Michelle Teran / Ubermatic

Michelle Teran is a Canadian-born artist whose practice explores media, performance and the urban environment. Her work critically engages media, connectivity and perception in the city. Her performances and installations repurpose the language of surveillance, cartography and social networks to construct unique scenarios that call conventional power and social relations into question. Currently she is a research fellow within the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme at the Bergen Academy of Arts and Design, 2010-2013. She is the winner of the Transmediale Award, 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 (Madrid). She lives and works between Bergen and Berlin.

Research
Michelle Teran is currently research fellow at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHIB) where she is carrying out post-graduate studies within the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme, from 2010-2013. In her research project “Future Guides for Cities” she proposes alternative ways to navigate through urban space. She investigates the relationship between online video archives and city and examines the notion of guide, as a person, map or a method. By exploiting the locative data which accompanies each video when it is put online, she uses locations and authors of various YouTube videos produced in cities to explore methods for creating multi-threaded narratives that demonstrate possible links between each inhabitant’s stories and paths through the city and with the world wide web.

Artistic Projects

A selection of her artistic works can be found on a separate artistic projects page.

Some notable works include:

The City is Creative
Buscando al Sr. Goodbar
Life: A User’s Manual
Friluftskino: Experiments in Open Air Surveillance Cinema