Houses of Domestic Memory
- Lisa Marie Patzer
- Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program
- Independent Creative Production Grant
Lisa Marie Patzer, 'Family Reunion' (c.2020), reverse-lit Kodak film installed in custom made wooden lightbox. Each lightbox is 28” x 18” x 3”. 8mm film stills processed by machine learning algorithms.
“Houses of Domestic Memory” is a series of large-scale digital prints and custom-designed lightboxes illuminating reverse-lit filmic images created from analog domestic archives. Broadly speaking, it is a visual inquiry into the production of domiciliary cultural history and patterned memory as seen through the lens of technological advances in machine learning algorithms. This project began with a set of 8mm found footage films from the mid-1960s and has expanded to incorporate other domestic archives such as wallpaper sample books, interior paint color sets, and woven textiles. Support from the Sachs Program will allow Lisa Marie Patzer to continue and expand this inquiry in scale and scope to include archival holdings in the Athenaeum of Philadelphia and develop a body of work for future exhibition.
Lisa Marie Patzer’s work is most often classified as new media/digital art, yet her practice is influenced by artists across a variety of traditions. Her interest in researching technologies of mass production and culture through art can be traced back to the Fluxus movement of the 1950s. Artists such as Jonas Mekas, George Brecht, László Moholy-Nagy, Michael Snow, and Nam June Paik set the stage for integrating technology into art in innovative and critical ways. Her past work has incorporated archival content to explore topics such as the history of surveillance technology and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of privacy rights, and how the advent of aerial photography, made common during WWI, altered our experience of warfare. She was the recipient of a Pew Fellowship in 2019.