Catherine D’Ignazio
Bio:
kanarinka, a.k.a. Catherine D’Ignazio, is an artist, software developer and educator. Her artwork is participatory and distributed – a single project might take place online, in the street and in a gallery, and involve multiple audiences participating in different ways for different reasons. Her practice is collaborative even when she says it’s not. Her artwork has been exhibited at the ICA Boston, Eyebeam, MASSMoCA, and the Western Front among other locations. She is Co-Director of the experimental curatorial group iKatun and a founding member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things. After spending eight years in educational technology as a java programmer & technical project manager, she taught at RISD’s Digital Media Graduate Program where she ran the Experimental Geography Research Cluster. She has also taught at MIT, Emerson College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. In 2012, kanarinka went back to school to the MIT’s Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab where she is currently a graduate student. At the Media Lab, she is working on a developing technologies and visualizations for a critical geography of news media. kanarinka is the recipient of various awards, including the Tanne Foundation Artist Award (2010), a Rotary Foundation Scholarship for independent study in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1999), a Turbulence.org networked art competition award (2003, 2012) and grants from the Cambridge Arts Council, the LEF Foundation, and RISD. She has been on juries and editorial boards for institutions such as Real Art Ways, the Berwick Research Institute, Art Interactive, Cartographica journal, CAA’s Public Art Forum and ShiftSpace. kanarinka has lectured widely about her collaborative creative practice at venues ranging from conferences (College Art Association, American Association of Geographers) to universities (Harvard University, UNC Chapel Hill) to art spaces (the Tate Modern, The Change you Want to See Gallery, Brooklyn). She has also written articles about geography, (micro)politics and art for publication in various geography journals. The former Director of Exhibitions and Programs at Art Interactive in Cambridge, MA, kanarinka maintains an experimental curatorial practice through her work with the Platform2 event series. kanarinka has a BA in International Relations from Tufts University (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and an MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art. Determined to be even more over-educated, she’s working on a Ph.D from the MIT Media Lab. She has lived and worked in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Michigan, and currently resides in Waltham, MA.
http://www.ikatun.org/kanarinka/about/bio/
"Taking the Situationist credo at face value, the artist kanarinka, in her It Takes 154,000 Breaths to Evacuate Boston, 2007, runs the Boston evacuation route as a spatial interpretation of the post-9/11 urban conditions. Installed as a series of jars with speakers inside, this psychogeographic project allows visitors to listen to her breaths, a reflection of behavior and psychologic condition, as she runs across this suggested evacuation plan. How do you measure fear in a society obsessed with security and preparedness? The $827,500 Boston emergency evacuation system was installed in 2006 to demonstrate the city's preparedness for evacuating people in snowstorms, hurricanes, infrastructure failures, fires and/or terrorist attacks. It is part of a host of visible changes to public spaces in Boston that also includes random bag searches, fancy transportation surveillance centers, terror simulations, and public-awareness campaigns. These are visible, everyday reminders that we are vulnerable-at risk and at war. Catherine D'Ignazio ran the entire evacuation route. The project is an attempt to measure our collective fear in the individual breaths that it takes to traverse these new geographies of insecurity. Running the route took 26 runs, about 100 miles, and over two months to complete. On the website, evacuateboston.com, we see the data, and results of this measurement of fear. Our fear is measured in the breaths of a single person-running, training, measuring, tracking, breathing, leaving. For Experimental Geography, the archive of breaths is presented as a series of 26 glass jars that correspond to the number of runs completed by kanarinka. Organized chronologically, the jars vary in size and volume based on the number of breaths collected on each run. Each jar "breathes" through small speaker components playing the soundtrack from the run."
(Thompson, Nato and Independent Curators International. Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism)
Exhibitions:
2013 Turbulence.org. iSkyTV. www.turbulence.org. On-going. Venice Biennial – Bloomberg Lounge. The Sixth Room. Venice, Italy. June 2013.
2011 University Museum of Fine Art. The Border Crossed Us. Amherst, MA. April 2011.
2010 Colby College Museum of Art. Experimental Geography. Waterville, ME. February 21 – May 30, 2010. Eyebeam Art + Technology Center. Re:Group – Beyond Models of Consensus. New York, NY. June 10 – August 7, 2010. Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Flush the Walls. Boston, MA. June 16, 2011.
2009 Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. James & Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition. Boston, MA. Winter 2009. Albuquerque Museum. Experimental Geography. Albuquerque, NM. 2009.
2008 Vera List Center for Art & Politics. Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding (online). New York, NY. October 15, 2008 – January 30, 2009. McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown State University. Agency: Art & Advertising. Youngstown, OH. September 19 – December 8, 2008. Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University. Experimental Geography. Greencastle, IN. September 19 – December 2, 2008. Lord Hall Gallery, University of Maine, Orono. Seriously, Funny. Orono, ME. August 22 – September 16, 2008. Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. The World as a Stage. Boston, MA. Feb – Apr 2008. DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park. The DeCordova Annual Exhibition. Lincoln, MA. May – Aug 2008.
2007 Western Front. Participatory Dissent. Vancouver, Canada. Oct, 2007. De Stadsgalerij Heerlen. Encounters II. Heerlen, Netherlands. Aug – Nov, 2007. Gallery 400. University of Illinois at Chicago. Pathogeographies. Summer 2007. Rhizome.org & the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Online. Touring Show. May 2007. University of Michigan. ebayaday. School of Art & Design. Ann Arbor, MI & online. Dec 2006 – Mar 2007.
2006 Pure: Art, Medicine, Technology. Allston, MA. Oct – Nov 2006. Dare-Dare. Sensing Place (with spurse). Montreal, Canada. Aug 2006. ISEA 2006: Interactive City. (with Glowlab) San Jose, CA. Aug, 2006. Transmodern Age Festival. Baltimore, MD. Apr 6th – 8th, 2006.
2005 MassArt. “Some Sort Of Uncertainty…”. Boston, MA. Nov 9th – 12th, 2005. Artivistic: A Conference On Art & Activism. Montreal, Canada. Sep 21-24, 2005. ZKM, Center For Art & Media. “Making Things Public. Atmospheres Of Democracy”. Karlsruhe, Germany, and Online. March – Oct, 2005. Boston Center For The Arts – Mills Gallery. “Sifting The Inner Belt”. Boston, MA. Jun 17th – Jul 31st, 2005. Aidekman Arts Center, Tufts University. “Artwork”. Medford, MA. May 2005. Space 200. Boston Cyberarts Festival. Boston, MA. Apr 29 – May 15, 2005.
2004 Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Center. Toronto, Canada. Oct 20 – 31, 2004. In Conjunction With The 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival. DCKT Contemporary. “1:100″. New York, NY. Jul – Aug 2004. MASSMoCA. “The Interventionists: Art In The Social Sphere” (with spurse). North Adams, MA. 2004-5. Chatham Mills. “Loom 3: Labeler”. Pittsboro, NC. May, 2004. Psy.Geo.Conflux 2004. New York City, NY. May 13 – 16, 2004.
2003 Boston Center For The Arts. Boston, MA. Sept 2003. “Dante’s Paradise Of Information”. The Copley Society. Boston Cyberarts Festival. Boston, MA. “Manifesta 2003”. Harvard University. Project Zero, Graduate School of Education. Cambridge, MA. “Holiday”, Jan 2003. Mediatopia.net. November 2002 – February 2003. Online group show.
2002 Manifesta 4. Free Manifesta, included. Frankfurt, Germany. Summer 2002. A project by Sal Randolph. Harvard University. Iconoclasm. Adams House. Feb 2002.
2001 Tufts University. Boston Cyberarts Festival. Jumboscope. Registrar’s Lobby. Medford, MA. Spring 2001.
http://www.ikatun.org/kanarinka/about/exhibitions/
Awards:
2013 Artists in Context commission for the Prospectus for the Nation.
2012 Turbulence.org networked art commission.
2010 Tanne Foundation Artist Award. RISD Faculty Professional Development Grant. Berkshire Taconic Foundation A.R.T. Award.
2009 Anderson Ranch. Extending Creativity in Digital Media residency program.
2008 Finalist, James & Audrey Foster Prize. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Second place, Best Show in a Public Place. Association of International Art Critics (AICA), New England chapter. Best Local Artist, Improper Bostonian Magazine
2007 RISD Faculty Professional Development Grant. LEF Foundation Contemporary Work Fund (to iKatun).
2006 Artist to Watch, Year in Review, Big, Red & Shiny magazine. Individual Artist Award (to the Institute for Infinitely Small Things), Cambridge Arts Council. RISD Faculty Professional Development Grant. RISD Part-time Faculty Professional Development Grant.
2003-5 Academic Scholarship, two years, Maine College of Art MFA Graduate Program.
2003 Winner (iKatun), Turbulence net.art competition.
1999 Rotary Ambassadorial Fellowship for one year of study in Buenos Aires, Argentina.