Peter Kusek

Lecturer of New Media

Contact Information

  • pkusek@unca.edu
  • 350-4569
  • 307 Owen Hall

Office Hours

  • Tuesday 8:30 am - 10:00 am
  • Tuesday 5:15 pm - 7:10 pm
  • Thursday 8:30 am - 10:00 am
  • Thursday 5:15 pm - 7:10 am
  • Note: Or by appointment

Peter Kusek, Assistant Professor of New Media, earned an MFA in Film, Video, and New Media and an MA in Visual Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Artist Statement

"I employ oblique strategies and misuse media technologies to re-contextualize and reinterpret traditional cinematic, sonic, and photographic practices. Transforming arcane media into aesthetic experiences of generative forms, I search for the lyrical ghosts and the hidden artifacts of archival media."

"As a new media artist, I experience a compelling synergy that takes place between my writing and making that strengthens both processes: I make art to metabolize elements of my research findings and I write in order to map out and clarify my grasp of ideas and conceptual relationships. In my work, I search for the secret constellations that emerge where disparate ideas and influences connect in unexpected places. I seek to illuminate these expansive findings with lucid and informative writing. Both processes require me to risk by foregoing ideological comfort zones and by pushing past my present areas of competency I access new depths of thought to encode into my production of resonant and experiential media works."

"The near hundred-year gap between several early 20th-century modern art movements (primarily Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism, Constructivism, and Dada) and contemporary new media art and the similarities shared by both (i.e. the Dadaists’ ideas of image construction versus the Renaissance concepts of inspiration and personal artistic genius) factor significantly in my research. In recent years I have moved into a progressively deeper study of how these movements function as precursors of new media practices in their own eras."

"The democratization of technology: the prolific computer usage, social media and the emerging role(s) of the consumer as producer of publicly available internet content call for a progressive theoretical discourse equally related to art history, critical theory, visual studies, media studies, 20th-century philosophy, and ethnography. My interest in these distinct, but interrelated areas further intensifies my desire to circumnavigate, distill, and voice manifestations of thought as essay and experience as image and text via expansive and joyfully problematic genre of new media art."

 

Education

  • MFA, Film Video & New Media
  • MA, Visual & Critical Studies

Courses Taught

  • NM101 Digital Design Principles
  • NM121 Web Page & Interactive Design