Bio
Andrea Wolf is a Chilean interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her work explores the relationship between personal memory and cultural practices ofemembering. Working with found footage –with anonymous stories–, Wolf creates multimedia installations, video sculptures, and transmedia narratives that examine how technology, media, and memory affect and transform each other, creating models of remembrance that are culturally shaped.
Andrea holds MFAs in Documentary Filmmaking from Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, in Digital Arts from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and from the Interactive Telecommunications at NYU. She was a fellow at the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum in 2013, an artist in residence at the IFP New York Media Center in 2015, and a member at NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator program for art, technology and design in New York City, from 2015 to 2017.
Using techniques such as projection mapping, algorithmic manipulations, and augmented reality, Wolf combines found memory objects like home movies, vintage photos, and postcards, with physical objects ranging from intimate dioramas to immersive installations, blurring the boundaries between physical and digital.
Her work has been shown in galleries, museums, biennials, and festivals around the globe. It has also been featured in digital collections and online platforms like Spotify, ArtJaws, Electric Objects, and ArtPoint. Andrea has also done larger-than-life projections in open spaces such as a 40-meter wide airplane hangar during the Sonar Festival in Santiago and the Manhattan Bridge for the 13th edition of the Light Year festival in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
The collaborative project with Karolina Ziulkoski, Future Past News, an installation that uses augmented reality to highlight disturbing parallels between present-day and 1937 pre-war turmoil, was featured as a special project at Art Central Hong Kong in 2018 and its online version is an honoree of the 2017 Webby Awards in the NetArt category.
In 2012, Andrea founded REVERSE, a nonprofit art space in New York for the development of new ideas and interdisciplinary practices, promoting artistic collaboration and innovative projects at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Between 2012 and 2016, REVERSE hosted more than 30 exhibitions, multiple performances, and an active calendar of workshops taught by a diverse roster of artists.
Artist Statement
My practice explores the relationship between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering. I work with found footage like home movies, family albums, and postcards. I reshape these analog memories through algorithmic manipulations, augmented reality, multimedia installations, video sculptures and transmedia storytelling. Working with these found footage, these anonymous stories, I explore how technology, media and memory affect and transform each other, altering and reconfiguring the narratives we construct around our identities, our ecologies and our machines.
Our memory is not an ecstatic repository of past experiences. Our digital technologies are not neutral means of reproduction and transmission of information. Memory is an action that is constantly actualized in the present. Every memory is a new memory. Digital technologies inevitably and actively transform whatever they mediate. Every mediated event is a new entity, a new story.
Having grown up in pre-Internet society, but currently living in the Information Age, my work dialogues between these two world-views. As I revisit with nostalgia the printed photographs of my childhood and the videos that my father recorded with his VHS camera, I also take countless photos with my iPhone that accumulate in my iCloud, and carefully select the images that I share on my Instagram.
Digital media has transformed the ways in which we engage with our personal past. Accessibility, transferability, and circulation of digital content has changed how we remember and forget. We obsessively capture and edit our lives, constantly documenting the instant present, and making personal memories immediately available on our social networks.
In the Age of the Image, we believe that the past becomes accessible through our images. We collect the portrait of everything we wish to remember, or do not wish to forget. Images become our memory, allowing us to fix time – to resist leaving the moment in the past without ensuring its return. In the Information Age, our new networked memory has produced a ‘continuous present’. Driven by nostalgia, I still visit those devices of resistance, while trying to understand how to remember in the age of the image that disappears.
My latest works reflect on our mediated relation with nature and how technology enables the creation and circulation of images that inform how we see and know nature. As humans reshape the landscape, we forget what was there before. We are surrounded by traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade. And we are haunted by imagined futures; dreamworlds of progress that have devastated our planet, and apocalyptic futures that seem to be taking shape today.