Curriculum Vitae

British cybernetician Gordon Pask maintained that one could make a computer “out of almost anything.” Consequently he spent many years of his life developing “maverick machines,” computing devices that deviated from mainstream computer development. I intend to write a book focusing on Pasks’ contributions to visual culture yet emphasizing his mobilization and actualization of a complex of ideas in various realms of knowledge and practice including science, art, architecture, theater, psychology, military research and ethics. My project traces the flow of “materials, images ideas across physical and virtual boundaries” and considers alternatives to the sedimentation that results from the unquestioned application of dominant digital computational models to art.

María Fernández is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University.  She received her doctorate in art history from Columbia University in 1993. Her research interests include the history and theory of digital art, postcolonial studies, Latin American art and architecture and the intersections of these fields. She has published essays in multiple journals including Art Journal, Third Text, nparadoxa,  Architectural Design (AD), Fuse and Mute. Her work appears in several volumes including the Companion of Contemporary Art since 1945 edited by Amelia Jones (Blackwell 2006) and At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (MIT Press, 2005.) With Faith Wilding and Michelle Wright she edited the anthology Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices published by Autonomedia in 2002.  Recently she completed a book on Mexican Cosmopolitanism in the Visual Arts under contract with Texas University Press and now she is working on a book on the work of the British cybernetician, Gordon Pask.

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