Rebecca Close works across media art and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Their animation films, installations and writing is concerned with reproduction and imagination, in terms of digital and networked memory; scientific imaging; and social reproduction as a site of possibility.
Previous research has focused on how poetry & theory, video/film networks, zines & print media periodicals, or the Internet interface, are taken up by people to alter epistemes and power relations. They are currently a DOROTHY researcher at the Institut d'Història de la Ciència (iHC) in Barcelona working on an MSCA project.
They are the author of two poetry collections: Valid, Virtual, Vegetable Reality (selected by Anthony V. Capildeo to win the 2017 Melita Hume Prize) and Réplica (Canal, 2022) and edit Them, All Magazine for poetry and Net/Software/Code art.
Their PhD research on The Fixed Capital of Fertility situated emerging computational and software landscapes of assisted reproduction in a broader history of reproductive struggle in Europe. The project was awarded the 2024 doctoral thesis award by the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture and key findings were published in The New Bioethics and The Journal of Gender Studies. They were a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University's ReproSoc in 2022.
A recent film The Wife of Them All combining science fiction animation with collaborations with (non)actors premiered at the 27th LesGaiCineMad Festival and travelled to the 69th International Oberhausen Short Film Festival with support from HAMACA moving image platform.
Training includes at the Arts Institute Bournemouth (Foundation Diploma in Art & Design); a first class BA degree in Philosophy (University of Manchester) and participating in the Programa de Estudios Independientes (PEI) at MACBA Museum, Barcelona. They have since contributed to many collective research, performance, curatorial, arts, archiving and translation projects, including diásporas críticas, Canal and Criticaldías. They were a lecturer in New Media and Experimental Practices (Universidad de las Artes Ecuador, 2015-2017), and have given short courses, classes and workshops on poetic and artistic ways of knowing for adults and young people at many universities and independent arts and activist spaces.
Short Bio.