[-empyre-] Welcome To Week 4: Patrick LIchty, Emily V. Duke and Cooper Battersby, and Jessica Posner,

[Renate Ferro]

Many thanks to Constanza Salazar, Rachel Fein-Smolinski, and Lynne Sachs for taking us through Week 3 on –emyre-.  I welcome our guests for the last week of our discussion with their biographies below. Please welcome Emily V. Duke and Cooper Battersby who are a collaborative pair, Jessica Posner, and Patrick Lichty.  Their biographies are below.  Looking forward to this wrap up.  Best. Renate

Week 4-Biographies 
Patrick Lichty (US, USE) is a media “reality” artist, curator, and theorist of over two decades who explores how media and mediation affect our perception of reality. He is best known for his work with the virtual reality performance art group Second Front, and the animator of the activist group, The Yes Men. He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow and Whitney Biennial exhibitor as part of the collective RTMark. He has presented and exhibited internationally at numerous biennials and triennials (Yokohama, Venice, Performa, Maribor, Turin, Sundance), and conferences (ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Popular Culture Association, SLSA, SxSW)

Jessica Posner is a feminist multimedia and performance based artist and writer who practices resilience and radical vulnerability as means for healing the self, body, spirit, and each other. She currently lives and works in central New York State where she teaches video and studio art as a contingent academic laborer. She spent 7 years making art with and about butter; and is now making art about and through sisterhood, popular culture, and sharks. She originated the “FEELINGS: A Feminist Art Video and Film Festival” in 2018. Examples of her work can be viewed at jessicaposner.com and vimeo.com/jessicaposner.

Emily Duke and Cooper Battersby
Cooper Battersby (b. 1971, Penticton British Columbia, Canada) and Emily Vey Duke (b. 1972, Halifax Nova Scotia, Canada) have been working collaboratively since June 1994.  They work in printed matter, installation, new media, curation and criticism, but their primary practice is in art video. They live in the countryside in Central New York State.  

Their work has shown at the Whitney Museum, Walker Center, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the Musee d’Art Contemporain Montreal, The New York Film Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam.   A book about their work, The Beauty Is Relentless, came out in 2012. 

Their work Dear Lorde won the Grand Prize at the European Media Arts Festival and showed at Videonale in Bonn Germany. In 2011, they were shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious prize for artists under 40.  

In 2011 they were Featured Filmmakers at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival.   In 2016, they were Spotlight Artists at the Images Festival in Toronto. 

They are both tenured faculty in the Transmedia Department at Syracuse University in Central New York.



Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu