bio / mini artist statement

I am a sound and new media artist and a researcher with an MFA in Intermedia Arts and PhD in the field of Media Studies and emerging technology. My artistic and academic work is concerned with the political ramification and potentials of emerging digital technologies; specifically their capacity to facilitate or repress solidarity, and to recondition creativity and labor practices. My work is often sited in or engaged with public or non-commercial spaces, and includes sculptures, interventions, sound installations, weird self-destructing circuits, videos, and compositions. Many of my pieces are site-specific, participatory, and/or interactive, and deal with the relationships among the body, (the) media, and intimate psychological and communal social dynamics revealed by contemporary technics of control, or, alternately, liberation. Recent projects deconstruct, mis-use, or hack mainstream technologies (AI, emotion recognition software) to reveal the limits of these tools and reify what is essentially human and beyond digital capture or quantification. Other work specifically focuses on sound and listening practices as sites of solidarity and collaboration (audio recordings of water from different sites of migration, for example). Ultimately, all my work uses the artistic object as a catalyst for social relations.

My work has been performed, installed and exhibited internationally at art galleries, museums, concert halls, public parks, city streets, tiny closets, boats, the New York City subways, and the internet. Venues include Cité international des arts (Paris), Kunstraum Niederösterreich (Vienna), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), Socrates Sculpture Park, White Box, The Kitchen, LMAKProjects, Roulette (all NYC), and many outdoor locations. My work has received awards from NYSCA, the LMCC, and Meet the Composer, among others. My scholarly research studies the values and politics built-into affective listening software/AI. I am also currently working on a book about how leftist social movements design their own digital communication tools. My research has been published in English and French in international journals and edited volumes, such as Sociologica, the International Journal of Communications, and Transpositions: musique et sciences sociales. I am an Assistant Professor/Enseignante-Chercheuse at The American University of Paris. www.jessicafeldman.org

Appointments and education (partial list):

Assistant Professor, Global Communications, American University of Paris, 2018 onward

Postdoctoral Researcher, Digital Civil Society Lab, Stanford University 2017-2018

Instructor, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University, 2011-2015

Part Time Faculty, Graduate Media Studies, The New School, 2011-2013

Adjunct Professor, Tyler School of the Arts, Temple University, 2009-2011

PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU, 2017

MFA in Intermedia Art, Bard, 2007

MA in Experimental Music, Wesleyan, 2005

BA in Music, Columbia, 2001

[please contact me for more info, including updated CVs]