Mark Tribe - Work

Work

Mark Tribe has focused on developing a critical understanding of the complex and interdependent relationships between technology and culture. Tribe's engagement with new media art has been motivated less by a fascination with new media technologies themselves than by a recognition that, in the hands of artists, these technologies can open up unexpected forms of political action, cultural participation, and aesthetic experience.

Tribe's art work has been exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, and Gigantic Art Space in New York City.

As a curator, Tribe founded the online resource for new media artists Rhizome.org in 1996. He held the Art and Technology Lectures at Columbia University. Tribe has also organized shows at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and inSite_05.

His Port Huron Project (2006–2008) is a collection of reenacted protest speeches from the 1960s and 1970s. Mark Tribe sat down with Christina Ulke, and said, "I came up with the idea as a response to the relative lack of political activity at Brown University, where I teach. As it happens, I went to college at Brown, and when I arrived there as a freshman in 1985, students had set up a shanty town in the center of campus to protest the university’s investments in South Africa. Twenty years later, and three years into a bloody and misguided war, the campus is quiet. No protests, no flyers. And my students never mention the war unless I bring it up. It’s not that they are in favor of the war. On the contrary, when asked, they all say they oppose it. But they don’t think they can do anything to stop the war. Many of them were active in the 2004 election, and were deeply disillusioned by the outcome. Others are just too busy with their own lives to give it much thought. I wanted to do something to help them (and me, for that matter) connect with the sense of possibility that characterized the New Left movements of the 60s and 70s."

In 2006, Mark Tribe and Reena Jana published the book "New Media Art". It has since been re-processed onto the web through the wiki.brown.edu website and is summarized into the following Wiki article, New media art. Mark Tribe writes about the different types of art forms that can be found within the internet, computer, video and virtual. New Media concerns are often derived from the telecommunications, mass media and digital modes of delivery the artworks involve, with practices ranging from conceptual to virtual art, performance to installation.