Lauren Fenton

Lauren Fenton is an artist/writer of interactive, immersive, visceral and haunted spaces. She received her BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College in 2006. Through her subsequent work in visual ethnography she examined the process of constructing multicultural narratives in film, culminating in her being awarded a Fulbright fellowship for the year 2006-2007 to make a documentary about the impact of post-Soviet globalization and consumer culture on the Altaians, an indigenous people in Siberia. As a PhD student she has designed experimental games, as well as animated/mixed media shorts (exhibited at the Chapman Gallery in downtown Los Angeles) informed by avant-garde film, situationism, phenomenology, and the experience of the flaneur . Currently her research focuses on designing database narratives that can be accessed through interactions with the textures of real space and developing the idea of immersion as it can be achieved through a cross-pollination of virtual and tactile geographies. Certain key notions serve as recognizable constellations to guide her investigation: Play Haunting Barthes’ Punctum Evocative Objects/Inanimata Architecture Texture Actuality Soundscape Photopia (a conflation of photography and utopia) Synesthesia Psychoanalysis Traps & Mazes Amnesia…