From Merce Cunningham to Creative Computation: Media Artist Sarah Bennett-Davidson Shares Her Journey

Sarah Bennet-Davidson is a media-based artist in New Mexico. She is currently a graduate student here at The University of New Mexico, enrolled in the MFA program in Electronic Art & Technology, and has been taking vvvv classes with The NODE Institute since 2022. vvvvv is a visual-first live programming environment for the .NET ecosystems. Bennet-Davidson was a recipient of a Summer Season ’24 scholarship with the NODE Institute for the vvvv Intermediates classes. Its language, VL, combines metaphors known from dataflow, functional and object-oriented programming.

Bennet-Davidson is teaching Electronic Art to students and working at UNM ARTSLab, which focuses on art/tech research. She started out being interested in experimental dance and choreography. The concepts behind algorithmic body movements captivated her, and after she saw a pieced by Merce Cunningham called “Biped” (1999), at Lincoln Center in New York City, which sparked her interest in generative large-scale projects.

She said she is excited to be at UNM and has also recently been selected to participate this spring as an artist in a competitive collaborative lithography course at Tamarind Institute. There she will be collaborating with Tamarind printmakers-in-training to create three print editions and using vvvv to create imagery for it.

We are excited to see what Sarah Bennet-Davidson does next!

LEARN MORE about Electronic Art & Technology courses offered during the Spring 2025 semester by visiting https://art.unm.edu/

LEARN MORE about UNM ARTSLab by visiting https://artslab.unm.edu