Cary Peppermint

1970–

Cary Peppermint's work involves a broad conceptualist approach to new media technologies. He often-times combines performance and the web to permeate a multitude of networks within and beyond the internet. Peppermint applies recombinant strategies to commercial sites and publications, such as Ebay.com, Evite.com, The New York Daily News, Artforum and Mp3.com, and employs them as carriers of his interactive compositions of chance or "restless culture." Peppermint's works comprise some of the first real-time performance art realized via the internet including "The Mashed Potato Supper" as part of Edinburgh's Fringe Film and Video Festival in 1995 and "Conductor Number One" included in PORT: Navigating Digital Culture in 1996. Peppermint lives in New York where he consistently disseminates his work through his independent website of information-art called "Restlessculture.net." His work has been exhibited in international festivals and centers of contemporary art, such as Osnabruck's European Media Art Festival and Walker Art Center's first major survey of internet art, "Beyond Interface." Peppermint's performances have taken place at The Kitchen, Postmaster's Gallery, and ISEA, as well as numerous other venues and art spaces. He is a 2001 recipient of a Franklin Furnace Performance Art Grant in support of his upcoming hybrid-media performance-installation entitled "Conductor Number Zero" which is scheduled for release in spring 2002.

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.