Tony Allard
Tony Allard is a performance artist, writer, and teacher who works from a transmedia perspective. From 1989 to 1997, Allard taught at the Kansas City Art Institute. He moved to San Diego in 1997, where he now teaches at California State University, San Marcos.
Allard's work addresses such issues as the precipitous replacement of human vision with machine vision, and the use of new media as a hyper retrospection device to invoke cultural and personal myths, memories, and histories. He has produced live radio and internet broadcast performances in Japan, Europe, Canada, and the United States. His most recent drawing and Internet-based installation, Drawing in the Media Stream Belfast, was exhibited at the 2009 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Allard is currently working on a speculative/hybrid media project, entitled mutate or die. This project will chronicle Allard’s failed attempt in 1996 to get the writer William Burroughs’ DNA sequenced, and his current collaborative attempt with the artist Adam Zaretsky to once again engage Burroughs’ genetic material — this time in a speculative experiment in the transformational power of mutation.
