Tammy Renee Brackett

Tammy Renée Brackett received a BA in Fine Arts from Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y., where she graduated summa cum laude and with honors in fine arts in 2003. In 2006 she received an MFA in Electronic Integrated Art in the School of Art and Design at Alfred University. Critiques of the impact of scientific “breakthroughs” on identity formation inform Brackett’s work. Using new media and traditional artistic mediums, she explores the factors that contribute to the invention of new identities and the overlapping fluid structures behind them. Through disciplines such as biotechnology and cartography, her art demonstrates the impossibility of finding any absolute structure governing identity or pinpointing its location. Brackett raises questions concerning the manipulations of science and mass media as they define human epistemology on both an individual and collective scale, and her work explores the blurry ethics of a frenetic acceleration in acquisition of scientific knowledge. Brackett’s recent work uses scientific data, such as the Map of the Human Genome, brainwave biofeedback, and infrared frequencies, as elements in her musical compositions and surround-sound installations. By using her own voice to generate the frequencies of DNA, she combines the individual human with its collective representation. These compositions in turn create video imagery when they are used by a computer program that remaps the information into a video matrix. Brackett has exhibited in Japan, Croatia, Hungary, and the United States and was recently included in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s biennial exhibition, Beyond/In Western New York. She has been awarded the 2005 College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship for Visual Artists, funded by the NEA.