- http://www.ubermatic.org
Michelle Teran
Willem de Kooning Academy, Social Practices, Faculty Member
- Michelle Teran (born in Canada) is an educator, artist, and researcher. She is practice-oriented Research Professor S... moreMichelle Teran (born in Canada) is an educator, artist, and researcher. She is practice-oriented Research Professor Social Practices at the Research Centre Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA).
Artistic and research portfolio: http://www.ubermatic.org
Her current and ongoing research areas are: socially engaged art, counter-cartographies, social movements, transmedia storytelling, feminist, eco-social and critical pedagogy. Her multidisciplinary works span film, text, bookworks, performance, installation, public readings, online works, participatory events, pedagogic experimentation, and interventions in public space.
She received her philosophiae doctor (Ph.D.) in Artistic Research, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. Her research project Future Guides for Cities: From Information to Home looked at the relation between online archives and the domain of the city, examining the notion of a guide, as a person, map, and method. This research built on her award winning work Life: A User’s Manual and and Buscando al Señor Goodbar and was an inquiry into the narrative language within the overlapping of different types of mapping systems: online tracking using geo-locational data, situated storytelling, and contemporary archiving practices. During this period, she joined Microhistories, a research group based in Berlin, Skopje, Gothenburg and Stockholm, with a shared interest on the use of microhistories, or stories of the everyday told by everyday people, as a form of history writing and an artistic genre. The research gathered knowledge from artistic practice/artistic research and the field of history. One of her contributions to the research was her work Folgen, a lecture performance and city novel that drew on existing narratives of video makers found YouTube to build a multi-layered media landscape of Berlin.
From 2013-2016, working together with Spanish activists the PAH and Stop Desahucios (Stop Evictions), she produced two films, a book translation, and performative reading which followed the Spanish housing crisis amidst the global financial crisis. Some of the work occurred with her participation in the artist-group SYNSMASKINEN, an inquiry into 7 fields of contemporary political crisis. The English version of Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany’s book Mortgaged Lives (original Spanish version Vidas Hipotecas), a translation project initiated by Michelle Teran, was published by the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. Through the collective learning project The Neighborhood Academy (NAK) she is engaged in eco-social learning practices, a Berlin-based, self-organized open platform for urban and rural knowledge sharing, cultural practice and activism which started around the Prinzessinnengarten. Together with Marc Herbst, she is co-editor of Everything Gardens! Growing from Ruins of Modernity, one of a three-part publication (ADOCS and nGbK publishers) on how the global ecological crisis and its social repercussions raise questions regarding alternative forms of education and spaces for un/learning and co/learning. Situationer Workbook/Situationer Cookbook, a transformative pedagogy reader (Research Center WdKA and Publication Studio Rotterdam publishers) connects to emergent research around transformative pedagogy, in order to imagine other possible perspectives on learning and education.
She has participated in conferences, performances, exhibitions and events in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, such as the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Transmediale Festival (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung), Museum Folkwang (Essen), Manchester Contemporary Art Gallery, Media Façades Festival (Helsinki), Mediations Biennale (Poznan), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Santiago), Today Art Museum (Bejing), Screen City Festival (Stavanger), Museum of Contemporary Art (Roskilde) Telemuseet (Oslo), Arco International Art Fair (Madrid), Tensta Konstall (Stockholm), Sonar Festival (Barcelona), ISEA, CCCB/MACBA (Barcelona), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), BEAP (Perth), Mois Multi Festival (Quebec City), and Mediacity (Seoul).
Formerly she held the position of Associate Professor at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has led seminars, workshops and master classes to both Bachelor’s and Master’s students (Fine Arts, Media Arts, Media Design, Dance, and Theatre) at different institutions throughout Europe and in the subject areas of networked performance, transmedia storytelling, surveillant architecture, urban infrastructures, psychogeography, microhistory, urban geography, and critical cartography.
She is the winner of several awards, including the Transmediale Award (2010), the Turku2011 Digital Media & Art Grand Prix Award, Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention (2005, 2010) and the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition.edit
Situationer Workbook / Cookbook, edited by Michelle Teran with Johanna Monk, Teana Boston-Mammah, and Clementine Edwards, is a book in two volumes on transformative pedagogy and teaching in times of crisis. How can times of crisis – or of... more
Situationer Workbook / Cookbook, edited by Michelle Teran with Johanna Monk, Teana Boston-Mammah, and Clementine Edwards, is a book in two volumes on transformative pedagogy and teaching in times of crisis. How can times of crisis – or of crises, in their many forms – inform and influence the pedagogies needed to situate ourselves in a troubled world? How can one tune in to the conditions, concerns and difficulties of these complex times, by cultivating new and necessary forms of humility, attentiveness and recognition toward other knowledges, other value systems, other frameworks of understanding? The essays, interviews, and other creative and critical interventions in this book offer a wide variety of reflections upon these fundamental questions.
This publication connects to emergent research around transformative pedagogy in socially engaged art and art education. It comes from the impetus to go back to the drawing board, in order to imagine other possible perspectives on learning and education. It is a body of research that continually writes and enacts itself into existence, cultivated by engaged practitioners within the Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and beyond.
This publication connects to emergent research around transformative pedagogy in socially engaged art and art education. It comes from the impetus to go back to the drawing board, in order to imagine other possible perspectives on learning and education. It is a body of research that continually writes and enacts itself into existence, cultivated by engaged practitioners within the Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and beyond.
Research Interests:
A city novel. A woman on a bicycle follows the traces that people have left in the public sphere of the internet which lead her to different places around the city.
Research Interests:
The right to housing has been systematically violated: difficulty in accessing housing, despite being a fundamental right, now holds back hundreds of thousands of families who demand a fairer mortgage system. Written by two of the... more
The right to housing has been systematically violated: difficulty in accessing housing, despite being a fundamental right, now holds back hundreds of thousands of families who demand a fairer mortgage system.
Written by two of the founders of the PAH, Mortgaged Lives explains the causes, points to those responsible for the Spanish mortgage crisis and its broader situation. Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany analyse the role of the public administration, Moreover they reveal the fights carried out by the PAH through first-person accounts, and offers advice and useful resources for defending the right to housing and avoiding abuses of power by the banks and financial institutions.
Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany
Prologues by Gerard Pisarello and José Coy
(0riginal Spanish version published by Cuadrilatero de Libros, Barcelona, 2012)
English translation by Michelle Teran. Published by The Journal of Aesthetics& Protest 2014
Written by two of the founders of the PAH, Mortgaged Lives explains the causes, points to those responsible for the Spanish mortgage crisis and its broader situation. Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany analyse the role of the public administration, Moreover they reveal the fights carried out by the PAH through first-person accounts, and offers advice and useful resources for defending the right to housing and avoiding abuses of power by the banks and financial institutions.
Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany
Prologues by Gerard Pisarello and José Coy
(0riginal Spanish version published by Cuadrilatero de Libros, Barcelona, 2012)
English translation by Michelle Teran. Published by The Journal of Aesthetics& Protest 2014
Research Interests:
Published by ADOCS/NGBK Berlin- A poetic/ethical document on the social pedagogy of the NachbarschaftsAkademie for the coming 99 years of cosmopolitical transformation in Berlin and the world. Published by the NGBK Gallery and ADOCS... more
Published by ADOCS/NGBK Berlin-
A poetic/ethical document on the social pedagogy of the NachbarschaftsAkademie for the coming 99 years of cosmopolitical transformation in Berlin and the world.
Published by the NGBK Gallery and ADOCS Press as a part of the Licht, Luft, Scheisse (light, air, shit) group of exhibitions done in Berlin as a part of the 2019 comemeration of the 100 years of the Bauhaus.
A poetic/ethical document on the social pedagogy of the NachbarschaftsAkademie for the coming 99 years of cosmopolitical transformation in Berlin and the world.
Published by the NGBK Gallery and ADOCS Press as a part of the Licht, Luft, Scheisse (light, air, shit) group of exhibitions done in Berlin as a part of the 2019 comemeration of the 100 years of the Bauhaus.
Research Interests:
"Future Guides: From Information to Home" is an artistic research project on following: how to practice and theorize following. It was carried out between 2010-2014 within the Norwegian Artistic Fellowship Programme and around the Bergen... more
"Future Guides: From Information to Home" is an artistic research project on following: how to practice and theorize following. It was carried out between 2010-2014 within the Norwegian Artistic Fellowship Programme and around the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. A final exhibition of my artistic research, "Your Revolution Begins at Home", took place at the USF Gallery and Cinemateket in Bergen, September 4-14, 2014. "Confessions of an Online Stalker", a critical reflection text on artistic results of the research, was submitted in 2015.
The study outlines the emergence of an artistic research method–combining data mining, systems for mapping, storytelling, and translation–and its application in the fields of media art, microhistory, and activism. The development of artistic works (several books, text, film, installation and public performance) become the aesthetic results of conversations, negotiations and reflections around the proceeding questions: How are tracking, guiding, following and stalking used as artistic research methods? What role does image production play in everyday life and how does it create tension between the public and private experience? How can strategies of translation provide the critical tools for experimenting with shifts between context, subjectivity and scale?
This artistic research reflects on a contemporary condition in which personal and social archives constitute a new type of city guide that challenges the official representations of cities online. It reflects on the phenomenon of documenting and sharing one’s urban life to the world online, an act reflective of a culture of making oneself and one’s life visible–thus, present–in online social networks. The work focuses on the “micro” or working on case studies, whereby the studying and following of trails of data produced by different individuals and seeing where it leads is a process of trying to establish where one "is" from other people's data. However, the effort of pinning down a location is not merely to focus–in a machinic system of (geo)precision–on the place where one might be standing but to recognize the people who occupy (or have occupied) that place in the city. It is a method of online tracking which leads to spatial tracking, from which a narrative language emerges. The question is implicitly addressed: to what extent urban media art can help us to “locate ourselves” in the mediated city by offering to trace and reveal the connections between places, people, and digital culture. But what if the connections reveal a city in crisis? The research leads to a flight to Madrid and ends up in the homes of evicted families, where anti-eviction activists use digital information to “locate” and make public the everyday effects of crisis. In the foreground of the crisis is the crisis of the home. It is there that we encounter sites of political struggle, the act of making oneself and one’s life visible becoming a strategy for collective empowerment.
The Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme is parallel to other research educations organised as academic PhD programmes. The programme intends to secure high level artistic research and leads to expertise as Associate Professor. The Artistic Research Fellowships Programme is among the first in this field in Europe. The programme offers a three-year position as Research Fellow to candidates who have completed the highest art education within their subject area.
The study outlines the emergence of an artistic research method–combining data mining, systems for mapping, storytelling, and translation–and its application in the fields of media art, microhistory, and activism. The development of artistic works (several books, text, film, installation and public performance) become the aesthetic results of conversations, negotiations and reflections around the proceeding questions: How are tracking, guiding, following and stalking used as artistic research methods? What role does image production play in everyday life and how does it create tension between the public and private experience? How can strategies of translation provide the critical tools for experimenting with shifts between context, subjectivity and scale?
This artistic research reflects on a contemporary condition in which personal and social archives constitute a new type of city guide that challenges the official representations of cities online. It reflects on the phenomenon of documenting and sharing one’s urban life to the world online, an act reflective of a culture of making oneself and one’s life visible–thus, present–in online social networks. The work focuses on the “micro” or working on case studies, whereby the studying and following of trails of data produced by different individuals and seeing where it leads is a process of trying to establish where one "is" from other people's data. However, the effort of pinning down a location is not merely to focus–in a machinic system of (geo)precision–on the place where one might be standing but to recognize the people who occupy (or have occupied) that place in the city. It is a method of online tracking which leads to spatial tracking, from which a narrative language emerges. The question is implicitly addressed: to what extent urban media art can help us to “locate ourselves” in the mediated city by offering to trace and reveal the connections between places, people, and digital culture. But what if the connections reveal a city in crisis? The research leads to a flight to Madrid and ends up in the homes of evicted families, where anti-eviction activists use digital information to “locate” and make public the everyday effects of crisis. In the foreground of the crisis is the crisis of the home. It is there that we encounter sites of political struggle, the act of making oneself and one’s life visible becoming a strategy for collective empowerment.
The Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme is parallel to other research educations organised as academic PhD programmes. The programme intends to secure high level artistic research and leads to expertise as Associate Professor. The Artistic Research Fellowships Programme is among the first in this field in Europe. The programme offers a three-year position as Research Fellow to candidates who have completed the highest art education within their subject area.
Research Interests:
... Michelle Teran and Manu Luksch Page 2. Gürses, Luksch and Teran: Trialogue Surveillance & Society 7(2) 166 ... One project was Friluftskino: Experiments in Open Air Surveillance Cinema and another, Parasitic Video Network, both of... more
... Michelle Teran and Manu Luksch Page 2. Gürses, Luksch and Teran: Trialogue Surveillance & Society 7(2) 166 ... One project was Friluftskino: Experiments in Open Air Surveillance Cinema and another, Parasitic Video Network, both of which she talks about in the trialogue. ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
How can we create and maintain a generative space where not everybody agrees but manages to nourish comfort? Can we recognize difference and disagreement as abundance? What is the feeling of the individual in the differentiated... more
How can we create and maintain a generative space where not everybody agrees but manages to nourish comfort? Can we recognize difference and disagreement as abundance? What is the feeling of the individual in the differentiated collective?
This document outlines a 24 hour workshop, including an overnight stay at the Floating University campus (Berlin), with the intention to write and rewrite, based on collective experience, rules, and poetics around our common being together.
It includes an introduction, workshop schedule, glossary of terms, poetics for dreaming, bibliographies and biographies.
This document outlines a 24 hour workshop, including an overnight stay at the Floating University campus (Berlin), with the intention to write and rewrite, based on collective experience, rules, and poetics around our common being together.
It includes an introduction, workshop schedule, glossary of terms, poetics for dreaming, bibliographies and biographies.
Research Interests:
The following teaching resource is a 24-hour score for a pedagogical experiment that proposes ways of learning through uncertainty and holding space collectively in uncertain times. Michelle Teran (practice-oriented research professor... more
The following teaching resource is a 24-hour score for a pedagogical experiment that proposes ways of learning through uncertainty and holding space collectively in uncertain times.
Michelle Teran (practice-oriented research professor Social Practices | Research Center Willem de Kooning Academy) and Marc Herbst (Journal for Aesthetics & Protest) developed the score. The Zurich University of the Arts commissioned and hosted the 24-hour event.
Michelle Teran (practice-oriented research professor Social Practices | Research Center Willem de Kooning Academy) and Marc Herbst (Journal for Aesthetics & Protest) developed the score. The Zurich University of the Arts commissioned and hosted the 24-hour event.