Victoria Vesna

Victoria Vesna is an artist exploring new technologies. Her most recent collaborative work, Bodies INCorporated, was installed as a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute and the ArtHouse in Dublin. Other versions and related exhibits appeared in the 1996 Siggraph Art Show in New Orleans, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Barnsdall Municipal Gallery in Los Angeles. Currently it is on show at the Machida Museum of Graphics in Japan and in the Online exhibit of Walker Art Center.

Vesna's work has moved from performance and video installations to experimental research that connects networked environments to physical public spaces. She explores how physical and ephemeral spaces affect collective behavior. Victoria is an artist fellow in an online Ph.D. program at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts (CAiiA) at the University of Wales. Her thesis, "Triadic Network Spaces: Buckminster Fuller and the Construction of the Information Personae", is due out in June, 1999.

Currently Vesna leads an initiative called 'Online Public Spaces: Multidisciplinary Explorations of Multiuser Environments'(OPS:MEME). This collaborative research project, which involves computer scientists and professors from English, History, and Art departments at UCSB and UCI examines two critical aspects of knowledge acquisition as they relate to digital distribution: the importance of context in shaping knowledge transfer, and the role of social communication and collaboration in altering and enhancing knowledge production and assimilation. The project is focused on developing an online mobile 'Information Personae' (IP). Vesna plans to demonstrate the potential of this distributed entity in her next work, the 'Y2K project: Building Communities of People With No Time'.

Vesna is the North American editor of Artificial Intelligence & Society and is working on a special issue 'Database Aesthetics: Issues of Organization and Category in Art', due out in May 1999. Last year she completed production on a CD-ROM called 'Life in the Universe with Steven Hawking' (a UCSB/MetaTools co-production). She has just finished production on a book/CD-ROM for Terminals, which deals with the cultural production of death.

Vesna's work has received notice in such prominent publications as Art in America, Artweek, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as Spiegel (Germany), The Irish Times (Ireland), Tema Celeste (Italy), and Veredas (Brazil).

Vesna has received numerous grants and sponsorships from various industries and educational foundations including Wavefront/Alias, MetaCreations, GTE Outreach, the UCSB Office of Research, the Getty and Intercampus Arts (where she serves as a member of the policy board). This year she became the director of the board of the David Bermant Foundation: Color, Light, Motion, and is in charge of the its newly established Innovation in Art & Technology grant program.