Body Politik: Online VJ Performance (Dec. 15)

Body Politik (an online live vj performance ) by Alessandro Imperato will be presented on December 15, 2009 at 9:30 pm Central at TERMINALapsu.org .The event is being organized by Upgrade! Tennessee.

Upgrade! Tennessee is sponsored by the Space for New Media at Tennessee State University in Nashville, TN and TERMINALapsu.org at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN and is administered by Jodi Hays, Kell Black and Barry Jones.

Alessandro Imperato is an English born digital artist and theorist in the social history of art and media theory. His imagery draws heavily on Brechtian strategies of ‘making strange’ settled meanings and narratives by jarring juxtaposition of potent signs. His work is particularly concerned with international military conflict in the post-Cold War and the increasing political contexts of cultural repression and regulation. Alessandro’s practice as a cultural producer can be described as being digital media montage. The artwork is intended to make sense of the mediations between reality and its representations. He aims to contribute towards a strategy of critically re-coding the post-war dualism between abstraction and figuration.

He regards art to be an important aspect of political and ideological struggle, in which realism and art’s critical relationship towards society involves an adequate re-description of present lived conditions. One of his aims is to contribute towards a Critical Realist aesthetic and to develop an adequate signifying practice that can take account of the various changing areas of political and cultural struggles. Revealing the social conflicts inherent in art and the media can expose the construction of myths of artistic autonomy and reveal artifacts as sites of political struggle. Alessandro is not interested in the invention of a private language, but in using the signs, forms and images of society to subvert and transform their meanings in order to reveal the myths and ideological distortions of cultural representations. Alessandro is a founder member of the Medeology Collective.