Dr. Shanken writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. Recent publications and presentations address art and software, surveillance art, art historiography, land art, investigatory art, sound art and ecology, shamanism, video, and bridging the gap between new media and contemporary art. He co-curated the exhibition, Nothing to Hide: Art, Surveillance, and Privacy, 2017.
His book Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon Press, 2009) has been expanded with an extensive, multimedia, multilingual Online Companion. Inventing the Future: Art, Electricity, New Media was published in Spanish in 2013 as Inventar el Futuro, with Portuguese and Chinese translations forthcoming in paper and E-text. He is editor of Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (U California, 2003) and Systems (Whitechapel/MIT, 2015).
Prior academic posts include RISD, University of Washington, University of Amsterdam, and Duke University. Fellowships include National Endowment for the Arts, American Council of Learned Societies, UCLA, University of Bremen, and Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Shanken earned a Ph.D. and MA in Art History at Duke , an MBA at Yale, and a BA in Fine Art at Haverford College.
Links to his publications are available via his website, Contemporary Art and New Media.