Remembering Steve Kurtz is an evening devoted to exploring and celebrating the life and work of Steve Kurtz, pioneer in bio art and tactical media.
As co-founder of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), an influential collective of radical experimental artists, Kurtz was a frequent visitor to Amsterdam, engaging in festivals such as Next 5 Minutes and World Information Org as a highly influential contributor to the discussions which swirled around the social and technological revolutions of the 1990s.
Kurtz and CAE’s radical approach questioned the very foundations of what it meant to be an artist through a willingness to embrace “any kind of cultural hybrid; artist, scientist, technician, craftsperson, theorist, activist.” This hybridity however carried unexpected risks. And in 2003 the danger of challenging institutional boundaries became clear when Kurtz was targeted in an FBI investigation, leading to a wave of grand-jury subpoenas under the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act, that took years to fully resolve in his favour. Our event will engage with this difficult phase in his life, in part, through screening key extracts of the renowned film Strange Culture by Lynn Hershman. We are fortunate in that we will be joined by Lynn Hershman and Richard Pell online from the US for discussion and reflection.
With books such as The Electronic Disturbance (1994), Electronic Civil Disobedience (1996) and Flesh Machine (1998), Kurtz and CAE defined the artistic and activist responses to corporate virtualization techniques. Were video and networks still possible as tools for cultural resistance?
Throughout the evening, we will hear from many individuals who knew Steve drawing on previously unseen film footage of interviews, as well as live discussion with distinguished contemporaries. Our explorations will range across key aspects of CAE’s’ output. Finally we will launch the Dutch translation of Unreality and Its Discontents: The Struggle Against Christian Nationalism, the last book that Steve completed at the very end of his life, in an act that couldn’t have been timelier or more urgent.
