Sean Kennedy
I’m an artist whose work focuses on the unique interactions that occur in immersive digital environments, whether that be in video work, hybrid works with physical media, or 3D space. Being trained in both digital and traditional arts, my work creates emotional meaning from operating in hybridity and mixed media. A lot of my work deals with intense feelings of fear, sadness, spirituality, solidarity and anxiety, and achieves this through confrontation, interrogation, or observation. My strongest skillsets are in video production, coding, sculpture, 3D modelling, and photography, with competency in visual design, audio editing, circuitry, game design, and drawing.
When considering what makes art worth experiencing, my mind is drawn to what makes moments in life worth experiencing. In the strings of moments that make up our life, good art experiences stick out as self-contained moments of emotional gravitas, escapism, or realization. In all circumstances the work puts us through a “trial” that, as Andrei Tarkovsky would put, “prepares us for death.” As an artist, my focus is on the self-contained experience. Something that draws the audience into a world of thinking and feeling is a tall order, but one that can be achieved by offering enough an experience with one foot firmly in our reality, and one foot somewhere totally new. My work seeks to provide anchors for the audience to latch onto, and short distances between them for the audience to swim from point to point, out into the depths. Thematically, it seeks to offer a perspective that is observational and participatory. You watch a situation unfold, but by watching are also participating in it. It is emotionally focused, but intellectually uncertain. The feeling is there, and the world reflects what the feeling is, but the idea cannot be reasoned with intellectually because it is not speaking that language.
Sean Kennedy is a graduate of the Emergent Digital Practices department at the University of Denver. To see EDP’s departmental exhibition, The EDP Virtual Expo 2021, click here.