February 15, 2001 Gin D. Wong, FAIA Conference Center, USC campus : 6:30pm-10:00pm

Constance Penley: film theorist, cultural critic and chair of the Department of Film Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara; will present Melrose Space; Art, Politics, and Identity in the Age of Global Media,* Followed by a panel discussion on issues arising from the festival theme of The Vanishing Author? The panelists are Jan Tumlir: writer, curator and contributing editor at Art & Text and Xtra; Steve Fagin: professor at University of California at San Diego, and an award-winning video artist whose feature length works include Tropicola and The Machine That Killed Bad People; and artist Simon Leung whose work has been exhibited most recently in Open Ends at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Flight Pattern at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The moderator is internationally recognized media artist and USC Professor Christiane Robbins.

* Melrose Space, the first primetime public art project in television history, involved almost 100 artists and producers in the creation of 200 artworks for Melrose Place. The works included bed linens patterned with unrolled condoms, a photograph of the Oklahoma bombing made to resemble a vodka ad campaign and a quilt depicting the molecular model of the controversial RU-486 abortion drug.

The AIM II Symposium is presented by the USC School of Fine Arts and co-sponsored by USC Spectrum