Carl Diehl
STATEMENT:
Where do ideas come from—- out of thin air, as if by magic? Or is it in the choreography, the behind-the-scenes, the work with the sleights at hand to generate creative solutions from percieved restrictions?
My art practice, scholarly research, and pedagogy have been increasingly intertwined around questions of knowledge production and the social scaffolding of collaborative learning.
In 2012, I co-founded Hundred Thousand Million Labyrinths, with Katy Asher and Becky Miller, a constraint-based writing group. In 2013, I co-founded Weird Shift, with Adam and Megan Rothstein. This artist-led initiative has included a storefront exhibition space, podcasts, and an on-going MicroTalks series where artists, writers, and independent scholars present research and recent projects. Working with artist Lindsey french from 2014-2020, we prototyped non-traditional frameworks for building algorithmic literacy.
In my video essays, live cinema, and printed works I have examined the specters of post-truth and algorithmic bias, shared insights from my time with media fossils, and compared approaches to creative problem-solving across contexts of art, magic, and everyday life. These publications and presentations are immersed in visual and contextual research, family memoirs, and the histories and visual cultures of traveling carnivals, artist-run spaces, and stage magic.
My practice is research-based, experimental, and collaborative. I find inspiration in the spaces between apparent obstacles and prescribed solutions, puzzling the world anew.
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Born and raised in Syracuse New York (1978), I earned a BFA in Art Video from Syracuse University (2000) and a MFA in Digital Art from the University of Oregon (2007). From 2000 to 2003 I was an events programmer at Artists’ Television Access, in San Francisco, and have remained an on-call volunteer with ATA since 2008, working remotely as a layout and copy editor.
My video essays, installations, performances and other works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including: the International Symposium of Electronic Art, Transmediale, The Schneider Museum of Art, the &Now Festival of New Writing, and Shapeshifters Cinema. I teach courses in the history and practice of digital and time-based art at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland.
List of Exhibitions / Commissions / Event Programming / Publications