Cary Peppermint

Cary Peppermint is a New York-based conceptual, new media, and performance artist. Peppermint was born Rome, Georgia, in 1970 and received in M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1997. While living in NYC for almost a decade afterward, Peppermint conducted a series of Dadaist and Fluxus inspired digital, networked performances via his website RestlessCulture, an ongoing, post-cinema living documentary database of what he calls “exposures in update.” As Papperment has stated, it is undecidable if RestlessCulture.net is “a website of performance” or “the performance of a website.” In Artforum, Mark Tribe called this series of work “twenty-first-century takes on Warhol's Factory.” AI Magazine wrote that “the lessons of the Surrealists are remixed daily in net.art such as Peppermint’s.” Although Peppermint incorporated many internet “readymades” into his performances, his most well-known is “Use Me As Medium” (2000) on Ebay.com, which Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, in "At the Edge of Art", describe as “invit [ing] us to ponder the longer-term dangers caused by a commercial culture that defines the behavior, freedoms, and values of our biological bodies.”

In 2001, Peppermint began proclaiming that he had “lost [his] faith in cultural production and wanted to abandon artmaking altogether,” even using the Whitney Museum of American Art's Artport as ad-space to try and jumpstart a career as a commercial HIP-HOP DJ CN ZERO. It has been suggested that this phase informed his decision in 2004 to leave NYC for the woods of the state of Maine. After several years of silence, Peppermint reemerged artistically with a decidedly environmental emphasis on his new media art practice and founded EcoArtTEch with his partner Christine Nadir in 2005. EcoArtTech uses digital, networked, and sustainable technologies and contemporary environments to create art about the experience of modern environments. This collaborative is concerned with re-imagining relationships between humans, their environments, and their technologies.

Since 2005, Peppermint has curated three international exhibitions of digitally infused eco-art, including “Technorganic” and “Wilderness Information Network,” which both took place in the upper Catskills of New York state. In February 2008, EcoArtTech curated and organized "Nature Version 2.0," a conjoined exhibition and symposium of new media artists who "reinvent environmentalism for the digital age." In the course of his artistic career, Peppermint has performed, exhibited, and lectured widely. His work, including performances, screenings, and installations, has been exhibited at Exit Art Gallery, the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Sonoma County Museum, Postmasters Gallery, The Kitchen, the European Media Art Festival, the Everson Museum of Art, the Digital Art Museum (Berlin), Fran Hill Gallery, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Ginza Art Laboratory in Tokyo, among other places. His work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and Computer Fine Arts.

References

* Atkins, Robert. “Art As Auction.” The Media Channel. (April 12, 2000) [http://www.mediachannel.org/arts/perspectives/auction/index.shtml]
* Blais, Joline and Jon Ippolito. At the Edge of Art, Thames & Hudson. (2006) [http://at-the-edge-of-art.com/home.html]
* Tribe, Mark. “Hotlist.” Artforum. Volume 7. (March 2001)

External links

* [http://www.restlessculture.net/ Restlessculture.net] Site of ongoing networked performances
* [http://www.ecoarttech.net EcoArtTech] New Media Environmental Art Collaborative
* [http://artport.whitney.org/gatepages/august01.shtml “Fun in the Sun"] Whitney Artport: The Whitney Museum Portal to Net Art
* [http://ecoarttech.net/sustainablefutures/ Nature Version 2.0] Exhibition and Symposium curated by EcoArtTech
* [http://www.free103point9.org/events/1678/ Off the Grid] 2008 Exhibition at Neuberger Museum of Art