Inventivity.com has been the place for my small but innovative technology consulting business with an impressive client list and amazing people. But I've always seen it as a way hold all my creative work, from advanced technology to writing, publishing, art, and music.
I produced and I archive here the art journal THE ACT, a performance art journal as part of an art non-profit I created and ran called "The Performance Project" in New York City in the 80's and 90's. The Performance Project was hosted weekly around NYC, starting from my rented living spaces and then by related and larger institutions, particularlly the Frankliin Furnace (out of the kindness Martha Wilson), and Performance Space (out of the kindness of ). I ran the weekly meetups of artists to do their performance work and then get feedback from fellow artists and audience members. I saw and met so many artists this way and people from a wide gamut of life's experiences and challenges. I also received friendship from a group of artists who regularly participated in the weekly performances and in the journal. Experiences that were gifts for which I'm very grateful. This was during the rise of AIDs and I lost one my most significant mentor Jacques Chwat.
The journal was active during the med-80s to early '90s, and I did what I could to keep it focused was on artists and works oriented towards art-as-truth, art-as-participation, art-as-social-and-political-engagement, and what it means to be an "unartist". Largely inspired by Allan Kaprow's work, and John Cage's influences (he was still alive then and was on a committee at Jasper Johns' Performance Foundation and gave us a grant for the journal). I also wanted to bring in the important work of Suzanne Lacy, and feminist artists and composers ( Pauline Oliveros ), as well as the culture breaking and embracing poet, Jerome Rothenberg, and the life-theater explorations such as those of Jerzy Growtowski.
I have a substantial and extensive background as an advanced technology leader: http://jeffrey-greenberg.com.
I got started through the sheer luck of being at UCSD and able to be study and get some mentorship from the likes of Allan Kaprow and Pauline Oliveros while earning a degree in bioengineering and then as an MFA student in the art department with an amazing faculty. In search of job as a graduate student, and tiring of grading calculus homework for the Math department, Harold Cohen invited me to work in Studio / AI lab at UCSD in 1979. Learning C, and reading the Unix source code, and using a PDP-8 to start with, we were using UUCP which enabled some networking as Internet technology was unfurling. In his lab, Harold developed what eventually came to be called 'expert AI' software, long before neural nets and machine learning were feasible. Harold, an artist, taught himself software and hardware and was giving talks also at Stanford's computer science department. As this was before spreadsheets, computers were mostly useless to businesses, and so technology companies were interested in giving Harold money to do things not seen before that would excite people and help sell computers. Everything then was new and Harold was active in creating new things that had not been seen before. He designed and built his own turtle to paint large canvases on the floor and could locate itself using sonar. I learned and help write software and firmware for devices to actualize his automated painting, including large scale printers to produce drawings at scale. These were seen in Harold's show at the Brooklyn Museum some years later. Harold's artwork was the expert system that captured Harold's own characterization of his drawing and drawing decisions in a form he referred to as Aaron.
I remember sitting in that refrigerated lab, shivering, amongst computers that were the size of multiple refrigerators and hard drives the size of washing machines, that today would be dwarfed by the computation and storage we hold literally in our hands today, and I thought to myself 'it would be cool to get an email from my mom, but that'll never happen if it involves all this shivering'. Even from the advanced and opportune perch on to the future, it was impossible to guess just how far we would go. Of course, we had different ideas of how it would work. For one, there was the Internet Book of Etiquette which was supposed to be read before using the Net, and it included imprecations against commercial use of the Net and the banishing of ads... Some ideals did not survive that era...
These days I am working on my own projects but I can spare time for interesting and useful projects and needs of others including:
(c) 2023 - jeffrey greenberg