Yvette Granata
Scholarship for artists, arts-based researchers, and curators at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz 2025
Yvette Granata is a media artist, filmmaker, and media scholar. She creates work across multiple media formats and makes immersive media experiences, VR art, video art, experimental animations, and hypothetical technological systems. She is currently interested in interrogating how socio-technological systems affect the body and vice versa, how the body interrupts socio-technic processes. Yvette holds a Phd from SUNY Buffalo’s Media Arts Program and a Masters from the University of Amsterdam. She is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in the department of Film, Television and Media and the Digital Studies Institute.
In her experimental animation project, Exo Gestus, Granata examines the artistic lineage of feminist craft in experimental moving image arts in which the performance of the body is central, yet the direct representation of the body remains outside of capture technology. While feminized craft has often been tied to the intricate work of the hands and fingers, such as weaving, stitching and other textile practices, in the tradition of feminist experimental film and media arts, the whole body has often been conceived as a method of inscription.
With the Exo Gestus series, Granata extends the tradition of experimental feminist image-making and brings it into the realm of digital animation. Utilizing an ill-fitting motion capture suit, she records choreographies of the body as a mode of critique of capture technologies and as a method of digital animation. The result is a series of warped digital figures that stretch out, glitch, and break apart in the process of being animated. During her time at the VALIE Export center, Granata will record new MOCAP files and use these files to expand her video series into a multi-screen installation with projected body-textures into the spaces of the center. She will experiment with how the spatial formation of the projections shift the animated environment. She will also explore the notes and works of VALIE Export in order to write about Export’s work as part of the historical genealogy of feminist media artists who think through gesture, experimental video, and body-based media environments.
