Lily Díaz

BIOGRAPHY

Lily Díaz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She grew up in Caracas, Venezuela and in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is married and has two children.

She has a Bachelor of Arts with honors in anthropology from Brandeis University (1981). Her honors essay (unpublished paper) was A Structuralist Analysis of the Cult of Puerto Rican Santeria. She has a Master of Fine Arts in Computer Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her final work for the M.F.A. degree was an essay, Pictorial Space in Computer Art, and a series of computer-generated stereographs. She is also an alumnae (1989) of the Studio Program of the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Lily Díaz works with technologically-derived artforms such as photography, video and digital media. Her interests focus on the areas of history, myth and representation. In 1985, as artist-in-residence at the Museum of Holography in New York City, she produced a holographic installation piece, A Tribute to Spiderman.This piece is now part of the Holography Collection at the MIT Museum of Art and Science.

During 1987, as part of a residency at Film/Video Arts (New York City), she created Afterimages, a VideoPoem. The video uses poetry to explore aspects of the Puerto Rican bilingual/bicultural identity. The piece has been exhibited widely and is part of the anthology Latin American Video during the Eighties of the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, ICI, in Madrid, Spain.

In 1990, she received a Fulbright fellowship to conduct research in the archives in Spain for A Simultaneous View of History, a hypermedia work about science in 16th Century America and Spain. The work investigates scientific techniques utilized by the Europeans to visualize the newly acquired lands.

In 1994, she was commisioned by the Arts Festival of Atlanta to create @rt Auction, an interactive computer art piece that explores the topic of how price informs our perception of art.

She has taught at the Pratt Institute of Design in Manhattan, the Universidad de Guadalajara in México, and has lectured in Finland, Norway, Puerto Rico, Spain and the United States. Currently she is pursuing post-doctoral studies at the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland. Illuminating History: Through the Eyes of Media is the title of her doctoral work at UIAH.

Her hobbies are: cooking, sewing, collecting old books, stamps, and postcards. She has a green belt in karate.

SYSTEMS OF REPRESENTATION:

The topics that my research deals with are:

ABSTRACT OF THESIS PROPOSAL:

Through the Eyes of Media: Illuminating History is an example of a synergistic collaboration that involves the Media Laboratory, the University of Turku, Department of Archeology, Raisio City Hall and the Academy of FInland. The project investigates new forms of representation of information in the humanities. The combined efforts include the creation of a digital archive. This involves a media transfer of archeological, historical and ethnographic data from an excavation site, archives, museums, and other repositories in Finland into digital multimedia data sets such as video clips, three-dimensional models of architectural structures, two dimensional images such as photographs, and recordings of reconstructions pertaining to the sites. The archeological point of view provides theoretical and material knowledge about artifacts from the past. Anthropological and cognitive science discourses supply concepts that allow for better understanding of collaborative processes among humanists, artists, and designers.

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE CONTENT MATERIALS USED:

Initially the main area for the content development has been the history of everyday life in Finland from the late Iron Age to the early Middle Ages. Artifacts from the Mulli Archeology Site have been utilized. The excavation work at the site has concentrated on history from the point of view of two thousand years of continued habitation. The site contains archeological remnants of diverse typology such as loom weights, 16th century ceramics, a cremation cementery, an inhumation cementery, and a medieval church. Other archival materials such as maps and coin hoard, once located at the site but now stored in diverse repositories throughout Finland, have been brought together in the digital archive.

COOPERATION UNITS

  • University of Turku, Department of Archeology
  • Raisio City Hall
  • Researchers from the National Board of Antiquities

    • SOURCES of FUNDING

  • Academy of Finland, stipend through Information Research Programme(1997-2000)
  • Research Institute, The University of Art and Design Helsinki/UIAH (1998)
  • Raisio City Hall
  • Center for International Mobility CIMO(Young Researcher award 1995-96)
  • Fulbright Research scholarship (Spain, 1990-91)

    • DEMONSTRATIONS RELATED TO RESEARCH (In chronological order with most recent first)

    PUBLICATIONS (In chronological order, most recent first)

    PUBLICATIONS ABOUT RESEARCH (In chronological order, most recent first)

    email: diaz@uiah.fi