Mary Agnes Krell
Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies (Centre for Photography and Visual Culture)

Research

Mary is currently the PI on Digital Ghost Hunt (an AR project combining live performance, technology and heritage sites). It was twice-funded by the AHRC and was featured as a part of a joint overseas cultural mission by the British Council and the AHRC to locations including SXSW.

She is also collaborating with printmaker Palmarin Merges on a series of works that explore how analogue and digital technologies support and confound communication. Some Assembly (an exhibition of some of this work) was chosen as a top 5 gallery opening when it premiered in Portland, OR.

In all of her work, interrogations of narrative, performance & mediated art are explored through combining analog and material digital technologies. 

She is interested in the intersection of performance and digital media and has used her work with Forced Entertainment and the Lee Miller Archives as points of departure. Her work has been funded in the UK by the AHRC, the British Academy, Arts Council England and commercial partners.

Selected Earlier Works:

In the past decade, Mary has completed a number of research projects including the following:

• Traces of Lee Miller:Echoes from St. Malo 
  Interactive Exhibition and DVD which toured internationally and was featured in exhibitions at the V&A (London) and at museums and galleries across Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
• Impossible Geographies
  An Interactive Installation shown on 4 continents created with Petra Gemeinboeck
• Nightwalks 
  A performative VR project with Forced Entertainment that won the Transmediale in 2000
• The Somnambulist 
  A generative film experiment funded by the British Academy. It was shown at film festivals and online.
• Investigating Imaginary Evidence 
  A digital project interrogating issues of creative authorship created while a Vectors Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center.
• A range of projects with Forced Entertainment 
  As an associate member of the company, I was the digital designer for a range of creative projects focussing on the intersection of devised performance and interactive technologies. Most of the work focussed on the creation of photo-real narratives and virtual spaces constructed as story fragments. 

Information about these (and other past projects) can be obtained via email.

Very Early Work:

Mary trained as a director and, as a result, her work is located in a space shared by performance, interactive media, ephemera and story-telling. At the start of her career, she worked in New York as an assistant to Richard Schechner during the development of his Faust/ Gastronome and Kafka's Amerika, projects with East Coast Artists. She was the volunteer co-ordinator for the London International Festival of Theatre in 1995. During the mid-late 1990s, she regularly collaborated with Forced Entertainment to create work which explored emerging technologies and devised performance. She has also worked with other live artists to explore digital technologies, including Michael Atavar, Daniel Gosling, and the BBC's Shooting Live Artists's Digital Performance Initiative.