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, but loving it. Besides video, I’m a photographer, a cyber artist, an anti-theorist and a writer as well. My videos have screened in many venues internationally, and I’ve participated in many film festivals and gallery shows. For the past couple years I’ve been creative interactive fiction as well.
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 is my distributor. My cyber art is archived at Cyland Video Archive, an international digital art archive.
Interactive Fiction / IF
In the past five years, I’ve been creating Interactive Fiction. I created two long IF stories including Time Before Memory (2019) and a sequel, Shanidar, Safe Return (2023). The setting for Time and Shanidar is prehistoric Eurasia. The characters are Cro Magnons and Neanderthals. They’re definitely speculative fiction (sci-fi) and are based on a lot of research into the time-period of 40,000 years ago.
Drift and Ride
Drift and Ride are interactive photo essays, both from 2020, created during the pandemic. Drift documents a stroll through my Staten Island neighborhood of St. George, which is itself like a trip back in time.
Ride is about public transit, which became much less of a safe option 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 the most about writing from 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 – climate, wealth inequity, racial justice, women’s oppression, human rights. I don’t usually write directly about those things – I’m not a journalist. Rather, consideration of those things make evident an inherent connectivity and interactivity of everything, from the quantum to the universal. I like to think about 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. Writing The Irreducible I pushed me out of theoretical thinking and into looking at situations and circumstances of naturally forming connectivities and the pathways to social change.
The Irreducible I: Space, Place, Authenticity, and Change
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.
Photography
I take photographs every day, visual notes on what’s going on around me. Sometimes intimate views of life, but not necessarily personal. Themes emerge in my photographs: irony, freeform visualization, casual causality, immediacy, thought-free awareness, reaction vs action, and observing the transitory physical world – everything in transit, everything changing, all the time.
I especially like to take photos of architecture. How buildings sit in the landscape, or more simply, how they sit on the earth and how they’re grounded. The building below is the St. Paul’s Bookstore building on victory Boulevard in Staten Island. St. Paul’s is one of the ugliest brutalist structures I’ve seen.
