George Legrady

George Legrady (born in 1950, Budapest) is a multidisciplinary, interactive media artist. He began his photographic artistic practice in Montreal, his first major project in 1973 was a photo documentary in northern Quebec of 4 James Bay Cree communities in response to the James Bay Cree hydroelectric conflict. Following graduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute in the mid 1970’s, his artistic work resulted in numerous projects that focused on a semiotic analysis of the photographic image. In 1985, he produced a photo documentary on the visual syntax of public billboards in 4 major Chinese cities.

Legrady began to explore the potential of digital technologies in the early 1980’s in the studio of Harold Cohen at UCSD. His contribution to the digital media field since the early stages of its formation into a discipline in the early 1990’s has been in intersecting cultural content with data processing as a means of creating aesthetic and socio-cultural narrative experiences. The [http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=510 digital catalog] of his solo museum exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, and the Canadian Museum of Photography in 1997, tracing the transition from photography to interactive media installations in his artworks, is now featured online at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Arts, Science & Technology.

His most significant interactive digital media arts projects include the [http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/anecdote/Anecdote.html “Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War”] (1993), [http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/slippery/Slippery.html “Slippery Traces”] (1995) published by the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, the internationally traveling [http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/pfom2/pfom2.html “Pockets Full of Memories”] (2001-2006) commissioned by the Centre Pompidou. His data visualization project [http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/spl/spl.html "Making Visible the Invisible"] for the Seattle Central Library will be operational until 2014 and was featured in the [http://www.whitney.org/arport/gatepages/november05.shtml Whitney Museum Artport] in 2005.

He is Director of the Experimental Visualization Lab in the [http://www.mat.ucsb.edu Media Arts & Technology Program] doctoral program at UC Santa Barbara. He has previously taught at the University of Western Ontario, California Institute of the arts, University of Southern California, San Francisco State University, and the Merz Akademie of Visual Communication.

External links

* [http://www.georgelegrady.com George Legrady Studio]
* [http://www.mat.ucsb.edu Media Arts & Technology Program]
* [http://www.fondation-langlois.org/legrady/ George Legrady: From Analogue to Digital, Langlois Foundation site]
* [http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2005/2/Legrady/index.htm The Art of Mapping Statistics Interview by Roberto Simanowski, Dichtung Digital, journal für digitale ästhetik]

References

* Paul, Christiane (2007). "Digital Art", London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0500203679.
* Vesna, Victoria (2007). "Database Aesthetics Art in the Age of Information Overflow", Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press & Hudson. ISBN 0-8166-4119-6.
* Wands, Bruce (2006). "Art of the Digital Age", London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-23817-0.