October 14 – December 13, 2010

Contact: Thomas Moore
Director of Arts & Culture
410-455-3370
tmoore@umbc.edu

UMBC's Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) presents Spectrum: 2010 Visual Arts Faculty Exhibition, organized by the CADVC and featuring work by six artists: Dan Bailey, Steve Bradley, Cathy Cook, Vin Grabill, Calla Thompson and Fred Worden.

An Opening Reception will be held on Thursday, October 14th from 5 to 7 pm, and the exhibition will open for regular hours on Friday, October 15th.

The inaugural exhibition in a new series, Spectrum features an in-depth look at recent research projects in film, video, photography, sound, installation, drawing, and sculpture by selected members of UMBC's Department of Visual Arts. A 24-page full color catalogue will accompany the exhibition and includes a critical essay by Washington, D.C.-based art critic and artist J.W. Mahoney.

Public programs feature lectures by each artist as well as screenings of films and videos in the CADVC's theatre space. Lectures will presented at noon on the following Wednesdays:
October 20 - Dan Bailey
October 27 - Steve Bradley
November 3 - Vin Grabill
November 8 - James Smalls
November 17 - Cathy Cook
December 1 - Calla Thompson
[A lecture by Fred Worden preceded the opening of the exhibition.]

About the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC)
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is dedicated to the study of contemporary art and visual culture, critical theory, art and cultural history, and the relationship between society and the arts. The CADVC serves as a forum for students, faculty, and the general public for the discussion of important aesthetic and social issues of the day. Disciplines represented include painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, digital art, video, film, television, design, architecture, advertising, and installation and performance art.

Since 1989, the CADVC has incorporated a number of public programs into its exhibition programming schedule to further impact the communities it serves. Symposia, lecture series, conferences, film series, visiting artist series, and residencies have all been fundamental in an effort to create an ongoing dialogue about contemporary art and culture. The Center has also initiated a number of projects with Baltimore and surrounding schools to integrate the contemporary artist and their concerns into the classroom. These projects take place on-site at both middle schools and high schools and are team taught by the instructors at these schools, professional artists, and students from the CADVC's Internship Program.

The Center produces one to two exhibition catalogues each year. Each document is fully illustrated and contains critical essays on the given subject by a variety of distinguished professionals in the field. Recent publications include Postmodernism: A Virtual Discussion and Paul Rand: Modernist Design. These books and catalogues are published and are distributed internationally through Distributed Art Publishers.

Since 1992, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture has actively pursued the organization of exhibitions that contain the aesthetic, theoretical, and educational potential to reach both a national and international audience. Over the years, the CADVC has traveled these exhibition projects to a broad spectrum of museums, professional non-profit galleries, and universities national and internationally. Recent traveling exhibitions include:

• White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art (2003)
• Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations (2001)
• Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (1999)
• Bruno Monguzzi: A Designer's Perspective (1998)
• Minimal Politics (1997)
• Kate Millett, Sculpture: The First 38 Years (1997)

Beyond the scope of these traveling exhibitions, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture also undertakes projects such as the Joseph Beuys Tree Partnership. As part of the educational mission of the CADVC, one graduate thesis exhibition and one undergraduate senior exhibition are presented each year.

This multi-faceted focus for presenting exhibitions, projects and scholarly research publications focused on contemporary art and cultural issues positions the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in a unique position within the mid-Atlantic region.

Hours and Admission
Tuesday through Saturday — 10 A.M. – 5:00 P.M.
Admission is free.

Public Information
UMBC Arts website: http://www.umbc.edu/arts
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture: http://www.umbc.edu/cadvc
Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture phone: 410-455-3188

Directions
• From Baltimore and points north, proceed south on I-95 to exit 47B. Take Route 166 toward Catonsville and then follow signs to the Walker Avenue Garage (metered parking).
• From I-695, take Exit 12C (Wilkens Avenue) and continue one-half mile to the entrance of UMBC at the roundabout intersection of Wilkens Avenue and Hilltop Road. Turn left and follow signs to the Walker Avenue Garage (metered parking).
• From Washington and points south, proceed north on I-95 to Exit 47B. Take Route 166 toward Catonsville and then follow signs to the Walker Avenue Garage (metered parking).
• Online campus map: http://www.umbc.edu/aboutumbc/campusmap/

Images for Media
High resolution images for media are available online:
http://www.umbc.edu/newsevents/arts/hi-res/
Images in this release: Dan Bailey: Arches Delicate Arch Planet; Fred Worden: video still from 1859 (2008); Vin Grabill: video still from Frontier.

You may view or download this release as a pdf file.

Plan to attend the MD/PhD Roadshow on Monday, October 4 at 12 noon in LH 3. MD/PhD program directors from Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland Baltimore, and University of Pennsylvania will be here to meet with students. The event is open to the campus.

Ars Technica has an an article on bad Android apps, Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers.

“The results of a study conducted by researchers from Duke University, Penn State University, and Intel Labs have revealed that a significant number of popular Android applications transmit private user data to advertising networks without explicitly asking or informing the user. The researchers developed a piece of software called TaintDroid that uses dynamic taint analysis to detect and report when applications are sending potentially sensitive information to remote servers.

They used TaintDroid to test 30 popular free Android applications selected at random from the Android market and found that half were sending private information to advertising servers, including the user’s location and phone number. In some cases, they found that applications were relaying GPS coordinates to remote advertising network servers as frequently as every 30 seconds, even when not displaying advertisements. These findings raise concern about the extent to which mobile platforms can insulate users from unwanted invasions of privacy.”

TaintDroid is an experimental system that “analyses how private information is obtained and released by applications ‘downloaded’ to consumer phones”. A paper on the system will be presented at the 2010 USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation later this month.

TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones, William Enck, Peter Gilbert, Byung-gon Chun, Landon P. Cox, Jaeyeon Jung, Patrick McDaniel, and Anmol N. Sheth, OSDI, October 2010.

The project, Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones has a good overview site with a FAQ and demo.

This is just one example of a rich and complex area full of trade-offs. We want our systems and devices to be smarter and to really understand us — our preferences, context, activities, interests, intentions, and pretty much everything short of our hopes and dreams. We then want them to use this knowledge to better serve us — selecting music, turing the ringer on and off, alerting us to relevant news, etc. Developing this technology is neither easy nor cheap and the developers have to profit from creating it. Extracting personal information that can be used or sold is one model — just as Google and others do to provide better ad placement on the Web.

Here’s a quote from the Ars Technical article that resonated with me.

“As Google says in its list of best practices that developers should adopt for data collection, providing users with easy access to a clear and unambiguous privacy policy is really important.”

We, and many others, are trying to prepare for the next step — when users can define their own privacy policies and these will be understood and enforced by their devices.