María Mencía is a media artist/e-poet, Associate Professor and Course Leader of the BA in Media and Communication, Kingston School of Art Faculty at Kingston University, London, UK. She is an Executive Member of the Electronic Literature Organization Board of Directors (ELO) and book editor for the "Electronic Literature" series with ELO-Bloomsbury Press.
Mencía is a pioneer in digital poetry and her PhD in Digital Poetics and Digital Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts-London (2000-2003), was one of the first practice-based research doctorates in the field of e-poetry. She studied English Philology at the Complutense University in Madrid, Fine Art & Design and History and Theory of Art at the University of the Arts London.
Research Areas
Her practice-based research is at the intersection of language, art and digital technology. It explores interlinguistic and multimodal digital textualities, digital media grammars, virtual poetic/aesthetic spaces found in-between the visual, the aural and the semantic in multimodal textualities. It is in this oscillation 'between text and image' or ‘sound and image’ ‘code and image’- in the shifting between these ways of expression- where I argue the poetic aesthetic space appears. Always interested in experimenting with the digital medium with the aim of engaging the reader/viewer/user in an experience of shifting ‘in’ and ‘out’ of language by looking ‘at’ and looking ‘through’ transparent and abstract landscapes of text and linguistic soundscapes. It draws from conceptual art, avant-garde poetics, remediating concepts of reading and writing, exploring digital media grammars (voice activation, use of webcam, use of mouse, acts of revealing, triggering, cut and paste, dragging) for interactivity, aesthetics, creation of virtual poetic spaces, engagement and meaning production.
It is trans-disciplinary bringing together different cultural, artistic and literary traditions such as: language art, fine art, linguistics, digital poetics translation, visual, concrete and sound poetry, with digital poetics, electronic writing, creative programming, interaction and interface design, media art theories and practices. It questions ways in which poetic/aesthetic digital experimentation can be used to bring up political and societal issues with themes such as; inter-linguistic communication, translation, migration, and displacement, gender issues and representation of those unheard voices. Her practice includes interactive digital media installations, performances, web-based works, sound-generated poems, interactive generative narratives and data visualisation poetics.
Publications
She has given keynote presentations; taken part in more than fifty conferences; chaired festivals like the E-Poetry Festival 2013-Kingston, London; curated exhibitions of e-lit; led pedagogic, programming research clusters and research projects in collaborative practice such as Code Interactive # 1 London, and Code Interactive # 2 Kosice, Slovakia.
She has exhibited internationally at museums, conferences and festivals including: La Casa del Lector, Madrid (Spain); Arts Santa Mónica, Barcelona (Spain); Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco y Universum- Museo de Las Ciencias de la UNAM, Mexico; Palazzo delle Arti (PAN), Naples (Italy); E-Poetry Festivals; Electronic Literature (ELO) Conferences; the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA); Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts (DRHA); onedotzero; Electronic Language International Festival (FILE); International Contemporary Art Fair (ARCO); Computers in Art and Design Education (CADE) and Caixaforum- Barcelona.
Her work is in collections such as the First volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, K. Hayles, N. Montfort, S. Rettberg, S. Strickland (eds). The Electronic Literature Organization, UCLA Department of English, Los Angeles and in the Anthology of European Electronic Literature, T. Memmott, M. Engberg, D.Prater (eds), ELMCIP. As well as in various databases in research centres. Her publication # WomenTechLit, Computing Literature, distributed by West Virginia University Press was awarded N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature, 2nd prize, 2017. You can get it from here. Her latest digital work, The Winnipeg: The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic, looks at the historical memory (Spanish-Chilean) and personal memory and was the recipient of the The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature, 2nd prize, 2018. Find here the research essay published in the special issue of Hyperrhiz.
She was the curator of Words Unstable On The Table (Watermans Art Centre, London, UK) and co-curator of Repurposing in Electronic Literature (DIG Gallery, Kosice, Slovakia).
Funding and Collaborations
Her current AHRC funded project focuses on the Memory, Victims and Representation of the Colombian Conflict in collaboration with Prof Claire Taylor Liverpool University. Project partners: Grupo de Investigación COMBA I+D, Universidad Santiago de Cali, Universidad de Cartagena, España- Pedagogical and Technological University.
She is collaborating on the research project A Transatlantic Take on Translating Electronic Literature (TTTEL) funded by the FMSH/Mellon Transatlantic Program in Collaborative Digital Humanities in partnership with Brown University (USA), the University of Paris 8 (France), the University of Coimbra (Portugal), Aarhus University (Denmark), and Kingston University (UK).
She has been awarded various grants to collaborate at international universities such as: Information Studies & Digital Design, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark; Laboratory: COSTECH Technologies and Human Sciences (TSH) Department, University of Technology of Compiegne (France); Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne, Australia (AHRC Small Grants); The University of Sydney, Australia (TIES Grant) and Media Research Lab -New York University, NY, USA (Promising Researcher Fellowship by Kingston University).
Download brief CV in pdf. For Full CV, contact me.
Información en Español en la publicación del Heraldo de Aragón, en Artes y Letras por Luisa Miñana. (Junio 2018) Aqui.