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Arts Division
Film and Digital Media Department
Lecturer
Faculty
Lecturer
Communications Building
#151
Tuesdays 2:30-4:30
Film and Digital Media
Abram Stern, MFA. Ph.D., (they/he) is an artist and scholar whose work builds upon collections of government-produced media and metadata. They interrogate the material produced by public bureaucracies and the infrastructures that mediate our experiences of them. Their artwork has been exhibited at / (Slash), the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and Design, Real Art Ways, the Beall Center for Arts and Technology, Works|San Jose, and New Langton Arts. Abram served as an education fellow for the Visualizing Abolition initiative at the Institute of Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, a public humanities fellow for The Humanities Institute, and a research fellow for the CITRIS Data and Democracy Institute. Their work has been published in Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus and Information Polity. Abram's projects and collaborations have been supported by funding from the Sunlight Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. They hold a Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, a Master’s in Fine Art of Digital Art and New Media, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Digital Media from the San Francisco Art Institute.
- “Metadata as Image and Event: Unburning 5d00*”, Policing/Abolition Technologies, Society for Social Studies of Science, Honolulu, HI. 2023.
- “Lossy States, Vulnerable Texts”, Indeterminate States of Loss and Control (chair), Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Denver, CO. 2023
- “Unburning 1d5003.mp4”, New Ways of Seeing, College Art Association, Chicago, IL. 2022.
- Digital IDEAS: A Summer Institute for Anti-Racist Critical Digital Studies, University of Michigan. 2021.
- “[mis]reading [un]documents and the contexts of non-texts”, Living Room Light Exchange, San Francisco, CA. 2019.
- “Oversight Machines”, Ordinary Volume: Documentation, Militarism and Governmentality at Scale, Visible Evidence XXVI, USC, Los Angeles, CA. 2019.
- “Unburning 1D3001.mp4”, Poetics and Politics IV, UC Santa Cruz. 2019.
- “Metadata/Image: Burning in and Reading Under”, Dynamics of Transparency and Opacity: Challenging the Limits of Documentary,Visible Evidence XXV, Bloomington, IN. 2018
- “Streaming Enclosure”, Fields and Streams: Landscapes of Political Media Ecology Praxis, Visible Evidence XXIII, Bozeman, MT. 2016
- Stern, Abram. “Unburning: Technics of Opacity, Oversight, and the Police Surveillance State.” Media-N 19, no. 1 (February 3, 2023): 120–38. https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v19i1.941.
- Deckert, Mark, Abram Stern, and Warren Sack. “Peer to PCAST: What Does Open Video Have to Do with Open Government?” Information Polity 16, no. 3 (2011): 225–41.
- Dale, Michael, Abram Stern, Mark Deckert, and Warren Sack. “System Demonstration: Metavid.Org: A Social Website and Open Archive of Congressional Video.” In Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data and Government, 309–10. Dg.o ’09. Puebla, Mexico: Digital Government Society of North America, 2009.
- Transforming Surveillance artist panel, w/Margaret Laurena Kemp, Ann Messner, Christopher Gregory-Rivera, Orphan Drift, and Brendan McQuade hosted by the ICA at Maine College of Art & Design.
- Seminar 4: Reimagining Protocols: Reclaiming, Challenging, and Queering Surveillance Feb 8 2021 at the Vera List Center, w/Margaret Laurena Kemp, Shaka McGlotten, and American Artist
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