EL Putnam
Originally from the United States, Dr. EL Putnam is an internationally recognised digital artist working in performance art and digital technologies. Her work focuses on borders and entanglements of gesture, particularly the interplay of the corporeal with the machinic. Through her artistic practice, EL explores hidden histories and emotional experiences, testing the limits of representation. She is drawn to actions as interlocution, or the forces and relations that interconnect people with places, space, material objects, technology, ideas, and each other through our shared milieu. In particular, she probes our gestural relationship to digital technology using wearable electronics in live performance and through the creation of responsive multimedia installations. Treating art events as inherently participatory, her work opens intersubjective spaces that offer multiple conceptual and aesthetic points of entry for the audience. In addition to creating works that are rich in cultural and political meaning, including the biopolitics of motherhood in Ireland, she is interested in how aesthetic pleasure can be used as a critical strategy, or as a means of captivating audiences in order to expose them to provocative ideas. EL is lecturer in Digital Media at National University Ireland Galway.
