Adriene Jenik

Adriene Jenik is an artist and educator who resides in the desert. Her computer and media art spans several decades including pioneering work in interactive cinema and live telematic performance. 

Jenik's artistic projects straddle and trouble the borders between art, science, engineering and popular culture and have been written about in The New York Times, published in The Drama Review, and recognized by the Rockefeller Foundation. She was an early member of the Paper Tiger Television collective (1985-91) and a founding member of the Deep Dish TV Alternative Satellite network. Her video productions include the video short, "What's the Difference Between a Yam & a Sweet Potato?" (with J. Evan Dunlap), and the award-winning live satellite TV broadcast, "EL NAFTAZTECA: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 A.D." (with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes). "MAUVE DESERT: A CD-ROM Translation" is Jenik's internationally acclaimed interactive road movie based on the novel Le Désert mauve by French Canadian author Nicole Brossard. Her creative research project, DESKTOP THEATER was a series of live theatrical interventions and activities in public visual chat rooms developed with multi-media maven Lisa Brenneis.

In 2014, she shifted her creative practice to focus on issues related to the US desert: environmental resilience, military testing and training, and indigenous values. Her ongoing series of DATA HUMANIZATION performances recast endurance work for our time. DRYLAB2023 (with co-director Marco Janssen and 8 participants) imagined a near future of water scarcity that was enacted over 30 days in an experiment in extreme experiential learning. Most weekends she can be found in a public space offering her performance of CLIMATE FUTURE READINGS with her ECOtarot deck. She is also a singer/songwriter and published poet.

Jenik received her BA in English from Douglass College, Rutgers University and her MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A founding professor of the Interdisciplinary Computer Arts Major at the University of California, San Diego and the Digital Culture program at Arizona State University, Jenik has taught electronic and digital media to generations of students. She currently serves as Professor of Intermedia in the School of Art at ASU, affiliate faculty in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and a senior sustainability scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability.

Keywords:  telematics performance, interactive media, media policy, freedom of expression, art.tech, desert, water scarcity, ECOtarot