Cary Peppermint

1970–

Cary Peppermint [also known as Cary Adams] (b. 1970; Rome, Georgia) created some of the first real-time performances realized via the internet. He has earned support for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. His performances, exhibitions, and lectures have taken place at venues such as Postmasters Gallery (1984–2025), New York; New York University; 319 Scholes, New York; Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn; Exit Art, New York (1982–2012); University of California, Los Angeles; MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts; ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) 2012; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada; European Media Art Festival; Parsons School of Design, New School, New York; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York. His work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Rhizome, Turbulence.org (1996–2016), and Cornell University’s Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.

Wikipedia entry

Introduction

Cary Peppermint (born 1970) is a New York-based conceptual, new media, performance, and environmental artist. Peppermint was born in Rome, Georgia, in 1970 and received in M.F.A. from Syracuse University in 1997. Peppermint has conducted a series of Dadaist and Fluxus inspired digital, networked performances via his website RestlessCulture, an ongoing, post-cinema living documentary database. In Artforum, Mark Tribe called this series of work “twenty-first-century takes on Warhol's Factory.”

In 2005, Peppermint founded ecoarttech with his partner Leila Christine Nadir. Their collaborative explores environmental issues and convergent media and technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective. In a 2012 interview with visualMAG, Peppermint and Nadir report that "movement between environmental extremes–between mega-cities and green landscapes–has always been the most creatively stimulating 'place' for us to dwell in. No matter where we go, we are always fascinated by the technologies and systems that human beings use to produce their survival and to create meaning in their lives."

One of ecoarttech's inaugural works was “Wilderness Trouble” (2007). More recent works include “Indeterminate Hikes” (2011), a smartphone app and installation that transforms chance encounters in everyday locales into public performances of bio-cultural diversity and wild happenings, created originally for the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2010 ISP exhibition; “Untitled Landscape #5” (2009), an internet-based work commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its Sunrise and Sunset series; “Center for Wildness in the Everyday” (2010), a series of networked performances about the “wildness” of water in the Texas Trinity River Basin, commissioned by the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design; and “Eclipse” (2009), a net art work exploring the politics of pollution, the myth of wilderness, and the surplus of online information, commissioned by Turbulence.org of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.

He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Rochester. 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.