EXPERT FACULTY

Carla Gannis

Assistant Chairperson, Department of Digital Arts

Carla Gannis's transmedia arts practice is representative of the multi-talented faculty in Digital Arts, a department that has long trained its graduates for commercial work, but is increasingly graduating digital fine artists in their own right. And as is a common misperception, the curriculum is not simply focused on digital techniques. It incorporates a broad range of media and concepts—"from bits to atoms"—written word to painting and elements that are 3-D printed, but all with a digital aspect incorporated.

Last month, together with Visiting Instructor Marianna Ellenberg, Gannis co-organized the Digital Arts Department’s inaugural PHATT-B (Pratt Hosts Art of Technology Terminal) – A Celebration of Digital Arts in Brooklyn event, a series of free panel discussions with artists, curators, and writers working in new media and digital arts.

“PHATT-B helped put the department on the map as being a central hub of digital arts in Brooklyn,” said Gannis. “The event provided a lively forum for discussion about digital arts and new media as art forms that invite collaboration and innovation.” Read more about PHATT-B here.

This fall, Gannis and poet Justin Petropoulos, exhibited <legend> </legend> at Transfer Gallery, an exhibition space in Brooklyn that explores the friction between digital practice and its physical instantiation. The show featured the couple’s collaborative project of poems and drawings based on text redactions of Edna Kenton’s compendium of folklore on the shape of the Earth, The Book of Earths (1928). Videos, drawings, sculptures, and installations refer to Kenton’s compilation of bizarre ancient stories, including such fantastic tales as the Babylonian theory of a boat-shaped earth to the Aztec rendering of the earth as a cross.

"Art and poetry should be natural allies, but it’s surprisingly rare to see both commingle as naturally as they did,"critic Hrag Vartanian wrote in the art blog Hyperallergic.  

Text and Production: Bay Brown
Video and Production: Peter Tannenbaum