Andrea Zapp

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Most Recent Affiliation:


  • Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester School of Art, Senior Research Fellow

Location:


  • Manchester, United Kingdom

Website:


Bio:

  • Andrea Zapp (Germany) is a Senior Research Fellow in Media Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, School of Art; and Programme Leader of the Media Lab. She is also an internationally exhibiting media artist and fashion designer. Her digital and design installations have been exhibited in media festivals, museums, and galleries across Europe, the USA, South America, Australia and Asia. Building on this expertise she focuses her practice and research on narrative digital imagery for fabric, textile and conceptual fashion design.

    Over the past decades, she has created artworks that investigate the digital network, human presence and identity as subject to a constant flow of online contributions, data and non-physical body representation. In “Networked Installations”, she mixed and referenced real, virtual and online spaces, mostly combined with surveillance interfaces.

    Recent methods explored “Media, Miniature and Shifting Scales” as a distinct format of installation architecture to reflect these different stages of being through the miniscule – hence being inside and outside the medium. Experiments in “Textile Media Narratives” explored digital media and mapping of collective space through fabric print, image patterns, embroidery techniques and other formats of physical object and embellishment.

    These different methodologies and steps of investigation culminate currently in “Analogue becoming the new Digital” as her research question. Through further design and applied art approaches, she intends to establish a stronger emotional link between audience and media artwork. The virtual space is framed at as the other place of memory and home by capturing it in analogue paraphernalia, modeled on and manufactured from the digital. Craft and media design objects and artefacts render the digital space domestic and decorative, but with the intention to provoke a surreal and paradoxical sense of longing and belonging to a parallel world.

    She published Networked Narrative Environments as imaginary spaces of being, MMU/FACT Liverpool, 2004; and New Screen Media, Cinema/Art/Narrative, BFI, London, 2002, (with Martin Rieser). She curated international exhibitions – StoryRooms, Networked Media Art & Installations, at The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, Oct 05 to Jan 06 and The World is My Imagination, Media-Model-Miniature, at CUBE Gallery Manchester, Sept to Nov 2007; POI – Moving, Mapping, Memory, at Cornerhouse Manchester, June 2009, and Analogue is the New Digital, An exhibition across the Digital Networks of Manchester, in collaboration with Simon Blackmore, Manchester, October 2010, as part of AND Festival. She has lectured and shown her artworks at numerous international venues, exhibitions and festivals since the Mid Nineties, including ISEA, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH et.al.

    She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

    In curriculum development she has pioneered and led the MA Media Lab as a multi-disciplinary student-led research community with external creative industry partners, has led the Professional Platforms in the MA Network and has been teaching across a broad spectrum of courses in the Media Department.

    She currently researchs the future of fashion and technologies, investigating the potential of smart fabrics and e-textiles for design purposes and new visual production concepts in fabric design. In 2014 she launched the fashion, media and design spin-out and research company – AZ.andreazapp, in which she uses her own photography for unique collection designs. www.andreazapp.com

    Andrea has an MA background in Film and Media Studies as well as Russian and French Literature and Language (Philipps University Marburg, Germany, 1990).

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