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stanza data art stanza stanza Steve Tanza , stanza Portrait

Artistic Practice

Stanza focuses on the landscape of monitored and networked real time information flows, and the artworks created reflect this. Underpinning his artworks are a whole series of potential problems about observation, invisible agency, and the ethics of the control space. Stanza's digital artworks are experienced as fused mashed-up data cities and real-time performative city experiences, all re-presented online as systems of control and systems that demonstrate how these systems control. Furthermore the artwork demonstrates how we are complicit and thus entangled in the surveyed and monitored technological layers that the artworks are communicating and fit seamlessly into what he calls panoptic aesthetics. What becomes real are the art installations, sculptures and paintings Stanza exhibits. The technologies incorporated in his digital artworks can include, custom made sensors, networked cameras, robotics, and computers.

His artworks often use environmental data, traffic data and networked information, and by using these real time data, it serves as a reminder as to our ever changing identity in the digital age. His most recent work connects data streams from ‘Smart Cities’ speculating on ideas for merging various types of data using methods of artificial intelligence AI and ML learning to create new artistic scenarios. The thrust of these artworks aims to show what happens when the public are allowed to make their own mixes and visualisations with the data, reclaiming ownership and representing data in new and different ways.

Some of his most well known digital art projects include: -

  • Velocity (2019). Acustom made software to track participants in the city demonstrating entangled citizen participation.
  • The Nemesis Machine (2010-2019). A sculptural artwork informed by real time data analysis of city spaces and how we are all now part of a bigger system.
  • The Binary Graffiti Club Choir. Singing binary messages across the city. Public engagement project.
  • The Reader (2015). A sculpture that poses the question what happens when machine intelligence becomes part of our human fabric.
  • The Agency At The End Of Civilisation (2015). A digital art installation as a real time interpretation of millions of data sets.
  • Be Herd Above The Noise (2010). The city as system of music using thousands of sounds on hundreds of speakers.
  • Soundcities (1997- 2020). How to experience the whole world as a system of sound.
  • Sensity (2006-2009). How can the invisible be made visible by using sensors and representing data about the environment?
  • Visitors to A Gallery (2004) and Public Domain (2008). The gallery visitors become bits of information and part of the artwork inside a surveillance system.
  • Genomixer (2004). A series of online artworks made using the artists DNA sequence.
  • Urban Generation (2002) Do we live in a giant global surveillance system? This artwork witnesses this constant real-time landscape.
  • The CentralCit. (1996+). Awading winning net art project relfecting on the urban condition.

Stanza is an internationally recognised artist, who has been exhibiting worldwide since 1984. His artworks have won twenty international art prizes and art awards including:- Vidalife 6.0 First Prize Spain. SeNef Grand Prix Korea. Videobrasil First Prize Brazil. Cynet Art First Prize Germany. Share First Prize Winner Italy: His art has also been rewarded with a prestigious Nesta Dreamtime Award, an Arts Humanities Creative Fellowship and a Clarks bursary and numerous international arts residencies.

Stanza engages directly with galleries and private clients, and numerous commissions include work for Quays Culture, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Watermans Art Centre, FACT, the Open Data Institute, The Goodwood Festival Of Speed, The Lowry. His artworks have been exhibited in over one hundred exhibitions globally. Participating venues have included:- Venice Biennale: Victoria Albert Museum: Tate Britain: Mundo Urbano Madrid: Bruges Museum: Fundacion Telefonica in Madrid: TSSK Norway: State Museum, Novorsibirsk: Biennale of Sydney: Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo Mexico: Plymouth Arts Centre: ICA London: Sao Paulo Biennale: De Markten Brussels: Transport Museum London: Haifa Museum: QUAD Derby: FACT Liverpool: Ars Nova Museum Finland: York Art Gallery: Centre des Arts Les Bain France: Bury Art Museum, UK: Kellen Gallery USA: Shrewsbury Museum: Samsung Media Centre Korea.  

Stanza was one of the first artists to use the internet as an art medium. His major online projects include the Netart archive, soundcities.com (a global soundmap project 1997-2020), genomixer.com (DNA-based artworks 2000), thecentralcity.co.uk (urban and city systems 1996), amorphoscapes.co.uk (generative painting 1997), and soundtoys.net (an online curated art portal 1996+).

Dr Stanza is an independent artist who is based in London who has been exhibiting worldwide since 1984. www.stanza.co.uk.

Stanza data art Stanza data art Stanza data art Stanza, Steve Tanza,