Talk #4 Panelists (Impossibility)
N.D. Austin is an experience designer who likes to bring love to neglected places. In projects like the Night Heron Speakeasy, he uses transgression and intimacy as tools for urban exploration. He once received an award for exemplary action under extreme duress from the US Forest Service. http://wanderlustprojects.com/
Ayesha Jordan is a multidisciplinary performer and creator. Her characters: Shasta Geaux Pop, reetheth indapeeth, SheShe Reynoir, Montez, & shawty g love affair appear in her interactive performance events and videos. Through her uniquely afro-feminist lens, Ayesha is on a constant quest to reveal "happy" in all that she makes, as a performer, creator, maître d, and amateur woodworker.
Niegel Smith (moderator) is a performance artist, walk-maker and theater director who sculpts social spaces into unique communal environments where we make new rituals, excavate our pasts and imagine future narratives. He is also a ringleader of Willing Participant. Willing Participant whips up urgent poetic responses to crazy shit that happens. Before surviving high school in Detroit, he grew up in the North Carolina piedmont, fishing with his dad, shopping with his mom and inventing tall-tale fantasies with his two younger brothers. http://www.niegelsmith.com
Nancy Nowacek uses sculpture, performance, and installation to expand the uses of the body in modern life. Her current large-scale public work, Citizen Bridge, proposes a hand-made temporary floating pedestrian bridge to reconnect Brooklyn to Governors Island. She is currently an Eyebeam 'On the Move Fellow’, a Smackmellon ‘One to Watch' and will be teaching classes at Pioneer Works and NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program this fall. http://nancynowacek.com
Born in Bochum (Germany), Veit Stratmann lives in Paris. Veit's work essentially rests upon questioning: can an artistic gesture be based on the notions of choice, of decision-making, of the posture of those who encounter the artwork? Can this decision-making become constructive material? If political action originates in the act of making a choice, can an encounter with art generate a permanent oscillation between a political and an artistic gesture? Veit has shown widely and internationally. He teaches at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France.
photo: Danya Abt. From "Total Detroit" by Niegel Smith (2011)