Katerie Gladdys is an assistant professor in digital media at the University of Florida at Gainesville who exhibits video installations and networked art in North America and Europe. Her work transforms mapped landscapes and familiar interactions into alternative geographies that transform how we experience a known place, space, and dynamic--encouraging others to look more closely at what constitutes their everyday existence. Recent projects have explored the levels of linguistic understanding of the landscape of a volcanic crater in Ecuador, the means of production and the mythology surrounding orange juice as metaphor for Florida tourism, kayaking in agricultural drainage ditches as an alternative to a highway commute, and mapping a month of local travel based upon narratives collected while foraging for apples on public land. With a background in sculpture at the University of Chicago and linguistics/ESL/multimedia from Southern Illinois University, she completed her graduate studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2005.

Conférence

Augmented Spirit: Extreme Embodiment

Vent user Deshae Lott’s life demonstrates the complications and triumphs emergent in using technology to sustain life and invites others to locate embodiment and commonality amidst the biomechanical and deviant. The machines necessary to sustain her life (ventilator, suction canister, oxygen concentrator, wheelchair, chest vest, in-exsuffulator, nebulizer) whoosh, whirl, alarm, drone, buzz, blink, vibrate, and tone around her, creating interfaces of tubes and devices whose intrusiveness, cumbersomeness, and cacophony seem antithetical to personal freedom. The frail body and engineering feats to sustain it demand unrelenting attention, yet the very presence of an individual life connected to the interfaces fosters a creative process whereby the patient and caregivers cooperate with the interfaces without being dictated to or dominated by them. Interdependency with machines, people, and systems add texture to the song while Deshae’s voice carries the melody and, faint though it is, vibrantly arises amidst and because of the interfaces. Through the use of digital images, projected images, sound, and video, we will create a multilayered sculptural installation mapping how daily real time fluctuations in data measuring physical health, time navigating the healthcare system, and medical costs as well as therapies restrict or fortify the volume of Deshae’s voice. This project demonstrates how the human consciousness, sustained by medical interfaces, emerges to create meaningful connections with others and the environment. Viewers of the piece will be led, as persons are in Deshae’s presence, to see in the foreground the life itself rather than the unfamiliar and imposing infrastructure sustaining her life.