Analytics are failing us. It is painfully obvious that polling and data do not reflect sentiment accurately. Perhaps they never have. Dividing Zero is a performance event where two artists, Angela Washko and Nathaniel Sullivan, will explore the limits of data and the false narratives that the abstraction provides.
Angela Washko explores metrics and seduction in her performance Millionaire Worthy, a performance that presents us with a strategy for romantic success through data analysis of the Bravo television show Millionaire Matchmaker.
“The problem with a topography is that a coffee cup can look like a donut.” So says JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in Nathaniel Sullivan’s Before the Nation Went Bankrupt, a lecture performance that transforms data into the metaphorical and conflates it with romantic love, lust and the desire for a security.
Dividing Zero is the first of three events on abstraction, finance and culture titled Mapping Abstraction, organized by Jay Muhlin and Nathaniel Sullivan that will be held over the next 6 months at Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA.
Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it. Since 2012, Washko has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an ongoing intervention inside the most popular online role-playing game of all time. Her most recent project, The Game: The Game is a video game presenting the practices of several prominent seduction coaches (aka pick-up artists) through the format of a dating simulator. In the game these pick-up gurus attempt to seduce the player using their signature techniques taken verbatim from their instructional books and video materials.
A recent recipient of a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, a Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and a Rhizome Internet Art Microgrant, Washko’s practice has been highlighted in Art in America, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, ARTnews, The Hairpin, VICE, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, the New York Times, Cosmopolitan Magazine and more. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her writing has been published in Creative Time Reports, FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, Copenhagen University Peer Reviewed Journal (NTIK), Neural Magazine, VASA Journal of Images and Culture, .dpi Feminist Magazine of Art and Digital Culture, Hyperallergic, ANIMAL NY and more. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Nathaniel Sullivan is a “creative non-fiction” artist. His research into the lives of real people and events combine documentary realism and rational processes with conjecture and desire. He makes videos and multimedia lecture performances that blur the line between subject and performer. He has created performances about former French president Francois Mitterrand’s last meal, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain’s sex life, and the love letters of banker Jamie Dimon.
He has received a special mention prize at the Montreal Film Festival in 2006, a festival prize at the FilmWinter in Stuttgart, Germany and an audience award at The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Most recently, his performance work has been written about on Hyperallergic. and he has been performing regularly in New York at alternative art and theatre venues like Galapagos Art Space and Glasshouses in Brooklyn and at the Prelude Festival at The Graduate Center CUNY. An 11 page spread of his latest work, Before the Nation Went Bankrupt about JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was featured in Vice. He has been an artist in residence at Contemporary Arts Center in Troy, New York, at I-Park in East Haddam, Connecticut and the Bemis Center in Omaha, Nebraska.
