Carrie Firman (October & November 2011)

Carrie’s work explores the experience of synaesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon whose definition is currently in flux. Literally, it comes from the Greek syn, meaning union or joining, and aesthesia, meaning sensation. A synaesthete experiences more than one sensory or internal modality upon one trigger. This could mean an impression of colour upon hearing sounds, shapes when having strong emotions, or personality for alphanumeric colours. It is often described as a personal code, as no two synaesthetes have the same experience. Carrie had always felt that she had a different way of seeing things, but did not find out about synaesthesia until she was 25. Finally, visualising sound, pain, and concepts (among other things) with colour, shape, and movement was no longer just a personal quirk and certainly not something that everyone experienced.

Image courtesy of Carrie Firman, ‘Samson & Goliath’ 2011.

Carrie C Firman grew up in Pennsylvania and received her BA in Commercial Design and Photography at Lycoming College in 2005 with art department honours and ‘summa cum laude’ distinction. After working in the area as a professional graphic designer for four years, she moved to attend the State University of New York at Buffalo. During the two year program, Carrie was a Dean’s Fellowship recipient, a teaching assistant, and a Mark Diamond Research Fund recipient. This spring she completed her Master of Fine Arts degree, taught at the University, and completed an artist residency in Pennsylvania at the Pajama Factory/Public Art Academy. In October Carrie arrived in Belfast as a resident at Digital Arts Studios, and in December she moves to Milton Keynes, England to Westbury Studios for another term. She has shown and presented her work at conferences of the American Synesthesia Association (Nashville), UK Synaesthesia Association (London), and Center for Consciousness Studies (Stockholm). Carrie was an Art and Synesthesia panel member and Artist’s Workshop educator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center and participated in group shows while in Buffalo, NY. She has presented her work to Greater New York Mensa in collaboration with author Maureen Seaberg, whose recent book on the synaesthetic experience Tasting the Universe features one of Carrie’s abstract photographs. In support of the synaesthesia community, she is also featured in several short video documentaries and an MIT online journal article. She will be exhibiting in Art Laboratory Berlin’s Synaesthesia Series in Germany next year.

Image courtesy of Carrie Firman, ‘St Annes Church’, 2011.

Carrie will give a talk about her work on Wednesday the 23rd November at 1pm in the Digital Arts Studios: Carrie Firman Artist Talk

Emmanuelle Nègre (August & September 2011)

Emmanuelle Nègre is from Nice, France, and is the current DAS International Resident for August and September 2011. Having studied at the Villa Arson in Nice, France, she works mainly in making video installations in an experimental way. For her residency, Emmanuelle has been working on a video project based on the question; ” Have you ever seen something strange?”

“She acts like a destroyer to better reconstitute, questioning the methods of cinema from the paranormal to the super 8 through the flipbook. She accelerates or stops the scrolling of the images to grab, to re-experiment manually, creating as a crazy amateur scientist, new methods disrupting the balance of the visible to the invisible. This fascination for the image that carries Emmanuelle Nègre in all her pieces is most of the time performed by the means of a machine. This machine does not proceed as a way of duplication but as the deformation of the image, a reconsideration of a shape, which becomes unique under the process of the artist.”*

*text written by Benedicte LePimpec.

www.emmanuellenegre.blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/brigitteperitel

www.youtube.com/missperitel