Canada / USA
Louise McKissick is a Canadian new media performance and installation artist based in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include, The Julia Set (Artemisia Gallery, Chicago), an interactive installation featuring borrowed library books and a series of subtly erotic photographs influenced by the work of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. The images were placed between the pages of library books based on mathematical calculations from the Julia Set, which is part of the Chaos theory branch of mathematics. Using the photographs as a guide, sound pieces were created by scanning the photographs and feeding them into software designed to create complex sound patterns based on Chaos theory algorithms. After the exhibition, the books were returned to the library with the photographs still hidden inside. Her digital video microshort, iloveyou, won the Palm d’Or first prize in the Aggressively Boring Film Festival (billed as “the world’s first film fest for the Palm OS”), and was broadcast on an outdoor LCD video billboard as part of the Transmedia 2000 show in Toronto. Louise has performed internationally, most recently at the Exit Performance Art Festival in Helsinki. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of Academic Computing at Columbia College Chicago, where she teaches web programming.