Paul Hertz [US] : Loss, Gain, Nurture, Sustain
This hybrid work consists of a short generative game and a longer lecture. The game is played online just before the performance. It generates a tiling pattern and graph that determine the order of the short, previously written texts. The texts are derived from a combinatorial process where 4 verbs (lose, gain, nurture, sustain) are crossed with 4 topics (friendship, history, grief, ecology) and 4 glitch processes (TBD). The texts are displayed in the determined order in a version of my “glitchSort” app that applies the glitch processes as I read the texts and share the screen from my app. The tiling pattern also has an interpretation within a long-running performance as Ignotus the Mage, a dysfunctional fortuneteller who only sees the present. As part of the performance, I will improvise a “reading” of the pattern as if telling the present of the /’fu:bar/ Festival itself.
Paul Hertz
Is active as an independent artist, printmaker, and curator working with algorithmic processes. He earned a BA in Fine Arts from Brown University (1971) and an MFA in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1985), where he was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in Art and Technology. From 1971 to 1983, he lived and worked in Spain. He taught courses in the theory, practice, and art history of new media at Northwestern University (1995–2004) and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011–2018).
Hertz’s curatorial work includes Second Nature (1999) for the City of Chicago’s Project Millennium, all.go.rhythm (2015) and glitChicago (2014), all at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, and Imaging by Numbers (2008) at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Northwestern University. His project La Finca/The Homestead (1995), one of the earliest exhibitions of art on the WWW, was exhibited at Northwestern University and the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain.
Hertz has exhibited his archival pigment prints and interactive installations at numerous international media festivals, conferences, and symposia. His large scale glass mural “A Chance Encounter of Measure and Continuity” (2016) is featured in the headquarters of the National Science Foundation, Alexandria, Virginia. His recent virtual reality installation, “Fools Paradise,” toured international venues (2017–2020) and can be downloaded at http://dimoda.art/. He lives and works in #Chicago.
paulhertz.net