Jenny Odell
Jenny Odell is an American artist, writer and educator who is based in Oakland, California. She wrote the book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.Life and work
Odell was born in San Francisco and grew up in Cupertino, California. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2008 with a degree in English Literature and received her MFA in Design + Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010.
Odell's work consists of acts of close observations such as bird watching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. Her artwork has for example used images from Google Earth and Google Maps. She has taught Internet art and digital/physical design at Stanford University since 2013. She was artist-in-residence at the Internet Archive in 2017. Her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is about "how to disconnect from the attention economy".Publications
- Travel by Approximation: a virtual road trip. Self-published, 2010.
- I Hate to Part With It: Craigslist Farewells. Self-published, 2012.
- The Satellite Collections. Self-published, 2013.
- The Archive of the Bureau of Suspended Objects. Self-published, 2015..
- Satellite Landscapes. Self-published, 2015.
- The Bureau of Suspended Objects at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Self-published, 2016.. Exhibition catalogue.
- The Bureau of Suspended Objects at the Palo Alto Art Center. Self-published, 2016.. Exhibition catalogue.
- How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2019..
Exhibitions
- In That Case: Havruta in Contemporary Art. Odell and Philip Buscemi. January 28, 2016 – July 5, 2016.
- Peripheral Landscapes: The Art of Maps: A conversation with Odell and geospatial librarian Matt Knutzen. May 1, 2015.
- The Internet Archive's 2017 Artist in Residence Exhibition. August 5–26 2017.
