Eli Smith is an activist and visual artist from Long Island, New York. She received her bachelor’s degree in Physics from the State University of New York at Geneseo and her MFA from CalArts in both Collaborative Performance and Art & Technology. Eli’s work expresses the psychology of precarity through constructed landscapes of potential violence. Her artistic process is focused on developing new strategies for intimate engagement as part of a feminist methodology of artistic meaning-making. Specific topics of interest include mental illness, class, child abuse, femme identity and trans-generational trauma.

With CultureHub, Eli will develop Elevator Music, a multi-media exploration of narrative-building through the manipulation of an immersive, interactive landscape. The piece is the manifestation of a continual interest in the potential violence of play and the development of personal narrative as a means of rehearsing identity. The final form will manifest as an interactive landscape that is comprised of interactive units whose configuration alters the presence of sound, light and video within the space. Elevator Music is a reflection on the convergence of memory, childhood fantasy, and personal mythos that play in the background of our consciousness and continually inform our experiences and perspectives.