Rachel Falconer

Rachel Falconer is a digital art curator, researcher, writer and educator operating at the critical intersections of contemporary art practice, feminist technoscience, emergent technologies, civic data infrastructures and networked culture.

She is Head of Digital Arts Computing BSc and a Lecturer in the Department of Computing. Drawing on her sustained interest in networked art practice and alternative curatorial strategies to inform her systems-based practice, Rachel has conceived and delivered multi-scale interdisciplinary public programming, alternative exhibition models and innovative public research platforms spanning a diversity of critical modes of engagement with technology. She has curated and conceived exhibitions and artist residencies which engage with radical logics and politics of distributed audiences and exhibition modelling, and is dedicated to the critical investigation of the complex relationship between network apparatus and the materiality of technological/social behaviours.

She is regularly invited to speak at public events and has participated in public programmes at institutions including; Tate, Barbican, ICA,V&A , The Photographers Gallery, FACT, Royal College of Art, The Lumen Prize, Rhizome, Arebyte Gallery, London Design Festival, The Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), FABRIKKEN (Copenhagen), EVA London and Furtherfield. Her research and writing has been published across a wide range of platforms including; the Guardian, Frieze, the British Journal of Photography, and The White Review. She is a contributing author to academic publications, most recently her chapter on distributed digital knowledge production was included in Radical Cut-Up, Nothing is Original, Edited by Lucas Feireiss and published by Sternberg Press, 2019.

Education

• MA Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art
• BA Industrial Design and Multimedia Communications UCL / Il Politecnico di Milano

Publications

• Sternberg Press, Cognitive Remix,( Re-editing the Polymath) in Nothing is Original - Radical Cut-Up, ed. Lukas Feireiss, 2020
• Frieze, The New Breed of Artist Exploring Society’s Digital Consciousness, reviewing a 20 artist show at MAXXI Gallery, Rome, 2018
• British Journal of Photography, In Game Photography, 2018
• The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, Routledge New York, The New Polymath – distributed knowledge production and innovation in the digital age – book chapter, 2016
• The Guardian, Rebooting the Relationship between Art and Tech, 2016
• The White Review, Pyramid Schemes, A Collective Cityscape, Lawrence Lek, 2013
• Dazed Digital, Is Everything Really A Remix?, 2013

Research Interests

• Networked / Alternative Curatorial Strategies for Digital Arts Practice
• Feminist Technoscience
• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
• Critical / Creative Applications of AI and Machine Learning
• Mixed Reality technologies and “Worlding”
• Embodiment and alternative coding practices
• Decentralized networked dynamics and counter-surveillance; including The Fediverse

Areas of supervision

• MA/MFA Computational Arts
• BSc Digital Arts Computing
• Primary PhD Supervisor for Yajuan Han