Elaine Gan

Elaine Gan is interested in mapping worlds otherwise. Her interdisciplinary practice combines art, science, and environmental humanities to study the timing and temporal logic of more-than-human socialities. Through writing, web experiments, and installation, Gan plays with making time appear. Speculative clocks and diagrams animate rhythms and patterns that emerge between species, landscapes, and media ecologies. To become is to cohere across difference, to coordinate through time.

Gan is art director of Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) and a fellow in Architecture & Environmental Structures of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). She has been a lecturer in digital arts and visual cultures at University of California, Santa Cruz since 2011. Doctoral research at UCSC seeks to articulate the timing of rice, fungi, and historically constituted disturbances that materialize as place, or a patterning that coordinates, conjugates, and concretes.

Installation and digital media projects have been exhibited internationally, most recently in World of Matter at HMKV (Germany), Intra-Action: Multispecies Becomings in the Anthropocene at University of Sydney, and Postnatural with Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA2013) at University of Notre Dame. Writings and 2D artworks have appeared in collaborative works with Anna Tsing and Matsutake Worlds Research Group, journals including Third Text and Social Text, and in a forthcoming book with World of Matter (Sternberg, 2015).

Gan received her BA in Architecture from Wellesley College and her MFA in Digital Art from UC Santa Cruz. She also completed an Independent Study Program through the Whitney Museum of Art.