josephine starrs
I am an arts practitioner, researching, creating and exhibiting video, photomedia and new media projects for national and international audiences. I am currently honorary senior lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University.
Over the past two decades I have collaborated on several projects with artist Leon Cmielewski, including Incompatible Elements, Waterways, and Seeker. Our current ongoing project is and the earth sighed, a media art installation that responds to the effects of climate change on our planet.
In 2005 I was awarded an Asialink grant to undertake an artist residency at Sarai, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, in Delhi, India. One outcome of the residency, Seeker is a media art installation exploring global human migration, with the capacity to evolve and expand over time through viewer participation.
My Research Masters degree in Visual Arts awarded in 2000, focused on the practice of Tactical Media, the critical use of rapid advancements in communications technologies for non-commercial goals, and this forms the basis for my ongoing investigation into the relationship between new technologies and social empowerment.
I’m also cofounder of the influential artist group, VNS Matrix, whose impetus throughout the 1990’s was to investigate and decipher the narratives of domination and control which surround technological culture and explore the construction of identity in social networked spaces. These themes are carried through in my 2004 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, to investigate digital games and gender within the cultures and economies of interactive entertainment.