Nancy Mauro-Flude

Nancy Mauro-Flude is a mother, digital caretaker, and faerie circuit researcher whose commitment to holistic computing arts advances expanded forms of literacy around digital customs, codesign and somatic investigation at scale.

She is founder of Autoluminescence Institute, an autonomous school for holistic computing arts, citizen science fiction, and somatic exploration that fosters art, design, and innovation at scale.

Nancy enjoy's navigating different kinds of operating systems through handy work that lovingly crafts strings of code to not only access but also touch my deepest, darkest files. Through artistic research, she devises performance installations that appreciate visceral networks of data fauna and flora fiction. Nancy seeks to raise awareness of cultural practices that increasingly rely on “Big Tech” infrastructure, compelling the public to consume their products to participate in digital colonisation. This dependence comes with oblique ecological, corporeal and transcendental costs.

An early contributors to permacomputing, a holistic movement embraces the interconnection of various elements the turbid and tendrilled realms of signals, waves, fibres, minerals, dirt, slime, shells and kelp, she emphasise how computational poetics and context-dependent processes with materialities can effectively intervene.

Marcia Nancy Mauro-Flude
Computational Arts | Art History and Theory | Oceania Pacific Diasporas | Science Technology and Science Studies
Nancy Mauro-Flude is a digital caretaker, artist and critical media theorist driven by the demystification of technology and the ‘mystification’ that lies in and through the visceral performance of the machinic assemblage. With a specialisation in critical coding and algorithmic cultures, critical Internet theory, materialist informatics and artistic research, her findings build upon in-depth empirical ethnographies, fostering integrated understandings of holistic computing practices and their relations to informal economies of place-based trade and future heritage paradigms. Mauro-Flude’s proficiency as a cultural leader nurturing a community of practitioners is substantiated by industry accolades, such as: Real Life: Mapping Digital Cultural Engagement in the First Decades of the 21st Century, a significant international impact report by the Australia Council for the Arts in 2021, evidenced her two-decade trajectory of contributions as an exemplar, including featuring her artwork on the front folio; Professor Hanna Musiol referred to Mauro-Flude’s research contributions as synergies to support her observation: ‘The digital and narrative work performed, builds new networks…vitally, technology itself becomes a medium of critical theory (Mauro-Flude 2015)…it is important to recognize the role and the work of programmers and designers as potential allies of social justice practices, and as creators of critical theory…not only as a tool of “social dreaming”…but also as a vehicle for a radical critical…practice…as a remedy to disempowerment’ in her commentary ‘Metaphors of Decryption: Designs, Poetics, Collaborations’, Decrypting Power (Rowman and Littlefield International 2019, 157–78).

Nancy Mauro-Flude has worked in cross-cultural contexts for two decades across five continents (Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, Netherlands, Romania, Austria, Norway, Germany, South America, North America, and Haiti). Her extensive experience with the intercultural dimensions of creative arts and holistic computing literacies is connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all, explicitly contributing towards the following SDG(s):
* (5) Gender equality and empower all women and girls
* (9) Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation.
* (10) Reduce inequality within and among countries
* (16) Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

EDUCATION
2015 PhD., ART (Electronic Media/History, Technology, and Society) School of Creative Arts & Media, University of Tasmania (UTAS)
2007 MA., (Media Design), Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University
2004 MA., (Theatre), DasArts Amsterdam University of the Arts.
2001 Bachelor of Arts, Hons. 1 (Performance Studies), Media, Arts and Communication Department The University of Sydney.
1999 Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology), Media, Arts and Communication Department University of Sydney.
APPOINTMENTS
2018-current Assistant Professor (Computation Arts) Digital Ethnography Research Centre, College of Design and Social Context RMIT University
2016–2018 Assistant Professor (Visual Communication) Communications and New Media Department, National University Singapore (NUS)
2016–2018 Director of Curatorial and Cultural Leadership, NUS Museum/ArtScience Museum
2015-6 Visiting Associate Professor (Art & Technology), Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
2008-13 Sessional Lecturer School of Creative Arts & Media and Computer Science and Engineering Faculty, UTAS

Fellowship and Residencies
2023 Artist in Residence RAWSPACE Theatre Royal, Performing Lines Tasmania
2013-14 Research Fellow Creative Exchange Institute, Provost’s Division, UTAS
2005-current Research Fellow, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
2007-8 Moddr_ Media Lab cofounder, WORM Institute for Avant Guardistic Recreation, Rotterdam worm.org
2007 Research Fellow Slade School of Fine Art, University of London
2006 Artist in Residence Museums Quartier, Vienna
2006 Research Fellow Patching Zone, V2: Institute of Unstable Media Rotterdam, The Netherlands patchingzone.net
2003-5 Artist in Residence, Waag Society Institute for Art, Science & Technology, Amsterdam waag.org