Sarah Sweeney
Professor
Area of Expertise: Digital Media
Sarah Sweeney’s digital and interactive work interrogates the relationship between
photographic memory objects and physical memories, and is informed by both the study
of memory science and the history of documentary technologies.
In her work, she explores the space between information that is stored corporeally
in our memory and the information that is captured and stored in memory objects created
by documentary technologies including camera phones, stereoscopic cameras, and home
video cameras-each project makes tangible the deletions and accretions produced through
our interactions with these technologies. She is the creator of The Forgetting Machine,
an iPhone app commissioned by the new media organization Rhizome, that systematically
destroys digital photographs each time they are viewed or refreshed to simulate the
theory of reconsolidation proposed by scientists studying memory. Her work has appeared
nationally and internationally in exhibitions at locations including the Orange County
Center for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the New Jersey
State Museum, the Black and White Gallery, and the UCR/California Photography Museum.
Office: Saisselin 200A
518-580-5042
Email: ssweeney@skidmore.edu
BFA, Williams College
MFA, Columbia University
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