Born in Paris. Lives in California
Prix Villa Medici
Visiting Scholar HitLab 1991-1992
Research Fellow MIT (Visual Arts Program) 1990-1991
Research Fellow MIT (CAVS) 1989-1990
Prix EDF Foundation/Pleias 1989
MA in Art and Technology, (Paris U)
MA in English, (La Sorbonne)
Grants from Silicon Graphics, Pixar, Wavefront; French Ministry of Culture
Nicole Stenger is a French/American artist, pioneer in Virtual Reality and in Web Cinema. In 1989-1991 she was a research Fellow at MIT-CAVS and MIT/Visual Arts Program. In 1991-1992 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (Hitlab) in Seattle.
In the nineties, after the completion of her VR project, Stenger worked on VRML works and developed online art projects that are early examples of Web Cinema. My Faux Cinema (1998–2003) followed by Love Your Friend (2004) was a project composed of web pages with animated gifs, java applets, open source audio files, textual parts written by Stenger or sampled from the Internet. Faux Films: Fresh! (2000) and Bitchery (2001) are stylistic jokes. They mimic cinema moving images. She also created Web Books: To Dream or Not to Eat (1998), The California Trilogy (1996–2000), Nature (2000), Nanfei in Waspland (2000). A Web Book is a kind of book with a story. It has the look of a book, with a cover, an introduction, a conclusion, and a narrative of seven to twelve pages. Web Books are multimedia works with static and animated text, animated gifs, VRML animation and sound.
Recent works
Stenger’s last works are VRML movies, also conceived for immersion. Chambers (2001), Dynasty (2007–2009). Dynasty is composed of 15 scenes with text by Stenger and music by Tchaikovsky.