Karen O'Rourke
Emeritus Professorat Jean Monnet UniversityMy work explores the relationship between art practice and the concepts of network, archive and territory in projects such as City Portraits (1989-92), Paris Réseau / Paris Network (1993-2000), archiving as art (1997-2000), A Map Larger Than the Territory (2002-2004), Eavesdroplets (2006), Partially Buried University (2008-2010) and Artists Bearing Gifts (2013–). The more than 50 research articles I have published include a recent piece on Project Row Houses, which will be the subject of my next book. My writing has found a home mainly in scholarly publications like Leonardo, Figures de l’art and antiAtlas Journal, but I have also made brief forays into narrative nonfiction and journalism. My first monograph, Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers was published by the MIT Press in 2013. In it, I explore a series of walking/mapping projects by contemporary artists. Some chart “emotional GPS”; some use satellites for creating landscapes made of data –“datascapes”– while others use their legs to do “speculative mapping.” The second, Des arts-réseaux aux dérives programmées : actualité de « l’art comme expérience » (From art networks to programmed drifts: the topicality of “art as experience,” 2011), was my habilitation thesis. Earlier publications include Paris Réseau/Paris Network (2000), a bilingual CD-Rom title. I taught for 29 years at l’École des Arts de La Sorbonne (Pantheon-Sorbonne University) where I was a Maître de conferences (Associate Professor). I took a position as a Professor at Jean Monnet University (Saint-Etienne) in 2014. I have been an emeritus Professor since 2017.