Victoria Vesna


Victoria Vesna is a digital media artist, theorist, and professor whose work investigates the interplay between art, science, technology, and consciousness. She is widely recognized as a pioneer of early Internet art: her projects Virtual Concrete and Bodies INC were among the first to use the web as a participatory, social, and performative environment, exploring virtual identity, collective authorship, and embodied presence online.
Since the early 80s, Vesna has developed large-scale installations and long-term collaborations with scientists—including nanoscientists, plasma physicists, biologists, and neuroscientists—resulting in influential works such as NanoMandala, Zero@WaveFunction, Blue Morph, Noise Aquarium, Alien Star Dust, and Flower Plasma.

Early life and education

Victoria Vesna was born in Washington, D.C., on June 9, 1959. She graduated from the High School of Art & Design in New York City, New York, in 1976. She received a Fine Arts Diploma from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1984. In 2000, she completed her Ph.D. under the mentorship of Roy Ascott, a pioneer of telematic and interactive art, at CAiiA at the University of Wales with a thesis entitled "Networked Public Spaces: An Investigation into Virtual Embodiment" in 2000.
In her early years in New York City, Vesna formed the post-punk band Crazy Hearts, immersing herself in the city’s 1980s industrial sound art and experimental post-punk movement, which later influenced her interest in sound as a performative and collaborative medium.

Career

Teaching

Victoria Vesna was as the chair of the Department of at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture from 2000-2007. She is the founder and director of since 2005, as well as the director of . She previously held teaching positions at the University of Linz, University of Tsukuba, Parsons School of Design, and UC Santa Barbara.
Additionally, she is the founder and director of , a collaborative educational platform for "Third Culture," as well as the host of the art & science dialogue series and lecture series .

Awards

She received the Oscar Signorini award for best net artwork in 1998 and the CINE Golden Eagle award for best scientific documentary in 1986. In 2011, she received the National Science Foundation Grant for their project, Acoustic Sensor Arrays for Understanding Bird ''Communication'', with collaborators Charles Taylor and Takashi Ikegami. She also received the Pacific Standard Time Art X Science Grant from the Getty Foundation and the Boroughs Wellcome Fund.

Artwork

Through creative research, she examines perception and identity shifts in connection with scientific innovation as well as examining bio and nanotechnology through art.
Exhibitions include Spaceship Earth at the Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Toruń and MORPHONANO at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, California.
Artweek reviewer Claudine Isé writes, “Vesna has created a number of Web-based works that examine the dichotomy between concepts of “virtual’ and ‘concrete.’ Her on-line projects include an upcoming electronic conference about the cultural production of death as well as a popular site called Bodies INCorporated, which gives visitors an opportunity to design their own ‘cyber bodies’ from a selection of organic and synthetic textures, such as water, lava, chocolate, rubber or plastic.”
Sound and vibration is central in Vesna's practice, as Claire Farago, the art historian, writes: "it’s more than sound – it’s also vibration and frequency. And not just any vibration, but the hum of the universe. In an with art historian Dobrila Denegri, Vesna describes the long term collaborative nature of her work which brings the art and science world together.

Early Work

Victoria Vesna produced and directed "Stephen Hawking: Life in the Universe CD," an interactive CM-ROM software program, for MetaTools. Based on an essay by Stephen Hawking, the software combined animations, data visualizations, and interactive elements to explore cosmology, particle physics, black holes, and the possibility of life beyond Earth.

Author

In Christopher Hanson's review of her book Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of information overflow, he says that Vesna provides an engaging collection of essays about changing aesthetics in interactive art and its relationship to the database.
Vesna is the North American Editor for , and on the advisory board of .

Personal life

Victoria Vesna was married to nuclear physicist Bogdan Maglich, with whom she has two children. During this period, she collaborated with Maglich on the documentary Searching for Hidden Chambers Using Modern Physics, which received a CINE Golden Eagle Award and marked the beginning of her sustained engagement with art and science.
From 2003 to 2023, Vesna was in a long-term partnership with nanoscientist James Gimzewski, a co-founder of the UCLA Art|Sci Center and longstanding collaborator on projects developed at the California NanoSystems Institute and the UCLA Broad Art Center. Their partnership significantly shaped her early art–science installations, including NanoMandala, Zero@WaveFunction, and Blue Morph.

Works

  • Flower Plasma in collaboration with plasma physicist Walter Gekelman and biomedical engineer Haley Marks.
  • Star Dust
  • , in collaboration with the of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, documentary film maker Alfred Vendl, computer animator Martina R. Fröschl, biologists Stephan Handschuh and Thomas Schwaha, and programmer Glenn Bristol.
  • Octopus Brainstorming, in collaboration with neuroscientist Mark Cohen.
  • Octopus Mandala Glow, in collaboration with Ray Zimmerman, Dawn Faelnar, Mike Datz, Peter Rand, Steven Amrhein, and others
  • Bird Song Diamond, in collaboration with biologist Charles Taylor and physicist Takashi Ikegami
  • HOX Zodiac, in collaboration with neuroscientist Siddharth Ramakrishnan
  • Blue Morph, in collaboration with James Gimzewski
  • Water Bowls
  • Water Bodies
  • Mood Swings
  • Datamining Bodies, in collaboration with Gerald de Jong and David Beaudry
  • Nanomandala
  • NANO, in collaboration with nanoscientist James Gimzewski
  • Quantum Tunneling
  • Zero@wavefunction in collaboration with James Gimzewski
  • Cell Ghosts
  • n0Time
  • Datamining Bodies
  • Virtual Concrete
  • Rambona
  • Bodies© INCorporated
  • Another Day in Paradise
  • Sometimes a Cigar is Only a Cigar
  • ''Vesper's Stampede to my Holy Mouth''

    Publications

  • Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Arts in Times of Climate Disruption, co-authored with Anuradha Vikram, Pacific Standard Time: Art + Science Collide, Getty Foundation. 2024.
  • Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Ecology: VICTORIA VESNA and Art in the World of Anthropocene, Kluszczynski, Ryszard, W. Ed., Lodz University press. 2020.
  • Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Digital Arts. Co-edited with Margot Lovejoy and Christiane Paul). Intellect. 2011.
  • Blue Morph: ''Metaphor and Metamorphosis, MM ’10: ACM Multimedia Conference Proceedings. 2010.
  • Metamorphosis of the Human Animal: Hox Zodiac. Co-authored with Siddharth Ramakrishnan. 2010.
  • Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between: Art and Electronic Media, Phaidon Press. 2008.
  • Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of information overflow'', University Of Minnesota Press. 2007.

    Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions