MY BIOGRAPHY

I graduated from Kenyon College with a BA in Studio Art in 1994. I then went on to earn an MFA from Ohio University in 1998 with concentrations in sculpture, philosophy, and book arts. In my second MFA, conferred by the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2002, I focused on interactive media while studying in the new Print/Media program. From 2002-2005 I served as Assistant Professor of Art and Design at Drake University, where I developed a new interactive and time-based media curriculum, and initiated cross-departmental relationships between visual and narrative arts. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Communications and Information Design at SUNYIT, where I am redeveloping the design curriculum with a progressive and experimental new media emphasis.

Over the past several years my practice has focused on political activity, participating in the tradition of self-authored design that has been integral to the history of twentieth-century public discourse. Removing my work from the cloistered space of the gallery and moving it to the unfiltered public arena of the web has allowed me to disseminate my work more broadly, while allowing the audience to freely engage with, participate in, and redistribute the work. Transitioning to the web has also enabled me focus on interactive work, utilizing the iterative processes of dynamic engagements to deliver complex and shifting messages.

My most recent work has centered on an examination of ways in which material processes and interactivity can affect and enhance narrative – specifically first person narratives. I am interested in how the narrator’s voice can be complicated through digital and physical interactions to convey a layered understanding of personal, social and political issues. In much of this work I look to utilize the genre of autobiography as a means of social criticism, using the distance of memory as an analog to the critical distance required for cultural analysis.

I am also actively working in traditional scholarly realms. Most recently I chaired a panel at the Popular Cultural Association’s annual conference titled Memory and Representation: Film and Memory in which I presented a paper titled Scribbled Notes or a Body of Writing: Memory and Writing in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento.” This paper is part of a larger body of research I have undertaken into the relationships between memory, retelling, and narrative as related to both my studio and scholarly practices.

Signed:

Thomas Knauer