BIO: Maria Wrang-Rasmussen

I work with storytelling, drawing, animation, and coding. I am currently examining themes of cyber memories, queer identity, and time through non-linear narratives and compositions. Considering the idea of simultaneity, Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome, has led me to look ahead at digital technologies and to the past into historical sources. Unlike the epistemological tree structure of information where knowledge “branches” out, the rhizome looks at information as a grid of connected points, like mushroom roots or an ant colony, connected and responding to each other. I see the rhizomatic pattern in different places, from webpages to fresco wall paintings and Choose-your-own-adventure novels.

How can the non-linearity of the rhizome be used to explore queerness and identity?

The pattern shows up in my drawings, with entangled bodies in ink and charcoal, touching, colliding, pushing against each other, and in the browser, intermixing textures and physicality with the digital. The visual language of my moving image work features soft movements, multiple events unfolding simultaneously. I use the moldability of the medium to embody the fluidity in expressions of identity and intimacy. These animations branch out: in some paths they exist purely as film, some as physical objects in art installations, and finally some are integrated in my browser-based art, where the moving images, static drawings, and stories are combined.

My browser-based artworks are open and accessible to everyone though the website-URL. Provoking the barrier between the author and the viewer, reactive programming lets the artwork form itself around the viewers mouse-movement and clicks. There is no one way to view them, no definite start or end, just moments.