PhD Researcher
Rachel Falconer is a curator, researcher, writer and educator operating at the critical intersections of contemporary art practice, feminist technoscience, emergent technologies, civic data infrastructures and networked culture. Drawing on her sustained interest in networked art practice and alternative curatorial strategies to inform her systems-based practice, Rachel has conceived and delivered multi-scale interdisciplinary public programming, alternative exhibition models and innovative public research platforms spanning a diversity of critical modes of engagement with technology. She has curated and conceived exhibitions and artist residencies which engage with radical logics and politics of distributed audiences and exhibition modelling, and is dedicated to the critical investigation of the complex relationship between network apparatus and the materiality of technological/social behaviours. She balances her independent curatorial practice with her position as lecturer and PhD supervisor in Digital Arts Computing and Creative Computing at Goldsmiths, University London, and heads up the creative technology prototyping and research initiative Goldsmiths Digital.
She is regularly invited to speak at public events and has participated in public programmes at institutions including: Tate, Barbican, ICA, V&A, The Photographers Gallery, FACT, Royal College of Art, The Lumen Prize, Rhizome, Arebyte Gallery, London Design Festival, The Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), FABRIKKEN (Copenhagen), EVA London and Furtherfield. Her research and writing has been published across a wide range of platforms including; The Guardian, Frieze, The British Journal of Photography, and The White Review. She is a contributing author to academic publications, most recently her chapter on distributed digital knowledge production was included in Radical Cut-Up, Nothing is Original, edited by Lucas Feireiss, and published by Sternberg Press, 2019.
Rachel’s PhD position is a collaboration between CSNI/LSBU and Whitechapel Gallery. Her research and practice will focus on the critical disrupting of the value chain and relational agencies created between networked communities of collaborative creative practice, the unstable sovereignty of the solo figure of the curator, and the destabilising of identities and potential for an expanded politics of agency embodied across digital diasporas and distributed audiences /actants.