The primary concern of my work is the active perception of the viewer. I focus on formal qualities and visceral effects rather than narrative. I generate or repurpose basic, generic, or stock elements in order to defamiliarize and decontextualize them, and disassemble their assumed meanings. I want to draw attention to the act of looking itself and avoid any central subject. I view my pieces as semiautonomous, useless machines.
I am informed by the industrial processes involved in media and design and feel the process of making a work is integral to its life. My work is based on programming, often using feedback and generative autonomous behavior. These programs consist of hand coded real-time applications that define the context, behavior, life, and identity of the elements. Within this framework, processes emerge that examine media, its formal and material qualities, and internal structure. This work is inspired by systems and the unique life they sometimes take on and navigates the frictions, difficulties and disruptions that occur with encounters such as interactions, re-mappings, and transmissions.
I emphasize production processes such as hand embroidery, sewing, or physically recreating digital work. The impossibility of reproducing algorithmic systems through the body of a human engaged in the task of realizing digital phenomena is important to me. I have recently been collaborating with dancers to further explore human-machine interplay and the synergies and frictions that occur between these entities.
An important aspect of my work is the interface between the viewer and the work, between participants, between the various elements, and between the piece, the environment it is shown in and the outer world.
I am uninterested in the cult of personality surrounding artists. I want my work to have autonomy from myself and hope to connect with viewers on equal terms, through shared experience rather than one-way communication.
Artist Bio
Sarah Bennett-Davidson is an interdisciplinary media artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She creates interactive, algorithmic pieces which destabilize perception and invite viewers to actively construct them. Informed by architectural theory, experimental film, programming, stochastic music, and cybernetics, she centers systems and interfaces between sound and image, viewer and artwork individual and society. The daughter of the late Free Jazz composer Lowell Davidson, she shares his interest in alternative structures and energetic flow. From 1998 to 2008 she studied dance and experimental choreography in New York, mostly at Merce Cunningham’s Studio and Movement Research, which sparked her interest in system and process-driven work. Recent work includes Interference, a large-scale installation at Albuquerque’s Bingo Gallery, and collaborations exploring material translations of digital systems.