M_A and 2426 SET present New Forensics: Scenarios and Simulated Environments, a one-day presentation by artists Kelly Loudenberg and Richard Wheeler, whose work and research focuses on simulating simulations. From violence to surveillance, their separate artistic practices investigate, re-articulate, and stage the exercises and environments that result from an increasingly militarized world in which new environments are manufactured and new genres of spaces are constructed.
Kelly Loudenberg’s project Foam Sweet Foam explores the furnitures produced for the staging of active shooter training exercises, and Richard Wheeler presents If I Could See What You See, a recent project which investigates the overt and covert activities of constructing an urban surveillance hideout.
The program concludes with a 30 minute exercise conducted by Wheeler, where participants examine practices of urban surveillance through a close reading of open-source online instructional videos. Participants use description, transcription, and instruction in order to unpack the spatial and performative aspects of this online subculture.
About the Artists
Kelly Loudenberg is a filmmaker & artist who has been exploring the physical and emotional landscapes of American justice for over a decade. This project has grown out of her work researching the fine line between fact and fiction, and how that bleeds into the contemporary world. She has recently completed production on a documentary series for Netflix that examines false confessions using the interrogation tapes to contextualize six separate cases (set to premiere in September). Her work has been shown at the Maryland Institute College of Art, SXSW Film Festival, and the Guggenheim Labs. She has been artist-in-residence at the Nevada Museum of Art, the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.
Richard Wheeler is an artist. He investigates locations, tools, methods, and cultures of observing, representing, and interacting with the world around us. He is an occasional faculty member of Art Center College of Design’s Media Design Practices department and UCLA’s Design Media Arts department and has lectured at American University, Georgetown University, and USC. His writing has appeared in KCET’s Artbound, Wired’s Danger Room, and the Daily Beast.