Marie Sester is a French-American artist who works with cross-disciplinary practices and experimental systems in Interactive Art using tracking technologies, light, audio, video, and biofeedback, focusing on social awareness and the responsibility of personal commitments.

Born in France, Marie Sester began her career as an architect after earning a Master’s Degree from the Ecole d’Architecture in Strasbourg, France. Her interests soon shifted from designing physical structures to the study of ideological ones, and of how culture, politics and technology affect our spatial awareness, our emotions and believes. After traveling extensively she moved to the U.S. in 2000.

Marie Sester received grants from Creative Capital (2002), LEF Foundation (2004), New York State Council on the Arts (2004 and 2011). She was in residence at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences – IAMAS, Gifu, Japan (2001-02) and Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, NY (2003). Her installations and websites earned an Honorary Mention in Interactive Art from Ars Electronica (2003), a Webby Award for Net Art (2004) and a spot on the “50 Coolest Websites” list on Time Magazine Online (2004). Recent interactive installations have been included as part of the Seoul and Singapore Biennales (2008), and installed at Glow Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2009), SFMOMA, San Francisco (2010-2011), EMPAC, Troy, New York (2010-2011), and Z33, Hasselt, Belgium (2011).

Work
For several years Sester’s work focused on notions of identity and awareness – how we shun or invite attention, exert or lose control of our personal or public spaces, and how we navigate through contemporary society’s ever more ubiquitous systems of surveillance and monitoring on one hand, visibility and self-promotion on the other hand. Almost always placing the individual at its center, her work relied on literal interactions with its audiences, creating encounters where it’s not clear if one’s wandered into some sort of game – or stumbled upon something more sinister.

Most recently her highest interest focuses on the nature of consciousness.