Email: awoolsey@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Cell: 571-305-0258
LinkedIn
Tokyo-born and Beijing-raised, Amanda Woolsey is a multidisciplinary artist, naturalist, avian enthusiast, and aspiring zoo-musicologist currently based in Astoria, Queens. Amanda holds a BS in Environmental Science from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and is a current Data Analysis and Visualization master’s student at CUNY The Graduate Center. She has worked extensively in the fields of avian migration and songbird behavioral ecology; collaborating with international research institutions including Beijing Normal University, University of Groningen, and Hawk Mountain Sanctuary over the course of her career. Deeply inspired by both her multicultural upbringing and past work as a research ornithologist, she works to utilize digital artistic tools as an effective means of data-driven wildlife conservation engagement.
In my work, I seek to meld the computational to the ecological to explore the nexus that rests at the intersection of aesthetics, wildlife science, and data. Inspired by witnessing biological design in the natural world as a research ornithologist, I strive to elicit a feeling of ecologically-driven wonder in an interactive digital format. My intent is thus to create engaging and pedagogical pieces of digital art, focusing on the creative kinship between animals and machines. In creating my data visualization piece “Hope is a Thing with Feathers”, I sought to close the artistic distance between natural forces and technological beings and dismantle the perceived notion that natural and computational worlds exist in adjacent, yet separate, nodes by visualizing bird collision rates in New York City in an interactive digital format. By envisioning ecological relationships with a digital lens, my work is heavily guided by core tenets of cybernetics and ecofeminism. Working with digital mediums allows me to envision an alternative eco-technological future, not one marred by anthropocentrism, but one in which digital and physical ecosystems may exist in mutualistic harmony. By using human-driven digital formats, I am able to employ a sense of humanism in my data-driven work, which is key in both catalyzing an empathetic shift to a mutualistic future and perceiving oneself as part of the natural world rather than a separate entity.