Cybersentics Book Club | October 2026: Here/There @ Gray Area
Join for October's Cybersentics Book Club, where we'll discuss a chapter on artists' work with telepresence, focusing on the Satellite Arts Project—pioneering telecollaborative performance work created by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz between 1975 and 1977.
This Month's Reading:
Paulsen, Kris. Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface. MIT Press, 2017.
§ Chapter 4: Inhabiting the Interface: The Mixed Reality of Satellite Telecommunication.
Long before "videoconferencing" and "the cloud" entered our vocabulary, Galloway and Rabinowitz (working together as Mobile Image) were already asking what it might mean for bodies, gestures, and performances to exist simultaneously across distant places. The book chapter reads this as a foundational moment in telepresent art: an attempt to imagine touch, presence, and collaboration across a distance technology alone couldn't close.
About the Author
Kris Paulsen is an Associate Professor of History of Art (and, by courtesy, Theatre, Film, and Media Arts) at The Ohio State University, specializing in contemporary art, video, and new media. Her first book, Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (MIT Press, 2017), received the 2018 Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her work traces the intersections of art and engineering, with a particular emphasis on telepresence, virtuality, and artificial intelligence.
Cybersentics Book Club is a monthly reading group at Gray Area where we discuss literature on the political implications of neural engineering, cultural perceptions of disruptive technology, present-day applications of cybernetics and cyborg theory, and more.
The book club is a great fit for artists, makers, researchers, scholars, engineers, and anyone curious about the integration of technology and art. Our purpose is to cultivate a welcoming community that fosters knowledge-sharing and collaboration. Whether you're looking to connect with potential collaborators, find answers to pressing questions, gain critical insights, or learn alongside peers, this is the place for you!
Thanks to book club donations, and in an effort to give back to our community, we established the Cybersentics Little Library, with items available for browsing and loan. Check it out here.
Cybersentics is organized and led by Anastasia Chernysheva.
An open-access library that accompanies this book club can be accessed here.