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Annette Barbier and Drew Browning

Annette Barbier and Drew Browning are Chicago artists working in electronic media. Annette Barbier and Drew Browning both earned MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Browning is the director of the Design Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Barbier chairs the Interactive Arts and Media Department at Columbia College Chicago. Both use new technologies to explore issues of identity on a local and global scale. Their work may be seen on line at: http://www.unreal-estates.com

Annette Barbier is an artist whose work began in sculpture and moved through video to new technologies including computer animation, virtual reality, and net art. Her work addresses home, domesticity, and the ways in which identity is bound up with one's environment.

Barbier graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA. She dropped out of college to spend a year in France which was formative in making issues of home, culture and identity central to her work. Years later, a Fulbright lectureship in India with her 3 year old daughter confirmed the importance of travel in questioning one's conceptions about the world, and resulted in a travel diary tape. More recent work is growing from a profoundly moving trip to Vietnam in 2003.

Barbier is Chair of the Interactive Arts and Media department at Columbia College Chicago. She teaches new media, computer animation, video installation, and experimental video. Selected video work is distributed by the Video Data Bank.

Barbier lives on the edge of a forest preserve with her artist husband and frequent collaborator Drew Browning. She takes inspiration from this close connection to the natural environment, frequently spotting coyote, hawks, waterfowl, songbirds, and deer, watching the seasons change, and growing things.

Her work is on line at:
http://www.unreal-estates.com

Drew Browning is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the School of Art and Design with an MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been teaching in the Electronic Visualization and Industrial Design programs since 1976 and is the founder and Director of the Design Visualization Laboratory. Browning has produced numerous video and computer graphic art works and has exhibited internationally. He has authored papers in electronic visualization and design and given lectures on these subjects at various conferences and professional meetings. He has received art and design research grants from agencies such as the Illinois Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, Veterans Administration and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His current research involves art and design work in virtual reality and interactive digital media.

His work is on line at:
http://www.unreal-estates.com