Marie Sester
Paradise under Surveillance: Transparency, Visibility, and Network Access
Date 2/2/04
Affiliation Artist, Los Angeles
Abstract
Marie Sester's work questions the societal perspective of the West and the "New World Order". She works with historical, archeological and artistic documents such as large-scale x-rays, architectural ground plans, elevations, sections, city maps, and aerial views. She creates immersive installations using technologies from the entertainment and surveillance industries. Her work proposes connections between individuals and broader forces, spatial scales, and histories.
Sester explores ways that societies implement forms, focusing primarily on ideas of transparency, visibility, and access: "Transparency, a term used in architecture in the 18th century, has recently reappeared in political, economic, and media discourses. Included in its values are those of information and communication, control and surveillance. The goal of transparency is visibility, but paradoxically transparency may serve to remove the visibility of these environments and promote secrecy. Visibility is also linked to the evolution of Western culture in the 20th century, from the Hollywood star industry to the explosion of advertising". Sester's third interest, access, emerges from the fact that a wired culture increasingly demands regulated forms of entry, from bank cards to code numbers, from passwords to plug-ins.
Bio
Marie Sester is a media artist based in New York. Born in France. She began her career as an architect, having earned her master's degree from the Ecole d'Architecture in Strasbourg in 1980. Her interest, shifted from how to build viable structures to how architecture and ideology affect our understanding of the world. Marie has received many grants and residencies, most recently from the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS), in Gifu, Japan; Creative Capital Foundation, New York; and Eyebeam, New York. Sester has taught in France, Japan, and the United States and has exhibited internationally. Her installations have been recently shown at SIGGRAPH 2003 and Ars Electronica 2003, where her project ACCESS received an Honorary Mention in Interactive Art. She currently has a one-person show at the Kitchen, New York.
-- As of 2/2/04
Updated Bio
Marie Sester is a media artist currently based in Los Angeles. Born in France, she began her career as an architect, having earned her master’s degree from the Ecole d’Architecture in Strasbourg. Her interest, however, shifted from how to build structures to how place, cultural values, and political ideas are intertwined and affect our understanding of the world. Her work particularly questions the societal perspective of the West.
Her installation work has exhibited internationally, including in the Kwangju Biennale, Korea (1997); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (1998); New Langton Arts, San Francisco, USA (1999); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, USA (2000); San Jose Museum of Art, USA (2001); Siggraph, San Diego, USA (2003); Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (2003); The Kitchen, New York, USA (2004); Villette Numérique, Paris, France (2004); the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2005), Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2006).
Her 2002 installation ACCESS received an Honorary Mention in Interactive Art from Ars Electronica (2003), received the Webby Award for Net Art (2004), and was listed in the "50 Coolest Websites" in the Time Magazine Online Edition (2004).
She has recently had residencies at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) (2002), Japan; Eyebeam, New York (2003); and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) (2005); and has received grants including from the Creative Capital Foundation, New York (2002); New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA) (2003), LEF Foundation (2004), and Franklin Furnace Fund (2004).
http://www.sester.net
http://www.ACCESSproject.net/
-- As of 1/10/07