Emily Bernstein
dogtime unstable media
Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Specialisms: Digital Arts / Installation/Sculpture / Storytelling
Location: Den Haag, Netherlands
Emily Bernstein
First Name: Emily
Last Name: Bernstein
Specialisms: Digital Arts / Installation/Sculpture / Storytelling
Sectors:
My Location: Den Haag, Netherlands
University / College: Gerrit Rietveld Academie
Course / Program Title: dogtime unstable media
About
Emily Bernstein is a multimedia artist based in The Hague, specializing in AI art and installation art. A graduate of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie’s “DOGtime Unstable Media” program (2024), Emily’s work explores the boundaries of authenticity, artificiality and memory, and the particular challenges of remembering the past within our digital era. She uses a blend of analogue, digital and artificial media to navigate the instability of collective memory and the biographical/documentary genre, and to discover how historical traumas can be healed by artificial means.
Through immersive installations, moving image, jewelry making and creative nonfiction writing, Emily experiments with finding new ways of paying homage to the past, while also questioning our role in narrating it. Her previous projects have ranged from artificial reconstructions of lost communities, to recovering and revoicing the memories of a dementia patient.
Prior to beginning her artistic career, Emily worked as a researcher and lecturer in linguistics, which significantly shaped her approach to artistic research and art making. She holds a Research MA in Linguistics from Leiden University, where together with a team of linguists she investigated innovative applications for AI in speech and hearing clinics.
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1990, Emily has lived and worked in seven countries, eventually settling permanently in the Netherlands where she regularly participates in independently organized group exhibitions. She has presented her work at public venues, as well as renowned media art and research foundations, such as LI-MA.
I longed for photographs of my father’s family from their home in the “Old World,” but due to historical circumstances and immigration, these photos do not exist. So I created a family album with the help of AI. The "photos" you see are not real, but their uncanniness and distortions urge the viewer to look again; to witness gaps in others' personal stories and to recognize something universal despite their alien-like representations. My installation is the result of hours of interview footage with family members, genealogical research, and surprising revelations that occurred while piecing together what was passed on through oral histories. It is an attempt to pay homage to the past, while also questioning the reliability of our narratives and the stories we accept as “the truth.” The work features a slideshow of AI-generated photos, a collection of AI-photos with a light projection, and a video work* that recontextualizes the interview clips to create a new narrative. Existing video footage of my family is overlaid onto imagined landscapes and locations, collapsing realities and timelines into a new, surreal “reality” that highlights the tension between the personal and the artificial. *Many thanks to Tim Kahn for his sound sample (trains talking under a bridge.wav), which was remixed for a portion of the sound in this work.
Competitions
