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Welcome to Excitable Sanctuary, Lauren Fenton’s wunderkammer blog, mindmap and portfolio site. You can find out more about my fellow PhD candidates in the Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice program at the University of Southern California’s  School of Cinematic Arts and iMAP’s advisors and faculty at [imap.usc.edu]. If you were wondering, excitable sanctuaries are the sort of things I like to make and talk about.

I design interactive media installations (Fisher Museum, 2010), experimental games, video art and animated/mixed media shorts (Chapman Gallery, 2009), exhibits (SCA gallery, 2010) informed by avant-garde film, theme parks, electronic dance culture, phenomenology, and the experience of the flaneur. Currently my research focuses on designing ambient and recombinant narratives that can be accessed through interactions with the textures of real space. I am interested in developing the idea of immersion in terms of a cross-pollination of virtual and tactile geographies — the meaningful correspondences in our sensual perceptions and their affective reverberations.

My background is in philosophy, Russian studies and visual ethnography. In 2006, I spent a year in Siberia on a Fulbright fellowship to make a documentary about the impact of post-Soviet globalization and consumer culture on the Altaians, an indigenous people settled in the Altai region.

My other interests include coming up with taxonomies for the psychological interfaces of inanimate objects and surfaces, and the history of “magical” entertainment technologies from mechanical toys and cabinets of wonders to phantasmagoria and stereoscopy.

Being part of an interdisciplinary practice-oriented PhD program housed within the USC Cinema School allows me to work with the John C. Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts, the Interactive Media Division, the Production Division, the Department of Critical Studies, and the Roski School of Fine Arts.

Contact Information:

lfenton1@gmail.com

Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice
Institute for Multimedia Literacy Bldg.
School of Cinematic Arts
746 West Adams Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90089-7727