Transnationally made and Bay Area born, Elizabeth Travelslight is a writer, experimental philosopher, and artist, orchestrating beautiful collisions between digital and material media, refining the explorations of her philosophy through conceptual art, curious objects, conversations, and installations that demonstrate intersections of folk art and craft with contemporary technology as a way of interrogating notions of the “new.”
Her efforts are part of a continuing exploration of diaspora, materialism, mathematics, space, and possibility that draws primarily upon family, history, literature, and the speculative fictions of an intensely private language becoming communicable. Her pieces and accumulations cannot help but respond to and emerge from feminist discourses of race, class, gender, and nation. They are digital releases, paper ephemera and bottled messages tossed into electrical currents. Meant to be found rather than shown– they no longer belong to her for she is undone by them. They are frenetic, symbolic emissions, codes amidst codes, intended to interest and interpolate those already willing and able to receive and return them.
She is a first year graduate student with the Digital Arts/New Media M.F.A program at the University of California Santa Cruz where in addition to building her art practice and media arsenal, she enjoys working with undergraduate students and believes that teaching is a fundamental part of her own learning.
In August 2008, she submitted her thesis, A Science of Spaces: Art, Empire, and Being in the Nth Dimension, towards an M.A. in Communication with an emphasis in poetry and contemporary philosophy through the Media & Communications Division of the European Graduate School, Saas Fee, Switzerland. This work examines a selection of maps as an investigation into ontology, contemporary capitalism, wilderness and creative possibility.
She is currently on leave from the venerable Rainbow Grocery Cooperative in San Francisco, where, in addition to receiving, cashiering, and grocery stocking, Elizabeth served two elected terms on the Board of Directors and four years as a founding member of the Anti-Oppression Workgroup. Her activities also included community health; policy governance; and developing cooperative democracies and worker-collective networks.
In 1999, she earned a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of California at Santa Cruz where her interests involved women’s studies, complex dynamical systems, and histories of science.
Elizabeth’s current work in progress is a physical/digital double installation thematically exploring archives as technologies of memory. Anarchive is a continuation and elaboration upon the intertwining of “text” and “textile” within art, craft, storytelling, and knowledge making. Anarchive attempts to take her previous text/ile inquiries toward a reconceptualization of the archive as a site of only momentary meaning and mere traces– fleeting concrescences and dissolutions that serve the present as a quietly passing presence that willingly yields to re-imagined futures to come. She is interested in exploring the inherent tensions and libratory potentials between remembering and forgetting, knowing and not knowing, holding and letting go for the sake of re-forging new paradigms of relationship. The act of weaving provides a continuous and patient meditation upon craft, labor, community, memory, and commodification.
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