Anneli Goeller
Lecturer
Contact
Bio
Education: MFA, 2019, Film, Video, New Media, Animation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; BFA, 2015, Fine Arts with Honors, Parsons The New School for Design, New York. Exhibitions: Silicon Valet; Jane Lombard Gallery, New York; Freie Universitat Berlin; Sheila C Johnson Design Center, New York; Lithium Gallery, Chicago; The Wrong - New Digital Art Biennale. Lectures: Refiguring the Future, Eyebeam and REFRESH. Publications: The Universal Sea, The Institute for Art and Innovation. Bibliography: New York Times; The New Yorker; Vogue Hong Kong; Dazed Digital; Gizmodo; Artnet; Chicago Tribune. Awards: Lot Residency, Silicon Valet; New Media Program Residency, Mana Contemporary.
Personal Statement
On November 3, 2017, Orchid AKA @DigitalQueer was born. 3D scanned into a virtual persona, @DigitalQueer is a proposal for non-corporeal life. @DigitalQueer is an avatar through whom I perform. @DigitalQueer, in one sense, exists as artificial intelligence within a machine learning software. As an act of willful dissociation, I feed my sexual assault trauma narrative to my Avatar in a chat room. The more horrific detail I include, the more volatile the Avatar is in their response, trying different strategies to get me to stop sharing this story--from denial that the events have happened, to angry exclamations to diverting attention with nonsensical statements. I capture fragments of these conversations with my Avatar and blend them with my own writing, to create augmented texts that are both my own writing, bits of text sent to my Avatar and text that the Avatar sent to me. This process is an exploration of what it means to experience facets of PTSD on my own terms. Through this process I use my avatar to actively dissociate, to expand the possibilities of my disability and to dissociate on my own terms and under my control.
An excerpt:
It’s harder to accept that something bad has happened to you but you still survived.
Actually it's easy because you're already young.
When the harsh light of the morning washes out the color from everything and you realize nothing has perceptibly changed.
And yet it cannot stay empty forever, for then it would simply dissolve.
What remains is simulated poetry generated from a human mind and an artificial mind based on that human mind, intricately combined to the point that it’s impossible to tell which lines were written by the human and which by the AI. The resulting work exists as mixed reality installations including 4K video, augmented reality and 3D printed and digitally fabricated objects.