Artist  Statement

Where’s Your Pocket Protector? is a combined hardspace and virtual repository for collective digital identities proposed for ISEA97 to officially open at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and on the WWW on September 22-27, 1997. Participants will copy and save to their computer hard disks the template graphic from this web site and submit their finished entries as attachments via e-mail. I read recently on a listserv the opinion that art is always virtual, communicative, and interactive. Nowadays, it’s easy to be “geek”. As telecommunicators we have transformed our language and perception in order to be fluent in “computerese”. I proposed this project for ISEA97, partly because it will take place at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The School’s reputation is substantial as an academy for artists. As the site of my earliest art training, it is where I first learned to spill my proverbial artist’s “guts”. As a humanist, I wore my “heart on my sleeve;” as a visual communicator, I now wear it in my breast pocket. To obsess afterall, is to fetishize—arcane prophylactic or “temporary autonomous zone”.

• Rose Stasuk (U.S.A.) is a visual artist who moved to Central Florida from Chicago in 1974. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College between 1971-74, and completed her BA in fine art in 1981 at the University of Central Florida. In 1994 she earned her MFA in Electronic Intermedia at the University of Florida. The artist has maintained a private studio since 1985. Her work has been featured in juried group and invitational shows at museums and cultural centers in Florida, the US and (virtually) the world. In addition, her work is included in the on-line image databases of Sonoma State University’s Women Artists Archive and at Arizona State University in The World’s Women On-Line, organized by artist Muriel Magenta. Over the past few years Stasuk has produced many works including: video sculpture; media-assisted performance and interactive, multimedia installation. From
  her studio computer in Clermont she maintains a Web site on the University of Florida Center for Excellence in Teaching server. The directory URL: <ucet.ufl.edu/~rstasuk/> provides access to several online projects, including the artist’s ISEA97 web event entitled Where’s Your Pocket Protector?, and her on-going, collaborative research project, The Body internet. Stasuk was awarded a 1995-96 Individual Artist Fellowship from the State of Florida for Interdisciplinary Art.