Karl Erickson

Biography

Karl Erickson lives in Memphis, Tennessee where he is an Associate Professor of Digital Art at Rhodes College. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts and his BFA from Wayne State University. He was raised in the Detroit-area of Michigan. He makes digital animations, videos, installations, and audio/visual performances. His screen-based work takes place in galleries, museums, film festivals and music venues.

Karl’s art is about recognizing the agency of all the other-than-human entities with which we share the Earth. This includes plants and animals, as well as machines, “inanimate matter,” electricity, waste, the macroscopic and the microscopic. The complex systems he uses in his art-making, from photogrammetry to modular synthesizers to data analysis, are analogous to the complexity of the ecosystem. 

Karl will be creating a series of experimental animations and puppet-sculptures about waste along the Boise River Greenbelt. He will collect trash on the shores of the river and assemble these objects into puppet-like figures. He will then digitize them using 3D scanning processes. These digital “trash-puppets” will sing, dance, and tell stories of their unexpected journeys along the river, personifying the entanglements that bring human-generated material into contact with the more-than-human. Karl’s animation Know No Now has been screened at the 2023 LINOLEUM Animation and Media Art  Festival in Kyiv, Ukraine, Chroma Art Film Festival in Miami, FL  (where it won the 2023 award for Best Animation),  and the 2023 West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival. He’s been an artist in residence at Loop Art Critique, The Arctic Circle, PlySpace and Signal Culture.