My next interview was with Renee Turner, a member of De Geuzen, for whom I gave a talk last January. De Geuzen is a group of 3 women conducting what they term “multi-visual” research, and most of it involves computers and digital media in some way.
Renee describes herself as a perpetual student and this is pretty clear looking at her educational history: BA University of Dallas, [1984-1989]; MFA University of Arizona, [1990-1992] and MAs from Rijksakademie, Department of Photographic Media, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [1993-1994], and the Jan van Eyck , Laureate: Theory, [1995-1996]. Now she’s finishing an MFA in writing from a UK school and is considering going on for PhD in New Media or something like that. But this seems in a certain way another point in common among the people I’ve interviewed, especially the women–they are always pushing into new areas, learning new things. That’s not to say this is reserved for women, or new media scholars/artists, but more people have explicitly mentioned that as a motive. I suppose maybe it’s no surprise that people studying new media (and as a foreshadowing, I have trouble even writing that phrase now that I’ve officially interviewed Florian) are more interested in continually having to learn something new.
Anyway, Renee started really with photography, but soon got in to digital images. She said that for her, new media seemed to allow more freedom from disciplinary constraints, but also that it allows her to much more easily combine and remix media (the advantage of digitality, of course).
She summed up her overall view as this: “I want to be rigorous, but I’m not into being disciplined at all.”
more on Renee’s work soon…