Biography
50 word artist biog:
Jen Southern is an artist and researcher. She specialises in site-specific and participatory digital art, focussing on more-than-human mobilities. She collaborates with artists, technologists, participants and natural systems to produce live installations that combine material and digital experience. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally for 30 years. https://www.jensouthern.net
50 word academic biog:
Jen Southern is an artist, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art (New Media) at Lancaster University, and an Associate Director at the Centre for Mobilities Research. She specialises in site-specific and participatory digital art, focussing on more-than-human mobilities. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally for over 30 years. https://www.jensouthern.net
150 word biog:
Jen Southern is an artist, Director of the School of Art at Lancaster University, and Co-Director at the Centre for Mobilities Research. She specialises in site-specific and participatory digital art, focussing on more-than-human mobilities. She has a current interest in the more-than-human relationships between plants, animals, rocks and machine learning. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally for over 30 years, including Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University, Canada (2024), FutureEverything, Arts & Heritage, and National Trust Quarry Bank, UK (2022), NEoN Digital Arts and Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research (2019), In Certain Places (2016), Abandon Normal Devices (2015), National Football Museum, UK (2015) and Mobile Media Studio (Montreal, 2013). She has co-curated exhibitions at conferences Global Mobility Futures (Lancaster 2013), Mobile Utopia: Pasts, Presents, Futures (Lancaster 2018) Im|mobile Lives in Turbulent Times (Newcastle 2021) and Mobilities, Ethics, Aesthetics (Seoul 2023). https://www.jensouthern.net
Full Biography:
Jen Southern works in the intersections between technology, place and people, and has a current interest in the more-than-human relationships between plants, animals, rocks and technologies such as machine learning. She seeks out collaborations with other artists, technologists, and more-than-human participants, making work through ongoing ‘generative encounters’.
For over 30 years her art practice research has focused on mobility and how things move to investigate relationality across temporal and spatial scales, and has been exhibited widely in the UK and Internationally, including work with walking, shipping containers, light aircraft, video games, football matches, mountain rescue dogs, and parasites.
As a founding member of the collaboration ‘KIT’ she exhibited digital art concerned with video games and public space in UK, Austria, The Netherlands, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia from 1994-2002.
In 2001, Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton established Satellite Bureau to investigate mobile encounters with sense of place through participatory GPS walking. They were awarded an ITEM commission from FACT, NESTA and ACE to work with Onteca Ltd, to create Landlines, an innovative mobile app to live track GPS for exhibitions (2004). This culminated in the exhibition Running Stitch (Brighton 2006, Dundee 2008, Yokohama, Japan 2008, Umea, Sweden 2009, San Francisco, USA 2009).
From 2008 -2016 she worked with Prof. Chris Speed (Edinburgh University) to develop and study a collective and relational GPS mapping app ‘Comob’, through a series of workshops, exhibitions and publications.
In 2016 Southern’s work with art and mobilities was the subject of the exhibition ‘Skylines: A survey of work 2001-2016’.
Recent work has been commissioned by FutureEverything, Arts & Heritage, and National Trust Quarry Bank (2022), NEoN Digital Arts and Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research (2019), In Certain Places (2016), Abandon Normal Devices (2015), National Football Museum (2015) and Mobile Media Studio (Montreal, 2013).
Since 2013 she has been an Associate Director at the Centre for Mobilities Research (Cemore) at Lancaster University, where she advocates for the importance of art practice in Mobilities Research. She has co-curated exhibitions at conferences Global Mobility Futures (Lancaster 2013), Mobile Utopia: Pasts, Presents, Futures (Lancaster 2018) Im|mobile Lives in Turbulent Times (Newcastle 2021) and Mobilities, Ethics, Aesthetics (Seoul 2023). In 2018 she founded the Art and Mobilities Network with Dr. Kai Syng Tan, and in 2019 she started the Art and Mobilities mailing list with Dr. Kaya Barry.
She is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and New Media at Lancaster University, where she is Director of the School of Art, and Senior Fellow of The Higher Education Authority (SFHEA). She has an art-practice-based PhD in Sociology (Lancaster 2013) exploring the use of GPS to map temporal and spatial relationships between people, animals, and place (AHRC Scholarship). She has an MFA in Fine Art (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, 1996) (Commonwealth Scholarship), and a BA(hons) Fine Art (Reading, 1991). She lives and works in Lancaster, UK.
Recent publications include:
Southern, J & Dillon, R 2023, 'Living with deadly mobilities: How art practice takes care of ethics when anthropomorphising a medically important parasite.', Mobilities, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 391-407.
Southern, J, Barry, K, Baxter, T, Blondin, S, Booker, C, Bowstead, J, Butler, C, Dillon, R, Ferguson, N, Filipska, G, Hieslmair, M, Hunt, L, Ianchenko, A, Johnson, P, Keane, J, Koszolko, MK, Qualmann, C, Rumsby, C, Sales Oliveria, C, Schleser, M, Sodero, S, Soliz, A, Wilson, LA, Wood, H & Zinganel, M. 2022, 'An agenda for creative practice in the new mobilities paradigm', Mobilities, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 349-373.
Para-Site-Seeing catalogue with essays by Prof Sarah Cook, Donna Holford-Lovell, Ali Floyd & Holly Yeoman, Rod Dillon, Jen Southern. 2020. Wellcome Centre for Anti Infectives Research. ISBN 978-1-8381710-0-1
Southern, J. & Thulin, S. 2020. ‘Composing Fragmented Relations with Materials, Locations and Archives’. Oxford Handbook on Sound Art. Oxford University Press.
Southern, J., Rose, E . & O’Keeffe, L. 2017. Art as a Strategy for Living with Utopias in Ruins. in J. Southern, E. Rose, L O'Keeffe & M. Buscher (eds), Mobile Utopia: Art and Experiments. pp. 2-11, ISBN 978-1-86220-339-6
Southern, J. 2017. Unruly Pitch: Flows and stoppages in football, art and methods. Wi Journal of Mobile Media.
Southern, J. 2016. Locative Awareness: A Mobilities Approach to Locative Art. Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Special Issue.
