Cecilia Dougherty
I took this picture of the 3-story mural of Biggie Small located at 1091 Bedford Avenue in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. The mural is astonishing in its height, boldness, and beauty. It was going to be painted over but has been saved. A PIX11 story about it here.
About Cecilia Dougherty
I’ve been a video artist since the mid-1980s. Before that, I was a painter, self-taught and working on my own, until I was able to enroll at UC Berkeley in the Art Department, where I took great painting and drawing classes. AT UC Berkeley, I found video, which seemed to be my true calling! My videos have screened in many venues internationally, and I’ve participated in many film festivals and gallery shows. But even so, one’s true calling can change, and I began creating works using simple html and css coding. And my most recent works have been interactive fiction, existing completely online. Microscope Gallery and Participant, Inc. have each hosted one of my works of interactive fiction.
Book: My first book, The Irreducible I: Space, Place, Authenticity, and Change (Atropos Press, New York and Dresden) was published in 2013 and is based on my PhD dissertation. In the book I argue for a removal of hierarchical classifications for humans, animals, machines, geographies, and the things we make and do. I propose approaching our problems as a species on Earth in terms of the interactivity of all elements involved. A fun read, for sure.
Video: Check out my Vimeo channel to see some of my videos: https://vimeo.com/ceciliadougherty.
My videos are archived at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and The Video Data Bank in Chicago and the Film-makers’ Cooperative distribute my work. My web art is archived at, and distributed by, Cyland Video Archive.
Interactive Fiction / IF
My most recent works are Interactive Fiction, including Time Before Memory (2019) and its sequel, Shanidar, Safe Return (2023). The setting for Time and Shanidar is prehistoric Eurasia. The characters are Cro Magnons and Neanderthals. These interactive stories are speculative fiction and are based on a lot of research into the time-period of 40,000 years ago. They include original graphics and photography, as well as an extensive soundtrack.
Drift and Ride
Drift and Ride are interactive photo essays created in 2020. Drift documents a stroll through St. George, my Staten Island neighborhood and is like a trip back in time. A lot of Staten Island neighborhoods have been stuck for decades, most likely due to neglect by developers. Developers are beginning to notice Staten Island, however, and are targeting some nearby neighborhoods for a renewal of dubious quality and purpose.
Ride is about NYC public transit, which became a much less safe option for getting aorund town during the pandemic. The piece is not about options, however. It’s about people-watching. Public transit offers a glimpse of chance encounters, meetings, conversations, New York street style, the mix and mashup of the residents of our city.
Writing
I learned a lot about writing from reading Georges Perec, the French 1950s-60s chronicler of everyday life. His work showed me how to escape ideology while keeping a clear head on issues that effect all of us. Issues such as climate change, wealth inequality, struggles for racial justice, women’s rights and bodily autonomy, freedom from war, human rights. I don’t usually write directly about those things directly, but their makes evident an inherent connectivity between everything, from the quantum to the universal. Perec illustrated ways of observing the present moment openly and freely, without judgment or motive.
In 2013, my book, called The Irreducible I: Space, Place, Authenticity, and Change, was published by Atropos Press and is based on my doctoral dissertation of the same title. Writing The Irreducible I pushed me out of theoretical thinking and I began to look at the naturally forming connectivities and the pathways to social change available in most situations and circumstances .
You can read a selection from The Irreducible I here.
The Irreducible I: Space, Place, Authenticity, and Change by Cecilia Dougherty, Atropos Press, 2013. Also available in KINDLE version.