About Derek

Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work investigates the role of new technologies in society and technological power structures using an approach that combines academic research with critical artmaking. His artworks often reverse-engineers and replicates technologies of control to better understand their implications and where assumptions or ideologies may have played a role in their development. His academic research draws from media theory and the social sciences, while his artistic practice is grounded in tactical media and institutional critique. Curry holds an MFA in New Genres from UCLA (2010) and a PhD in Media Study from the State University of New York at Buffalo (2018). He is currently an Associate Professor in Art + Design at Northeastern University in Boston. Curry has exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica, ISEA, National Gallery X (London), NeMe (Cypress), and the Athens Digital Arts Festival. His research has been published in Leonardo, Big Data & Society, Digital Culture & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. His artwork has been funded by Science Gallery (Dublin, Detroit, Atlanta), NEoN Digital Arts Festival, and MediaFutures. He is the recipient of the 2023 MediaFutures Best Artist(s) in the Artists for Media track award.

He is typically collaborating with Jennifer Gradecki

Contact: d.curry@northeastern.edu

• Derek Curry CV (PDF)

Peer-reviewed Articles

• Curry, Derek; Gradecki, Jennifer. “Epic Sock Puppet Theater : artistic tactics for mitigating online disinformation”. Artnodes, 2024, Num. 33, pp. 1-8, https://doi.org/10.7238/artnodes.v0i33.418111.
• Derek Curry, “Artistic Defamiliarization in the Age of Algorithmic Prediction,” Leonardo (Oxford) 56, no. 2 (2023): 177-182, https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02293.
• Derek Curry, “Speedrunning the Financial Markets: A Comparison of Gaming Culture and High Frequency Trading,” Digital Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (2021): 75—90. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5387-8/digital-culture-society-dcs/
• Anzman-Frasca, S., Singh, A., Curry, D., Tauriello, S., Epstein, Leonard H., Faith, Myles S., Reardon, Kaley, & Pape, Dave. 2020. “Evaluating a Board Game Designed to Promote Young Children’s Delay of Gratification.” Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.581025/full
• Derek Curry, “Public Dissentiment: Hacktivism in the Age of High-Frequency Traders.” Visual Resources 34, no. 1-2 (April 2018): 93-115. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01973762.2018.1435477
• Jennifer Gradecki and Derek Curry, “Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency: Prototyping Counterveillance.” Big Data & Society 4, no.1 (June 2017), http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951717693259

Book Chapters

• Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki (co-authored), “Artistic Research and Technocratic Consciousness,” in Retracing Political Dimensions: Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art, eds. Inge Hinterwaldner and Oliver Grau (De Gruyter, 2021).https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110670981
• Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki (co-authored), “Qualculative Poetics: An Artistic Critique of Rational Judgment,” in Shifting Interfaces: Presence and Reality in New Media Arts of the Early 21st Century. ed. Hava Aldouby (Leuven University Press, 2020). https://lup.be/products/123857