GALLERY, William Turner Gallery, ROSEGALLERY, and out-of-state, at academia’s first holographic theater at iEXCEL at UNMC.
The broad range of artists included digital art pioneers Rebecca Allen, David Em, Maija Beeton, Vibeke Sørensen, Paul Brown, Karl Sims, Mark C., Sheriann Ki Sun Burnham, Diane Piepol, JON 9, Kevin Mack, Clayton Campbell, and more contemporary artists such as Alina Kalinouskaya, Federico Galavis, Nikolina Lawless, choreographer Donna Sternberg, plus holographic experiments with scientists Gregory Carpenter, DrPH, and Michael Hollins, a panel on AI-informed architecture organized by producer Summer Varde, NCARB, PCC, PCAC, a panel on Digital Art history with Pietro Rigolo , Joel Ferree , Melanie Lenz and exhibitions by established, museum-exhibited artists such as David Hockney, Larry Bell, the writings of performance artist Barbara T. Smith , a panel on classic teleprescence by Anastasia Chernysheva with Kit Galloway also were included in the series.
The festival was co-chaired by Robert Berman, Jeffrey Gordon, and myself, and was the first time that Santa Monica’s three largest cultural institutions: Santa Monica College, Bergamot Station Arts Center, and 18th Street Arts Center collaborated.
Special acknowledgement to SMC’s Walter Meyer and Sheila Cordova, AIA, for their enormous contributions: creativity, vision, and support, without which this would not have grown from a tiny grassroots artists’ effort into a 12-venue year-long survey of digital art spanning back almost 50 years, plus live multimedia performance, panel discussions, and site-specific installations.
Plans are underway to stage another DNA Festival in 2027.”