Elizabeth Knipe is a digital poet and experimental video maker who entertains an interest in physical electronic art. Her work often deals with social dynamics and reconstruction of "the real" in the digital realm, exploring the role of interactivity in a user's/viewer's experience of an artwork. In the past year, Elizabeth has read a selection of her digital poems at the E-Poetry Festival in London, UK, the BIOS Symposium at West Virginia University, and the E-Poetry Symposium: Language Media Poetics at SUNY Buffalo. Her video work has been screened at various Buffalo venues, including Squeaky Wheel Media Center,CEPA Gallery, Soundlab, and Kitchen Distribution, as well as at Berks County Filmmakers in Reading, PA and at The Lucy Parsons Center in Boston. Elizabeth received an MFA from the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo in 2008.

Artist's Statement

First and foremost, I consider myself a poet. Words and language catch my attention, send me into a space where experiences can be condensed into a common demoninator between all of us. Details vary, but our emotional response, that feeling in our gut when we hear, or read, or see a clarification of the world we live in--that's what relates us. In my work, I seek projects that call that response from both me and my audience.

Many of my poems are drawn out of the experience of growing up on a farm in a small town. The scenery of my childhood is peppered throughout the imagery in my writing and inspires the colors in my videos. Most often the content or plot acts as a reconciliation between my rural youth and urban adulthood, between the family I was born with and the family I have created. The tension between these dichotomies and the resulting insecurities are always present at some level.

I am curious about technology and the way it shapes our response to art. I like to explore what happens when a poem starts to move around the screen, and gets illustrated by sound and visual elements. How can I use these things to better access those gut responses that call to mind memories based on emotion? To draw in the audience of my screen-based works, I explore the use of interactivity in the physical sense, when the whole body is engaged in sending messages to a computer (not just the hand).