Home > News > VICTORIA VESNA APPOINTED CHAIR OF UCLA'S DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN

VICTORIA VESNA APPOINTED CHAIR OF UCLA'S DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN

Carolyn Campbell (ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu) (310) 825-6540
For Immediate Use Thursday, June 17, 1999.

Victoria Vesna has been named chair of the Department of Design in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. Her appointment, effective July 1, was announced by Daniel Neuman, dean of the school. She succeeds Professor Rebecca Allen, who will remain on the design faculty.

“Victoria Vesna is highly regarded as a scholar and an artist,” said Neuman. “I look forward to her leadership in furthering the research and leading edge work of our uniquely challenging design programs.”

Vesna comes to UCLA from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) where she is a professor of art. Her work has moved from performance and video installations to experimental research that connects networked environments to physical public spaces. She explores how physical and ephemeral spaces affect collective behavior.

An artist exploring new technologies, her most recent collaborative work, “Bodies INCorporated,” was installed as a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute and the ArtHouse in Dublin. Other versions and related exhibits appeared the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles and at the Machida Museum of Graphics in Japan.

Vesna leads an initiative called “Online Public Spaces: Multidisciplinary Explorations of Multiuser Environments” (OPS:MEME). This collaborative research project involves computer scientists and professors from the English, history and art departments at UCSB and UC Irvine. It examines two critical aspects of knowledge acquisition as they relate to digital distribution – the importance of context in shaping knowledge transfer and the role of social communication and collaboration in altering and enhancing knowledge production and assimilation. The project is focused on developing an online mobile agent, the Information Personae (IP). Vesna plans to demonstrate the potential of this distributed entity in her next work, “Data Mining People.”

She is the North American editor of Artificial Intelligence & Society and is working on a special issue, “'Database Aesthetics: Issues of Organization and Category in Art,” submitted in May, 1999. In 1997, she completed production on a CD-ROM called “Life in the Universe with Stephen Hawking” (a UCSB/MetaTools co-production). She has just finished production on a book/CD-ROM for Terminals, which deals with the cultural production of death.

Vesna's work has received notice in such prominent publications as Art in America, Artweek, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, as well as Der Spiegel (Germany), The Irish Times (Ireland), Tema Celeste (Italy) and Veredas (Brazil).

She has received numerous grants and sponsorships from various industries and educational foundations including Wavefront/Alias, MetaCreations, GTE Outreach, the UCSB Office of Research and the Getty and Intercampus Arts. Last year she became the director of the board of the David Bermant Foundation: Color, Light, Motion, and is in charge of its newly established Innovation in Art & Technology grant program.

Vesna is an artist fellow in an online Ph.D. program at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Interactive Arts (CAiiA) at the University of Wales. Her thesis, “Networked Triadic Spaces: Buckminster Fuller and the Construction of the Information Personae,” is due out in September.


Contact: Carolyn Campbell
Phone: (310) 825-6540
Email: ccampbel@arts.ucla.edu