Victoria Vespa

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

Bodies INC was established in 1997 as one of the first early net art projects where
audiences were given an opportunity to create their avatars in 3D online. The project
critiqued and anticipated the oncoming age of our bodies being incorporated into a huge
commercial machine with our full voluntary participation. Bodies INC 2.0 was created to
protect and copyright the last remaining personal privacy realm left – our intuition, the
third eye.

Victoria Vesna, Ph.D., is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of  Design
Media Arts  and Director of the  Art|Sci Center  at the School of the Arts (North campus)
and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) (South campus). Although she was trained
early on as a painter (Faculty of Fine arts,  University of Belgrade , 1984), her curious
mind took her on an exploratory path that resulted in work can be defined as
experimental creative research residing between disciplines and technologies. With her
installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior
and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation ( PhD, CAiiA_STAR ,
University of Wales, 2000). Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers,
nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists and she brings this experience
to students. She is the North American editor of  AI & Society journal  (Springer Verlag,
UK) and in 2007 published an edited volume –  Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of
Information Overflow (Minnesota Press)  and another in 2011 —  Context Providers:
Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. (co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot
Lovejoy)  Intellect Ltd, 2011. Currently she is working on an artist cook book “Hox
Zodiac” (expected January, 2021)