Jessica Renfro

Artistic Researcher and Digital Participatory Artist
Germany (residence), Netherlands, United States (citizenship)
research interests: Participation, socially engaged art, new media art, practice-based research, digitality
en

I create immersive participatory experiences using original music, narration, visual images and digital interactive techniques. The simulations I build are playful, brightly colored, and surreal; often evoking the aesthetics of early 90’s video games. The ‘win-state’ is designed to be a sense of collective accomplishment, embellished by the awkwardness, difficulty, and sometimes even silliness of achieving this. 

 

My work is motivated by the need to collaborate across cultural divides and disciplines in the pursuit of climate protections/solutions. I work collaboratively with programmers, using values-based design and iterative game design models to create conditions like creativity, access, cooperation, and resilience in collective tasks. 


I hold a Master of Music and Graduate Performance Diploma in Opera Performance from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2021, I also received an M.A. in Performance Practices from ArtEZ University in The Netherlands. My research into participatory art has been published or presented in the APRIA journal (2020), the Politics of the Machines conference (2021), and the 13th SAR International Conference on Artistic Research  (2022), and the Connective Symposium at Fontys University in the Netherlands (upcoming 2022)


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