Born in Canada, Michelle Teran is a visual artist working with media and performance. She explores the interaction between media and social networks in urban environments, creating site-specific performance and urban interventions that explore the relations which occur between the self-production of media and city. Her interests are the spatial and social constructions of the relationship between private and public, the ‘visual economy’ of images, performing through media and the politics of observation and of the encounter. She is the winner of the Transmediale Award, the Turku2011 Digital Media & Art Grand Prix Award and has received numerous other grants and accolades for her work including the Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention (2005, 2010) and the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition (Madrid). She lives and works between Bergen and Berlin.
Research
Michelle Teran is currently research fellow at the National Academy of Art in Bergen (KHIB) where she is carrying out post-graduate studies within the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme, from 2010-2013. In her research project “Future Guides for Cities” she proposes alternative ways to navigate through urban space. She investigates the relationship between online video archives and city and examines the notion of guide, as a person, map or a method. By exploiting the locative data which accompanies each video when it is put online, she uses locations and authors of various YouTube videos produced in cities to explore methods for creating multi-threaded narratives that demonstrate possible links between each inhabitant’s stories and paths through the city and with the world wide web.
Artistic Projects
A selection of her artistic works can be found on a separate artistic projects page.
Some notable works include:
The City is Creative
Buscando al Sr. Goodbar
Life: A User’s Manual
Friluftskino: Experiments in Open Air Surveillance Cinema
Upcoming
Presentations on the Sniff, Snoop, Crawl and Surveillant Spaces: From Autonomous Surveillance to Machine Voyeurism panels at ISEA 2011, September 14-22, Istanbul
Developing and presenting new site-specific performance for the Urban Festival in Zagreb, Croatia, October 6-12, 2011
Tracing Mobility exhibition, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, November 25 – December 12, 2011, Berlin. Exhibiting artists: Frank Abbott, Aram Bartholl, Heath Bunting, Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller, Michelle Teran, Simin Faithfull, Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser, Plan B, Esther Polak, and others.
Taipei Digital Art Festival 2011, November 11-20, 2011, Taipei. Participating artists include Blast Theory, Michelle Teran, The Sine Wave Orchestra, Oliver Hangl, Kuwakubo Ryota, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno.