Christiane Robbins (born 1959 in Montclair, New Jersey) is an American artist, director, designer, and scholar. She is notable for her practice and facility in cultivating a wide range of media.
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Robbins was born in 1959 in Montclair, New Jersey, but moved to Chicago, Illinois as a teenager with her father. She attended the University of Wisconsin, first majoring in Political science and history. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual art, Photography, and Art history. While in college, she worked for the Archives of American Art. Later, she moved to the Bay Area with her husband, A. Magdanz, an artist, forming a partnership with him at Western Influence Studios. They divorced and she continued her practice in both product and broadcast design. In 1989, she moved to Los Angeles to complete her graduate studies at the California Institute of the Arts. She served on the Board of Directors of the Glass Art Society and, from 1984 to 1988, was the executive editor of the GAS Journal.
In 2000, Robbins moved to the Avenel Homes in Los Angeles. There, she discovered some of the original residents still haunted by an unmitigated fear. She is directing and producing this feature length mystery story - a tale of what happened to one of our most talented architects of architecture's golden age in Los Angeles. It is also the story of how a profession lost its soul.[1]. A short compilation of clips was selected for exhibition and screening in the 2011 Gwangju Design Bienniale curated by influential artist, curator, social commentator and activist, Ai WeiWei; and AIA's Architecture and the City Film Series, 2009.
Another recent project is GONE WEST represents an archival indexing of 365 days, similar to that of a diary or journal: a collective narrative, yet personal, locative and subjective. This series serves to document the project and conceptualization over the course of a specific year externally marked as The Year of Digital Transition. 2009 was a year deeply scarred by a collective global financial crisis. This crisis was imagined, created, made possible and exasperated by the almost incomprehensible complexities and opacities of the virtual realm - “The Digital,” i.e. September 15th, the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.
Since 2001, her artistic practice has situated itself in addressing issues of psychogeographies, locative technologies, global, environmental and cultural issues that are clearly embodied in her cross-disciplinary projects, Blue-Screen MOTO, and the I-5 Project, 2001-2007 [2].
She has also served as Professor of Digital Media, Director of the Matrix Program for Digital Media and as Executive Producer of AIM - a multi-year, international conference and symposia which presented a series of critical inquiries into digital art practice and culture, the trajectories of the idioms of "informatization," "globalization", and our fascination with the spectacular. AIM III was inspired by the world's first modern amusement park, AIM III: Luna Park comprises a series of conceptual and aesthetic inquiries structured around issues raised by the ascendance of technologized entertainment to an unquestioned position of cultural dominance; the significance of this ascendance in the context of the global spread of corporate market economics; and the options available as we negotiate a response spectrum that includes both uncritical absorption into the pleasure of spectacle and novelty and the active reployment of new media technologies to critique and impact the topologies of our social, political and cultural landscapes.
She was a co-organizer of the USC/MIT bi-annual conference Race in Digital Space, October 2002 [3] [4] addressing "Since the 1996 advent of a graphical interface for the Internet technology opened up the World Wide Web to the global masses, traditional communication systems within and between nation states have been fundamentally transformed," they state. They point to core issues such as the Digital Divide while at the same time they note that "...many scholars, individuals, grassroots organizations, and free speech activists, among others, have become increasingly concerned about efforts to limit these new technologies before their democratizing and liberatory potentials are fully realized."
She is a 1989 MFA graduate and notable alumni of the California Institute of the Arts, [5]. Most recently, as a Professor at the University of Southern California[6] [7] she lives in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA. She has received an EMA[8] and Visiting Research Fellowship at Stanford University, and held teaching positions at Mills College[9], San Francisco State University[10] and UC-Berkeley.
Robbins' work has been widely exhibited and screened in film and video festivals in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and in Europe. Both her experiemental and documentary video work has won several awards, including the 1984 Best of Video Shorts at the San Francisco International Film Festivall
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, a 1989 Film Arts Foundation Award and has been broadcast on PBS (KQED, KCET, WGBH, WNET) The Living Room Festival, American Public Television, Channel 4, UK, and cablecast. She has been the recipient of awards and grantsincluding the SFMoMA's SECA Award, 1992, a 2002-2003 C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship, Sundance Producer's Institute, as well as nominations for Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships. In 2008, along with [Vasulka], she was invited to present at the Walker Art Center's Moving the Moving Image. presented as part of the University of Minnesota's Women with Vision Symposia. Her works have been reviewed and appeared in a variety of publications ranging from Art Forum to Wired magazine. Her work is in public collections including:
She began her work in video through a collaborations with Max Almy on the videos " Perfect Leader ", 1983 and " Leaving the Twentieth Century ", 1981/82 and the video installation " Deadline ", 1981 and worked with many artists during the past ten years including Bill Viola on his feature length video " I do not know what it is that I am " [11] and Marlon Riggs' " Color Adjustment” [12] and "Anthem".
During the 1990’s and early 21st C, she was also active within the cultural, museum and gallery communities, acting as a Director, Curator and Cultural Producer of film/video series, visual art exhibitions, performance and literary series. Her curatorial projects have been supported via grants such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Film Arts Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Lannon Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Warhol Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, etc.
In the early to mid 1990’s she served as Executive Co-Director of New Langton Arts [13] and directed the NEA’s Regional Regranting Program for Artists Fellowships[14]. Among the many exhibitions she curated, programmed and organized are: Adrian Piper's, "Black Box"/White Box", Beth B's "Amnesia,” Gilles Peress's "Farewell to Bosnia", Victor Burgins’” Venise”; Jayce Salloum/Yasmina Bouziane, Connie Samaras, "Tiny Shoes: An Homage to Jack T. Chick", George Legrady's "The Clearing", "The Bay Area Awards Show, 1993 & 94, Nora Ligarano/Marshall Reese's "The Acid Migration of Culture", + numerous media programs, artists, literary and public panels including [Burgin], Lyle Ashton Harris/Thomas Harris, Sandy Stone, Eileen Myles, and Jalal Toufic … among a cast of hundreds. In 1990 she co-directed one of the first global-scale cultural projects to be posted/exhibited on the internet, On-line against AIDS, held in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Paris, Buenos Aries and New York[15]. This online conference and exhibition coincided with the Seropositive Ball[16] and Sixth International Conference on Aids, offering alternative cultural viewpoints to this health crisis. Her co-directors included Mark Graham &Lee Felsenstein and was co-produced by the University of Amsterdam and the Paradiso Cultural Center.