Marc Tasman is an Intermedia artist who works in photography, video, performance, and networked media. His research is focused on the strengths of social technologies to construct identity and create meaning in culture. Through teaching and administration, Tasman encourages practices that forge connections to broader learning communities, empowering seekers to innovate with new media forms and creative enterprises.
He is currently director of the Digital Arts and Culture Program and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Tasman is a senior artist member of the residency program at RedLine Milwaukee and co-directs the Jewish Artists’ Lab in Milwaukee, a consortium of six Midwestern cities founded in Milwaukee. Tasman has screened work at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and published photographs in the New York Times Digital Edition, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and Tablet Magazine. The first edition of his electronic, interactive book, Internet Culture was published by Great River Learning press in 2017.
To see works samples including a reel of time-based media samples, click this. To view the Marc Tasman TED talk, Future Cultures, click this.
CURRENT EVENTS
Opening Summer 2018 : Six shows in six weeks #6showsin6weeks. 7 weeks is more accurate, but we’re not really counting. See links below.
June 1- Magnet Factory Bay View Gallery Night
June 3- Sep 17 Jewish Artists’ Lab Exhibition: Crossing the Threshold- JCC
June 28- Sep 16 Look Here! Villa Terrace
June 7- July 6 The Modern Landscape RedLine
June 7- Jan 27 The Nohl Fellowship at 15 Haggerty Museum
July 20- August 25 RedLine Artists’ in Residence Timeline Exhibition
October 2017: Tasman is one of the artists featured in the 6th CultureJam MKE exhibition, “True Lies” which opens October 20 and runs though November 25 at RedLine Milwaukee. https://www.facebook.com/events/467242670329140/
September 2017: Marc Tasman and collaborative partner Clayton Haggarty were interviewed by Ann Hanlon of the UW-Milwaukee Libraries and Director of the Digital Humanities Lab for the pilot project Look Here!
The Look Here! project is an experiment initiated by the UWM Libraries and aimed at encouraging artists from the community and the UWM Peck School of the Arts to work with and create art from the Libraries’ digitized cultural heritage holdings – archival materials, photographs, maps, prints, rare books and other objects. Look Here! asks artists to propose projects that re-imagine, transform, and engage with these objects in ways that were un-imagined before the digital turn.
August 2017: Tasman’s electronic, interactive textbook goes live for the Fall 2017 semester. Tasman’s Internet Culture puts the Internet and associated developments into the broader context of human culture. He frames the Web and social media as new phenomena that are restating, regenerating, and disrupting belief systems, especially around relationships, that have been around since, and are functions of previous revolutions and anthropological periods. However these tools expand or reconfigure social, economic, and political structures, Tasman still sees an opportunity for individuals to act to imbue the new media with the most essential and crucial cultural values which we chose as humans to cherish. In this way, through a survey of foundational theories and practical advice, Tasman asserts, we are responsible for making the Internet Culture.
July 2017: Marc Tasman completed and exhibited the last of the eight pieces in his series Transformative Commentary as part of the RedLine Timeline Exhibition and the Milwaukee Jewish Artists’ Lab’s show Outside/Inside: Exploring boundaries and otherness. The series consists of large charcoal drawings of political figures and activists from 2016 mashed together with each of the eight songs from Leonard Cohen’s 1988 Album, I’m Your Man. Poignantly, Cohen himself came to the forefront of news when his death (two days before) was announced a day after the U.S. Presidential election, adding another jolt to the culture after the the surprise outcome.
October 2016
Revolution: CultureJam MKE, the fifth installment of this provocative indie art series, curated by art-scene impresario Jeff Redmon, premieres Friday at RedLine Milwaukee, October 21, 6-10pm. For my pieces in this show, I’ve taken selected lyrics from songs of Leonard Cohen’s 1988 album, “I’m Your Man” and mashed them together in charcoal drawings on paper with contemporary political figures. Among the 30 artists participating in the show with me is Waldek Dynerman, who writes of the theme Revolution, that “artists must be at the frontline of progressive change.” The exhibition runs through December 17, 2016. RedLine Milwaukee, 1422 N. 4th, St. Milwaukee, WI 53212 http://milwaukeerecord.com/arts/revolution-coming-to-redline-milwaukee-this-friday/
The following week at the Charles Allis Art Museum there will be an opening reception for the statewide, juried group exhibition Forward 2016: A Survey of Wisconsin Art Now. I’m excited and honored to have a photographic print from my Laurentian Internationale series in this show. This one runs from October 27 – February 19, 2016. Opening Reception, Thursday, October 27th, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. Those in attendance will get to cast a vote for the Viewer’s Choice Award. Jurors Brent Budsberg and Susan Barnett will speak briefly about their selection process and commence an award ceremony at 7pm. Charles Allis Art Museum is located at 1801 N. Prospect Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53202 http://www.charlesallis.org/exhibitions.html
April 2016
I was invited to speak at the 7th Kern Conference on Visual Communication: Selfies, Self-Portraits, Social Media, hosted by the Rochester Institute of Technology, April 14- 16, 2016, where I traced the lineage of the selfie, conceptualizing it within performance and photography practices, to several daily photo projects, including my own in which I made a Polaroid self-portrait every day for 3,654 consecutive days—Ten Years and One Day—characterizing these works as proto-selfies.
photo: https://www.rit.edu/news/photoarchive.php?view=photo&datePhoto=2016-04-15-15-35
MARC TASMAN 