Andrea Ackerman
Andrea Ackerman is an artist, writer and theorist living and working in New York. She graduated from Yale where she studied physics and biophysics, and from Harvard Medical School where she concentrated in neuroscience. While practicing as an adult and child psychiatrist and training as a Freudian psychoanalyst, she gradually turned to a career as an artist. Using digital technology to explore the relationship of technology, nature and aesthetics, she creates works that embody a compelling, meaningful synthetic nature. Synthetic Landscapes is a series of 2D still and 3D animated works (whose forms are influenced by chaos and complexity theory) that function as synthetic gardens. The series of 3D animations, Rose Breathing, Yawn and Woman Waking_Paper Dissolve elaborates an intimate, subtle experience of emotionally complex 3D animated characters. Ackerman writes about our evolving relationship to technology, artificial intelligence and the synthetic, in particular about the exploration in new media art of contemporary concepts of the mechanisms of consciousness, of brain plasticity and empathy. Ackerman is working on a general theory of aesthetic experience built upon recent theories of the chaotic dynamics of the brain/mind.