Allen Jamie
Jamie Allen is a Canadian-born artist and scholar, who investigates what technologies teach us about who we are as individuals, cultures and societies. He has been an electronics engineer, a polymer chemist and an exhibition designer with the American Museum of Natural History. Allen works, learns and teaches all over the world, with NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the Pratt Institute of Art and Design, Hanyang University in Seoul, and the Royal College of Art in London, amongst others. He likes to make things with his head and hands – experiments into the material systems of media, electricity, and information as artworks, designs, events, and writing. He attempts to recompose the institutions he works with in ways that assert the importance of generosity, friendship, passion and love in knowledge practices like art and research.
Allen is Canada Research Chair in Infrastructure, Media & Communications at NSCAD. At NSCAD he is developing a new institute, The Institute of Departments and Organisations, that seeks to reroute artistic research, revive imaginative conceptualism and foment extra-disciplinary, collaborative energies. His PhD, under the supervision of Siegfried Zielinski and Avital Ronell, was awarded in 2015 (summa cum laude) by the European Graduate School. Jamie maintains an auxiliary position as Senior Researcher at the Critical Media Lab in Basel, Switzerland, and co-founder of the media, art and philosophy journal continentcontinent.cc.
