About the Project:
World-Wide-Walks : SOFIA is proposed for the “WORK IN MOTION - migration, mobility and labour“ exhibition for the Red House Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria 2008-09. This installation is part of a series of walks/web projects dealing with issues of geography, borders, personal histories and cultural memories. Begun in San Francisco, California as The Walk Series (1973), these projects have evolved into series of “world wide walks” through a variety of natural and cultural environments, produced in the form of video documentation / performances. The underlying theme of this work is "techno/cultural interfacing" exploring new media practices within site-specific cultural contexts. A key reference for this project is the life and adventures of John Ledyard, the man who dreamed of walking the world. Ledyard’s writings reflect a rare ability to incorporate the viewpoint of the indigenous men and women he encountered on his journeys, and it was one of the first known attempts by a person to walk around the world.
WorldWideWalks
About the Author:
Peter d'Agostino is an artist who has been working in video and new media for over three decades. His pioneering projects have been exhibited internationally in the form of installations, performances, telecommunications events, and broadcast productions. Surveys of his work include: Between Earth & Sky: MX (1973-2007), exhibited at Laboratorio Arte Alemeda, Mexico City; Interactivity and Intervention, 1978-99, Lehman College Art Gallery, New York; and, Between Earth & Sky, 1973/2003, University of Paris I Partheon-Sorbonne. Major group exhibitions include: The Whitney Museum of American Art (Biennial, and The American Century-Film and Video in America 1950-2000), the Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil, and the Kwangju Biennial, Korea. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthaus, Zurich, Foundation
La Caixa, Barcelona, Spain, Pacific Film Archive, University
Art Museum, Berkeley, The Getty Center, Los Angeles, and
is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
D’Agostino was awarded grants and fellowships from: the National Endowment for the Arts, Japan Foundation, Pew Trusts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT. He was an artist-in-residence at the TV Laboratory, WNET, New York, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, Italy as well as a visiting artist at the National Center for SuperComputing Applications, University of Illinois, and the American Academy in Rome.
His interactive multimedia projects (Web, DVD, CD-ROM, Laserdisc) include: DOUBLE YOU (and X,Y,Z.), TransmissionS, TRACES, STRING CYCLES, @Vesu.Vius, VR/RV: a Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality, YOO (YearZEROZERO) and www.peterdagostino.net . The installations have been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, as part of the Video Viewpoints series at The Museum of Modern Art, the Festival des Arts Electroniques, Rennes, France, the Interactions exhibition at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Holland, and the European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck, Germany. The TransmissionS: In the WELL installation (1990) and VR/RV (1995) both received honorary awards for interactive art at Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria.
A professor of film and media arts and director of the NewTechLab at Temple University, Philadelphia, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil, 1996, Australia, 2003, and Italy 2006. D’Agostino’s books include: Transmission: toward a post-television culture, The Un/Necessary Image. and TeleGuide-including a Proposal for QUBE. He is also a contributor to Illuminating Video, and Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Recent publications featuring his work include New Media in Art, Video Art, and Digital Art.
Peter d'Agostino: 'World-Wide-Walks : SOFIA'
