糖心Vlog

Jen Southern is the Discipline Lead for Fine Art, she is an artist, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and New Media, and co-Director at the Centre for Mobilities Research. Her work is a hybrid of art practice and mobilities research and has been exhibited internationally for over 30 years. With an ethos of shared authorship she collaborates with artists, technologists and members of the public to produce live installations that combine material and digital experience. Her recent practice is focussed on generative encounters between more-than-human systems that grow: from grass seeds, to gardeners, to machine learning.

I am programme lead for BA Fine Art and Director of the . My research examines the temporal conditions of painting and the potential for repetitive strategies in re-thinking these conditions in ways that move beyond those ascribed to painting by convention. Starting from the premise that repetition is an engine of difference, I am also interested in the ways that an encounter with repeating images, specifically painting, temporalises the space of their encounter. In order to test the temporal conditions of the static image and the temporalisation of space, I explore the role of parallax motion in relation to paintings exhibited in series within labyrinthine installation spaces.

I am an artist with a specialism in contemporary drawing. I make works with paper that test the limits of visibility and material existence. This practice reflects a fascination with the unseen, untouchable and unspoken, particularly where drawing explores this in relation to the practice of other research disciplines. I am particularly interested in how art and science work together. For example, I use drawing on site in collaboration with other professions to explore what it means to see, touch and feel experiences on the edge of our grasp. Over the past decade I have worked with medics, physicists and conservators to see what my drawing shares with these professions that negotiate the unseen. A recurrent subject has been clothing and I am well known for my work with historic dress collections as exemplified in exhibitions at Kensington Palace (2013), The Bowes Museum (2015) and Brantwood, John Ruskin House and Museum (2019), and with Ryerson Fasion Research Collection in Toronto (2019). The work I make is typically immaterial and invisible building on current thinking about materiality and taking approaches from sculpture into drawing. Most recently my interest in immateriality, invisibility and preservation has shifted toward environmental concerns, and I am currently working on artworks about the precarity of glacial archaeology.

I am particularly interested in with working with students who share my interest in using methods from drawing – in its most conventional to its most expanded forms – to explore themes of preservation, (im)materiality, (in)visibility through collaborative or empirical on site working, be it with museum collections or on location in the environment.

I am Professor of Media Theory and History. I currently teach on a range of topics, including new media art, art and technology, continental philosophy and technology. My main research interest is in the cultural effects and meanings of technology and media, particularly in relation to art and philosophy. My publications include the monographs Digital Culture (2002, 2^nd edition 2008), Art, Time and Technology (2006), Community without Community in Digital Culture (2011), Unnatural Theology: Religion, Art and Media after the Death of God (2019), I Hate the Lake District (2020) and World’s End (forthcoming, 2022), co-edited volumes White Heat Cold Logic (2008), and Art Practice in a Digital Culture (2010), as well as many book chapters and journal articles. I am currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Footnotes for a Ghost Book.