about

Alicia Champlin is an american intermedial artist and researcher based in Barcelona. Her interactive performance “I Am Sitting…” has been staged at Black Mountain College {RE:Happening} in NC; Without Borders Festival in ME; in Barcelona, Spain; and in Bergen, Norway. Champlin holds an MFA in Intermedia from the University of Maine. She works primarily with generative systems and sound, using installation and performance to explore aspects of agency and embodiment. Recent exhibitions include the collaborative ‘Algorithms That Matter’ in Graz, Austria, in February, 2019.

In addition to performance and installation works, she also presents her research and custom interfaces in hands-on workshops and demonstrations of open-source technologies.

Drawing upon an academic background in Critical Methodologies and Japanese/Buddhist Art History, and a professional history in data processing and web technologies, Champlin joined the University of Maine’s Intermedia MFA program in 2015. Much of Champlin’s creative research prior to 2015 centered around pilgrimage, travel, and landscape as ways to communicate identity and make sense of our social environments. Aiming to be more than a tourist, she has visited sacred and secular destinations, followed pilgrimage routes, and taken on the role of pilgrim, seeker, and pathfinder. Many images here document those journeys, and attempt to capture the experiential aspects of locations and icons along the way. A number of the writing samples included speak to the phenomenological aspects of place and movement.

Since then, Champlin’s research & creative practices have come to focus on feedback-driven, generative systems in pursuit of the phenomenological intersection of networked communication and identity. Drawing influence from the provocations of Alvin Lucier, Nam June Paik, Marina Abramovic, and mentor N.B. Aldrich, her work aims to explore cybernetic and post-structuralist issues of communication, such as agency, embodiment and perception, with process-based, interactive methodologies. Champlin completed her MFA in 2018 with a thesis based on these aims, Rediscovering the Interpersonal: Models of Networked Communications in New Media Performance. (University of Maine Digitial Commons)

Currently, Champlin is working with environmental and biometric data as an interventionary control mechanism in live video and audio feedback loops, and using sensors to create meaningful interactions with embodied environments. She is also an active member of the local live-coding collective, TOPLAP Barcelona, performing frequently in concerts and working on an album release.

Please follow the newsfeed for project developments, news, and events. For booking, workshops, and creative consulting, please email alicia (at) cartographile.com or send a message on facebook.