Biography

Amy Alexander has worked in film, video, and digital media. She received a BA in Communications: Film/Video from Glassboro State College (now Rowan University), and an MFA in Film/Video with additional work in New Media from California Institute of the Arts. She is currently Associate Professor of Visual Arts: Computing at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to coming to UCSD, she taught at CalArts and USC, as well as working commercially in television, animation, new media, and information technology. With a background in music and IT as well as in visual media, her work encompasses live visual performance, public art, and critique of software and its relationship to contemporary culture and politics.

Alexander’s graduate work focused on historical studies of abstract animation (visual music) and its practice in real-time analog video synthesis and computer graphics. Much of her subsequent work has been in software art, net art, and live audiovisual performance. Her early net projects, such as The Multi-Cultural Recycler (1996) and thebot (2000), made use of computer programming and time-based structures acting upon material from the Internet. As Cue P. Doll she developed the tactical barcode-scanning software CueJack (2001) and co-produced software projects with The Yes Men including Reamweaver (2002). Alexander was also a founding member and developer of the Discordia.us media culture community weblog project, also launched in 2003. Her software projects include Scream (2005), which confronts expectations for desktop software applications with the realities of daily human life, by allowing the user to scream as a means of interacting with the computer.

In recent years, Alexander has focused on the performative and "meatspace" as well as in the humorous possibilities of media and software art and a critical look at the overflow of computer and business cultures into pop culture and leisure. She has created several live audiovisual performance projects integrating these themes, including CyberSpaceLand (text-based VJ performance; 2003-Present.) Alexander is also part of the TOPLAP livecoding audiovisual performance ensemble and online discussion group.

Alexander has been active in the curation of software art and development of software art discourse, with a particular interest in how software influences contemporary culture and vice versa. She is a founding member, developer, and moderator of the online Runme.org software art repository and has been involved with the Read_Me software art festival as a juror and reviewer since its inception. She has written texts for Runme.org and the Read_Me festivals and books, Low-fi.org and others, as well as participating in software art panels at Transmediale/Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and at Ars Electronica in Linz. She has served on the software art juries for the Read_Me and Transmediale festivals. In 2004, she curated the exhibition, "Softside: A selection of projects from Runme.org" at the Sonar festival in Barcelona. She was a co-organizer of the Runme-Dorkbot City Camp / Read_Me festival in Aarhus, and a juror/reviewer for the Read_Me festivals 2002, 2003, and 2005 (Moscow, Helsinki, and Dortmund.)

Alexander’s current work combines her interests in popular visual performance with the cultural implications of software. In collaboration both with other video artists and with computer vision researchers, she has developed SVEN: Surveillance Video Entertainment Network (aka AI to the People), a real-time video performance system that takes a humorous but critical look at artificial intelligence surveillance algorithms by developing techniques that detect when people look like rock stars instead of criminals. In summer of 2005 she began production of SVEN as Artist-in-Residence at the Digital Research Unit of The Media Centre in Huddersfield, England. The project began exhibiting as a van-based street performance project in Spring 2006, exhibiting on the streets of San Diego as well as the Digital Art Weeks festival in Zurich, the Zero/One ISEA 2006 festival in San Jose, and ZEMOS98 in Sevilla, Spain. As an installation, SVEN made its museum debut at the Whitney Museum in New York in Summer 2007.

Alexander has recently co-authored a chapter with Nick Collins on historical and contemporary live audiovisual performance for The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, available from Cambridge University Press in Fall 2007. She continues to do her live visual performances and is developing new work in performance, installation, and computer vision-mediated public art.

Alexander's website, plagiarist.org (1998 - present), includes links to most of her projects as well as housing a number of other older, mostly text based projects on topics including corporate dominance, ownership, digital primacy and digital culture.

Alexander's work has been presented in art venues, public spaces and mainstream settings. Exhibitions include ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Prix Ars Electronica, Sinking Creek Film Festival, Steirischer Herbst, Transmediale, European Media Art Festival, net.congestion, Santa Monica Museum of Art, pARTS Gallery, Read_Me, Next Five Minutes, Sonar, The Tirana Biennale, The New Museum and The Whitney Museum – as well as in nightclubs, on the streets and on the Internet. Her projects have been reviewed in publications including Leonardo, ArtNews, Neural.it, Furtherfield.org, Rhizome, USA Today, The New York Times, Wired, Slashdot, Libération, The Boston Globe, The Independent, as well as various texts on digital media art including the book Internet Art by Rachel Greene. A more complete listing of exhibition venues can be found on her CV