Jennifer Parker
Jennifer Parker is an artist and professor of Art and Digital Art & New Media and founding Director of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center (openlabresearch.com).
Parker investigates methods of Arts Integration in Higher Education by combining creative research practices with science, engineering, and technology. As an artist, Parker carves sites for collective entanglement between disciplines. Facilitating, identifying and determining the boundaries of complex, multi-dimensional space with the aim to develop (a sense of) community to encourage learning, and inform and develop the practice of its members. Her methods of inquiry build on lab and studio visits, literature reviews, and conversations with faculty and students across disciplines triggering a heuristic learning process to pursue creative research for exhibitions and publications.
ARI Supported Project: The Algae Society BioArt & Design Lab
As a collective, the Algae Society seeks to galvanize the human species to become enamored with algae as an active and diverse community member bound together in an interdependent system of organisms adapting to global warming. We view this as a collaborative moment and a creative approach to climate change. We also see an opportunity to benefit, support, and illustrate the symbiotic relationship between humans and algae and the importance of this organism for humankind's well-being and future. Conscious that wider public acceptance of a posthuman position requires considered communicative and persuasive practice, we work primarily through the medium of art and science-based exhibitions, accessible to the public in the places they gather, such as museums, science centers, and public events.