Alexa Wright

I am a visual artist working with photography and interactive digital media. I am interested in using new technologies to investigate the expression of human identity and to interrogate the conventional boundaries between art, science and technology. All my work is research based and often involves collaborations with scientists or with people such as those with disabilities, or specific medical conditions. I work with technology, but am always interested in rendering the technology I use invisible. Another theme that runs through most of my recent work is the interrogation of definitions of reality. The installations explore the idea and experience of a transparent interface between the real and the virtual and are increasingly aimed towards creating a seamless convergence between the two. In the photographic works the digital intervention is (or should be) undetectable, whilst giving the images an uncanny sense of (hyper) reality. I am interested in forcing the viewer or user into an active role, where he or she somehow becomes the subject of the work.

I have worked collaboratively with numerous medical scientists, most consistently with Alf Linney, Professor of Medical Physics at University College London. Alter Ego (2005), made in collaboration with Alf Linney, is a virtual mirror in which individual users interact with their own automatically created avatar. Alter Ego has been shown both nationally and internationally, most recently in FILE ‘07, SESI Art Gallery, Sao Paolo, Brazil and ‘El cuerpo (con)sentido’, Centro the Historia , Zaragoza, Spain (2008). Our latest project, Conversation Piece, is an intelligent room that can converse with its occupants. In this real-time, live work audience and machines act as both performers and observers. Conversation Piece was shown at the ACM Multimedia Conference Interactive Arts Program, Augsburg, Germany in 2007 and at Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast as part of ISEA 09. Other recent works include Opera Interna (2005) a series of digitally manipulated portraits of opera singers that explore the performative nature of human expression; and Cover Story (2006), a video installation that investigates the functions of the human face, commissioned for UK Science Week (Norwich), 2006 and exhibited in Visions in The Nunnery, Bow (2008).

I teach at the University of Westminster in London. In 2009 I completed a doctoral thesis entitled 'Out of Order, an Investigation into the Visual Significance of Human Monstrosity'.