Jesse Reding Fleming
Assistant Professor of Emerging Media ArtsArea of Focus: Emerging Media Arts
BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in New Genres
Teacher certification from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior
Jesse Reding Fleming, is part of an emerging group of artists and technologists innovating the convergence of media art and contemplative strategies. Fleming’s motivation is to transmute, and at times lower our perceived boundary between self and other. He takes inspiration from maps where a practitioner is given systematic techniques to explore their world, perception, consciousness, and relation to other through direct experience. He structures his work to elicit a selective attention towards witnessing and mutating the self-other dichotomy. This is seen in Fleming’s artistic research and development – a hybrid output of his XR, media art, installation, filmmaking, interaction methodology, and contemplative programming.
He joined the Johnny Carson Center as a founding member in 2019 and directs the Awareness Lab (tAL) a creative and critical research studio making artworks to be performed, experienced, or enacted as applied design, experiential media, and technologies for the surfacing of awareness, mind-body relation, attention, awe, insight and interconnection.
Fleming’s artworks are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; The Cedars-Sinai Collection, Los Angeles; the Rutter Family Art Foundation, Norfolk Virginia; and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul. He has been selected for exhibition at the Hammer Museum, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, West Hollywood Public Arts Commission, 356 Mission Road, the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair, LA Freewaves, Otis College of Art and Design, UCLA, and the Colburn School of Music (all in Los Angeles); Johnny Carson Theater, Nebraska; Middlebury College, Vermont; Virginia MOCA; MASS MoCA, West Adams; the Philbrook Museum, Tulsa; the San Francisco Symphony; Landmarks at the University of Texas at Austin; Creative Time, NYC; the Moving Image Art Fair, NYC; NADA, Miami; the National Film Museum, Frankfurt; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul; the Further Future Festival, Las Vegas; Slam Dance Film Festival, Park City; and the Loop Festival, Barcelona. In 2012, he won the NYC Moving Image Art Fair award for Exceptional Vision and Artistic Achievement, and in 2014, he was listed as number one of the top ten artists in Los Angeles in Artforum’s annual Best Of list.
He has an MFA from UCLA’s Design Media Arts Department, a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in New Genres, and a teaching credential from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
Courses
Game Engines for Real-time PerformancesAugmented Worlds
Virtual Production
Innovation Studio: Emergent Strategies for Regenerative Futures
Innovation Studio: Designing for Mindfulness
Visual Expression Studio
Honors and Awards
Grant Grand Challenges for Quantum Science, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Office of Research and Innovation, for the development of a location-based mixed-reality art installation. Co-principal investigator, ongoing, completion by August 2024.Nebraska Research Initiative, EDGEWORKS, Design Innovation Core, ORED. Co-principal investigator, awarded August 2021, ongoing, completion by August 2026.
Layman Grant, ORED. Principal investigator, awarded June 2021, ongoing, completion by August 2022.
Undergrad Creative Activities and Research Experience (UCARE), University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Principal investigator, one student, 2020–21.
First Year Research Experience (FYRE), University of Nebraska-Lincoln, two students, Fall 2020, Fall, 2021.
Arts and Humanities Research Enhancement Grant, ORED. Principal investigator, awarded June 2020, completed December 31, 2021.
Symposia Grant for Jennifer McCoy and Kevin McCoy, ORED. Principal investigator, awarded January 2020, completed December 2021.