Edward A. Shanken

Edward A. Shanken is an art historian of 20th and 21st century experimental new media art. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been translated into six languages.

Background

Edward A. Shanken began his activities as an art historian of experimental digital art and computer art theory by obtaining a MA (1999) and Ph.D. (2001) in Art History from Duke University after obtaining a MBA from Yale University in 1990. He was the Executive Director of the Information Science Information Studies program (ISIS) at Duke University from 2001 to 2004. He was Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Savannah College of Art and Design from 2004 to 2007 and was Senior Researcher at the UCLA Art | Science Center and Visiting Scholar at the California NanoSystems Institute from 2007 to 2008. He is currently Assistant Professor of New Media in the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.

Shanken has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Council of Learned Societies. He was formerly chair of the Leonardo Education Forum and a member of the College Art Association Education Committee and has served as an advisor to the Media Art Histories conference, ISEA, the journal Technoetic Arts, and the Leonardo Pioneers and Pathbreakers project. He has conducted extensive research on the theorist and art critic Jack Burnham and into cybernetics as applied to systems art in the 1960s. [Charlie Gere, "Art, Time and Technology: Histories of the Disappearing Body" (2005) Berg, p. 137]

Research Activity

Since 2007 Dr. Shanken has been a member of the faculty of the MediaArtHistories graduate program at Donau University in Krems where he researches current and past experimental art with a focus on the entwinement of art, science, and technology. Shanken’s current research examines art-science collaboration. Following this concern he served as editor of "Artists in Industry and the Academy: Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations", a special series of essays in the Leonardo Journal (38:4 and 38:5) in 2005.

Reference Bibliography

Dr. Shanken is the author of "Art and Electronic Media" forthcoming from Phaidon Press and is the editor of "Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness", the collected writings of Roy Ascott, that was published by the University of California Press in 2003. His essay, "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art" received honorable mention in the Leonardo Award for Excellence in 2004.

Footnotes

External links

* [http://artexetra.com official site of Edward A. Shanken]