DANIELLE RONEY

Danielle Roney’s hybrid practice explores how art and technology can democratize spatial narratives and infrastructures. Working with mediated sculpture, fluid architectures, and time-based media she interweaves isolation and connectedness, redefining spatial relationships to create new satellites of meaning while collapsing physical barriers.

Working across institutional and civic spaces, for nearly two decades Roney has created artworks exploring collective behaviors and spatialized intelligence to underscore our macro and micro entanglements. Early works examined the initial implications of the Informational Age – socially, politically, and culturally – and in 2005, at TEDGlobal, she presented Global Portals, a concept for transnational networked public spaces. A parallel series of work examined the relationship between technology and pluralism, where Genesis Trial: China (2006) and Genesis Trial: Johannesburg (2008) began a series of investigations into the multiplicity of modern global centers and the reinterpretations of cultural identities. During this period, she also established a satellite studio in Beijing (2005-2009).

2010 ushered in a new, decade-long research-based focus in Roney’s practice, pivoting from a macro exploration of the collective global implications of networked culture to a micro focus on the individual experience of the migrant condition, particularly in relation to technologies of power and surveillance. Refugee Conversations (2011) portrays the expansion and contraction of personal mobility routes to and from Istanbul – a city at the epicenter of migration. Adapted from the Bertold Brecht’s play of the same title, the piece illuminates present and historical juxtapositions of human migration and individual conditions of exile caused by oppression and violence.

Roney continued to steadily deepen her public realm practice, refining her exploration of how we navigate the world individually and collectively. Opposing Views, selected by the International Symposium of Electronic Arts Istanbul 2011 in conjunction with the Istanbul 12th Biennale, presented the visualization of conflict through debate upon the interactive media façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, with an emphasis on how the ideologies of the few impact the many. Monumental public projects included live architectural mapping with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra (2014) upon the Wisconsin State Capitol Building and permanent sculpture commissions in the ‘Particulate Series’ including Houston (2015), Toledo (2017), Atlanta (2017), and Dallas (2020).

Oscillating between global and local, community integration figures as a prominent feature of both Roney’s institutional and public realm work process. Her 2019 project, STRATA: Bending Fields of Relation, for the exhibition ‘knowledges’, involved an extensive community outreach process in which Roney collaborated with University of Kansas based DACA support student services groups and local allyship training programs in asking the question: How can migrants and their communities occupy institutional spaces, anonymously and safely? The resulting sets of autonomous networked interfaces produced LED sculptural formations translating vocal data visualizations of migrant collaborators to provide portals of presence for the occupation of institutional space.

Roney’s overlapping material and conceptual trajectories come together in a new hybrid form in SUPERPOSITIONS, a NEXT decade initiative leveraging autonomous networked virtual infrastructures to generate meaning beyond the spectacle of technological innovation and renew opportunities for human connection in the public realm. Individual, mediated sculptures – STRATA – establish performative thresholds that expand intersubjectivity through Translation and Transmission; constructing collaborative modes of democratized cultural production.

Roney exhibited in the Beijing off-biennale ‘Convergence’ with curators Feng Boyi and CS Kiang, and has produced works in Johannesburg, Venice (IT), São Paulo, and Istanbul. US exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Zuckerman Museum of Art; and SouthxEast Biennale. In 2015, Opposing Views was highlighted in the StatsPL educational program, a collaborative effort between cognitive and neuroscience experts, technologists, and top educators made possible by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

She has received numerous grants including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia and Sony Electronics. Roney participated in ‘knowledges’ (2019), the Integrated Arts Research Initiative at the Spencer Museum of Art funded by the Mellon Foundation, Warhol Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, ArtPapers, and featured in Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape and Dislocations, by Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

RONEY STUDIO

Roney began her studio career in the late 1990’s in Los Angeles, before relocating to Atlanta (2001), where she based her international practice from for 15 years; during which time she also opened a satellite studio in Beijing (2005-2009). In 2015, the studio expanded and permanently relocated to New York.

Informed by Roney’s hybrid artistic practice and history working across digital and physical mediums, Roney Studio currently consists of an international, multidisciplinary team of designers, programmers, and fabrication technicians synthesizing computationally driven approaches to design and fabrication with highly refined hand-based techniques. The Studio regularly collaborates with external global engineering and fabrication teams to develop unique approaches and innovate custom solutions in the execution of large-scale public-realm projects.

Embracing radical beauty through the tool of abstraction,

 

Roney Studio is dedicated to how art and technology can create meaning in the 21st Century.

 

Each project is the result of custom computational, data-driven design processes that present a poetic, considered vision of time-based interactions, incorporating data in response to a local context, community, and site.

Large-scale permanent public commissions articulate macro spatial perspective and micro connectivity in a state of suspended animation. Referencing collective behavior and spatial intelligence, algorithmic patterns have referred to the longest measurable duration of time, AEON (2015); for world-class health care facilities, envisioned our collective well-being, MYRIAD (2020) and presented the iconic emblem of future global connectivity, NEXUS (2017) for technology giant, NCR’s World Headquarters. Fluid dynamics within time-based media commissions have defined place through its celestial ECHO (2020), providing a fragmented view of the site’s personal universe through media architectures.

Studio activities draw upon Danielle Roney’s advocacy for the role of communicative infrastructures in the public realm and her overlapping background in urban master planning and experience in media-architecture design. In 2010 she designed the U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale of Architecture, with the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and 306090, Hong Kong. From 2010-2012, Roney was also a master planning public art consultant for the Atlanta Beltline, with Field Operations, led by Perkins and Will. She also sat on Mayor Shirley Franklin’s Public Art Advisory Committee for the City of Atlanta, as well as on the board of directors of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia and The Contemporary.

Leveraging two decades of world-class public realm experience to respond to the present moment, Roney Studio’s next focus is SUPERPOSITIONS, a multi-year initiative optimizing sculptural LED gestures with adaptive and autonomously networked virtual interfaces to create fluid, Momentary Monuments. Generating meaning through participatory community data, the initiative responds to and inspires social imaginaries through collaborative platforms.

The sculptural forms of SUPERPOSITIONS – STRATA – are fabricated through a first-of-its-kind process that pushes the limits of multi-axis stainless steel bending. A custom LED system engages community data to transform the formations into an animated video surface, manifesting human presence through light. The initiative arose in tandem to her upcoming satellite gateways, Meridian: East and West, for the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, premiering in 2021 and 2023. This supports the foundation that artworks in the public sphere can function as satellites of meaning that facilitate both physical and virtual connections across our networked lives; enabling an open, accessible, and inclusive experience that allows for a multiplicity of potentials.

Roney Studio supports inclusivity and diverse voices, internally within the studio and through initiating collaborative platforms of exchange that promote a vision of a more equitable future.