Biography: Cary Peppermint's work explores the convergence of ecological, cultural, and digital networks, through a post-disciplinary practice with strong ties to internet and performance art. His works are in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, Computer Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Since co-founding ecoarttech with Leila Nadir in 2005, Cary's art has turned toward the imagination of the environment as a convergent network of biological, cultural, and digital spaces. Selected ecoarttech works include "Eclipse," commissioned by Turbulence.org; "Untitled Landscape #5," a commission for the Whitney Museum of American Art; and "Center for Wildness and the Everyday," a series of digital media works and performances about water scarcity commissioned by the University of North Texas.
ecoarttech's honors include a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts artist fellowship and teaching appointments at Banff New Media Institute and Anderson Arts Ranch. Cary's curatorial work has focused on digital, back-country, off the grid exhibitions such as Wild Info Net, a solar-powered sound-art installation in the Catskill Mountains, and Nature 2.0, one of the first exhibitions of eco-art engaging new media technologies. Peppermint is an Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester and has held previous appointments at Cornell University, Colgate University, and the Pratt Institute.
Cary Peppermint's CONDUCTOR NUMBER ZERO VERSION 6.0 is the latest in his ongoing series of interactive, real-time performance-installations or "techno-lectures in continuous update." In the artist's own words, "CN_ZERO could be considered a hyper-construction of a 'recombinant pop-star', i.e. and ARTIST who functions as a latent carrier for art (the construction of culture) instead of the commercially constructed artist, i.e. the POP_STAR who functions as a latent carrier for capital and exchange (the leveling of culture).
Using multiple halogen work-lights, surveillance cameras, monitors, a portable p.a., a Polaroid camera and a laptop computer, CN_ZERO is in essentially a performative "base camp" for human media-saturation. An "overexposure in light and sound," CN_ZERO is a performance that quesitons the very conditions of possibility for cultural production.