Debra Swack (USA)

Debra Swack

is an artist who combines arts with technology and science. She has a B.A. in Art from SUNY@Binghamton and is also a Phi Theta Kappa in Computer Science. She is employed as a consultant for the SUNY@Buffalo Research Foundation where she does software testing, technical writing and software user training. She was born in Louisiana while her father composer Dr. Irwin Swack was teaching at LA Tech and conducting the Knoxville Symphony (his archives are in the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library). Her work is mentioned in Xerox Parc’s “Art and Innovation” and Stephen Wilson’s “Information Arts” both published by
MIT Press and is also included in the New MuseumÂ’s Rhizome ArtBase collection of historically significant new media.

Debra Swack is a new media and sound artist whose projects have been presented at The University of California at Irvine, White Box Gallery, Eyebeam, Princeton University, The New Museum, The New York Hall of Science, The Banff Center for the Arts, The Arts and Genomics Center in Amsterdam and Vancouver, Xerox’s Palo Alto Lab, Real Art Ways (Sol LeWitt Collection) and the Beecher Center for Arts and Technology. Publications include Mark Batty/ Random House, e-Scholarship’s “The Emotions-after Charles Darwin”, MIT’s “Art and Innovation at Xerox Parc” and “Information Arts”, Ars Electronica Cyberarts 2005, Kloone4000, Allegories of the Genome, Art Calendar, NY Arts, PhotoReview (selected by Philip Brockman of the Corcoran) and Printmaking Today.

“Birdsongs; the Language Gene” (which reconfigures birdsongs into human music) was previously presented in the “Sonic Fragments” sound-art festival at Princeton University in 2008 and is in the collection of the New Museum. “95 Chimes”; a sound installation relating music string theory to music was first presented in 2002 at the ASCI SCI-Art Symposium at the Museum of Natural History in New York and was mastered in 2005 in Banff Centre for the Art’s recording studio under a co-production grant. She also has worked collaboratively with her father, classical composer Dr. Irwin Swack (whose archives are in Lincoln Center), most notably on “Little Wars; the Carousel Project”; an animated video using his piece Four Burlesques for Flute and Bb Clarinet.

She is currently preparing “Animal Patterning Project” (a bio-art/ animation exploring the genetic alteration of the patterning of animal skins to make them more aesthetic for human exploitation) and “Digital Maze Symmetry Project” (participant s can “grow” and interactively navigate through their own 3D software designed virtual architectural maze space) for publication by Mark Batty for Random House in “Infinite Instances: Studies and Instances of Time.”

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