Peter d'Agostino

Biography

Peter d'Agostino's work investigates the personal, cultural and technological systems of signs, language and communications that permeate everyday life. In a sophisticated synthesis of theory and art practice, d'Agostino applies semiotic, deconstructive and appropriative strategies to his analyses and critiques of the structure, function and influence of broadcast television.

D'Agostino's works draw on a broad theater of discourses — linguistics, communications and mass media theory, history, aesthetics, physics, architecture — as well as popular formats and personal references. Through the language and techniques of communications and television, he examines a media-driven consumer culture and its information systems.

D'Agostino, who has worked in video since 1971, continues to explore increasingly sophisticated technologies and hypermedia, including projects for the World Wide Web. In these multi-leveled interactive works, the viewer interacts with the technology, activating a multiplicity of associative meanings in nonlinear, open-ended texts.

In addition to his work in video, d'Agostino has written and edited numerous articles and books on photography, video, language, and semiotics, including Transmission: Theory and Practice for a New Television Aesthetic (1985) and Transmission: Toward a Post-television Culture (co-editor, 1995).

D'Agostino was born in 1945. He received a B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and an M.A. from San Francisco State University. He has been artist-in-residence at the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen; a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, and artist-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center and the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. He is currently Professor of Film and Media Arts and Director of New-Tech Lab at Temple University, Philadelphia.

D'Agostino has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pew Trusts and the Japan Foundation he received a Fulbright Scholarship(Brazil) as well as grants from the Contemporary Art Television (CAT) Fund and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His work has been broadcast widely and exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil; Kwangju Biennial,Korea as well as in solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; University Art Museum, Berkeley, California; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Philadelphia Art Museum. D'Agostino lives in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania.