elaine

POSITIONS

Elaine Gan produces site-driven installations, performative interventions, and multimedia narratives as different means of mapping and remixing negotiations of territory, collectivity, and subjectivity. Her art practice has earned grants and fellowships from organizations that include Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, NY Department of Cultural Affairs, and Puffin Foundation. Her projects have been exhibited at art venues including Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Toronto Free in Ontario (Canada), Third Guangzhou Triennial (China), and in New York at Artists Space, Exit Art, Bronx Museum, P. S. 122, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Armory Show.

Gan currently serves on the Artists' Advisory Committee of the New York Foundation for the Arts (Interdisciplinary Arts). She participated in the Whitney Museum - Independent Study Program in 2006-7 and holds a B.A. in Architecture from Wellesley College. She is from New York City and Manila.

PROPOSED RESEARCH at DANM

I am interested in the phenomenon of exploding megacities (populations over 10 million), majority of which are in "developing nations" with segregated infrastructure, post/neocolonial systems of governance, and insufficient or faith-based social services. As neoliberalism activates new networks and mobilities, financial instruments, and digital communication systems that re-engineer parameters of human time and physical space, we are also experiencing the rapid creation and escalation of hierarchies and antagonisms, violent displacements, and massive dispossessions. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe’s questions -- which we/they and what forms of we/they for a democratic politics –- resound.

At DANM, I would like to focus on visualizing relationships between software/computational media, uneven geographical development, and globalized capital. This may take the final form of a game, geographic information system or some still-unknown digital configuration. By locating, describing, mapping, and animating semantic connections and disjunctures, my project goal is ultimately to investigate how software might produce new positions and publics, trigger new narratives, propose new ecologies for rights to "equality in difference" (Etienne Balibar).

PROJECTS

CLASSES

Fall 2009 Notes: DANM201 / DANM210 / DANM219 / HISTCON237

TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIPS

Fall 2009: FDM20C - Kelley

CONTACT

email egan (at) ucsc (dot) edu