Erin Single
Media artist, designer, educator
Erin Single (b. Richmond, VA) is a media artist, designer, and educator who creates installations, performances, and experimental films. Her practice-based research examines the relationship between nature, the female body, and technology across timescales.
She lives and works in Macon, GA.
Snail dance
Video installation and performance
Year: 2026
The central research question driving the project is: How can we collaborate with minerals in performance-based artistic processes with digital media to tell stories that generate empathy for the landscape? Through video performance, I developed a multimedia installation with video projection, photographs, and live performance that explores a character’s relationship with the mineral calcite, as it is entangled with themes of inner beauty, snails, loneliness, and the extractive nature of the beauty industry.
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Lavatoi
Single-channel video
Year: 2026
This work speculatively reimagines the communal wash house as a site of rest, play, and women's liberation. In rural villages throughout Italy before washing machines and indoor plumbing were widespread, women gathered at lavatoio to wash clothes in the natural spring fountains. The lavatoi is a symbol of domestic labor, habits of everyday life, and a relic of a less isolated time. This work considers the screen as the digital border between the interior emotional world and the exterior architecture of the physical world and explores this theme through character-based screen performance and improvised movement.
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Dust warning: Does Albemarle know about this?
Video installation and performance
Year: 2021
Lithium is the lightest metal on Earth and an unseen material in most of our electronic devices. It is vital to our everyday consumption and creation of digital media.
This multiscreen video installation and performance explores landscape and liveness in a lithium mine. Using aesthetic strategies and character-based performance to estrange a site of extractive capitalism, the landscape opens itself to alternative imagining.
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Fear is a virus
Single-channel video
Year: 2020
This experimental film complicates the performance of everyday life and vanity in times of apocalypse. Employing an aesthetic of sublime contamination, the film questions our contemporary, social media-obsessed society. What does decoration with make-up and jewels mean when no one will see you? What is the future of luxury in a world that no longer has fashion runways or hotels? What happens to new life?
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Negative tides
Video installation
Year: 2020
The King Tides are natural phenomena that occur twice a year when the moon, Earth, and sun are aligned and coastal areas experience the most extreme difference in low and high tides. The obfuscation of the past, present, and future in the physical installation with a cinemagraph created an eerie glimpse of a future in which we can only experience the ocean in a digital realm.
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Have you ever been to an ocean?
Performance
Year: 2020
A multimedia performance in the tradition of disc and video jockey culture using found video and audio, envisioned as a 30-minute set in a festival or club space. I layer retro MIDI hip-hop beats and a repeating chorus of a child saying “Have you ever been to an ocean? I have never been to an ocean” with projected archival footage of icebergs, the ocean, and beach vacationers from the 1960s and 70s. The work creates a futurescape that use the emotion of nostalgia to create another world in which we experience a memory of the ocean in projected sound and image.
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Bleached
Interactive installation with Processing.js
Year: 2019
Coral is an organism constantly in a state of growth and destruction, and this process is entangled in human political, economic, cultural, and social systems. The core idea for this specific piece is to generate empathy for the coral by using motion capture technology to impact an image of bleached coral shown on a screen. As viewers move throughout the space, the image of the coral changes colors and glitches based on movement captured in the space, bleaching the coral reef on the screen. The Kinect sensor was hidden in the installation so that changes on screen could not be linked to singular movements, but rather appeared as part of a system. This work considers ideas such as the Anthropocene and multispecies ethnography to address the environmental crisis facing coral reefs.
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Cake piece
Performance
Year: 2019
Cake Piece, its name inspired by Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) and the quote “Let them eat cake” (originally in French, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”) was a performance to critique Georgia House Bill 481. This bill, passed in 2019 by the state of Georgia’s General Assembly, was an anti-abortion law that outlawed most abortions once a doctor could detect fetal cardiac activity, or about six weeks into a pregnancy. The artwork challenges a law that “violated a woman’s constitutional right to access to the procedure as established by the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade” and more broadly the elitism of state governments in the southern United States which passed similar legislation at this time.
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