Marcelle Crickenberger

February 9, 2019–Today’s first featured event is Marcelle Crickenberger’s digital installation, which will be displayed all day at CAM Raleigh on Saturday, February 23rd.

Dr. Heather Marcelle Crickenberger (Ph.D.) is a Senior Lecturer in the University Writing Program at UNC-Charlotte. Her work as a teacher of writing, her scholarship in new media and rhetorical theory and her interdisciplinary work with engineering and the visual arts have resulted in publications and presentations in a variety of media over the years. Between 2002-2004, she created a literary e-zine called The Lemming using code to build a digital platform for sharing cartoons, graphic arts, and creative writing.  She expanded on this platform between 2004-2007 in her online digital dissertation, ‘The Structure of Awakening’: Walter Benjamin and Progressive Scholarship in New Media (archive). Both projects aimed to press the possibilities of digital composition and publishing. Her work in the visual arts has appeared in exhibitions over the years, including a collaborative art installation with Jen Crickenberger at Charlotte’s Light Factory called Containment in 2007.  She also designed and authored an immersive multimedia installation for NC State’s Hunt Library as part of the 2014 North Carolina Book Festive entitled PROJECTIONS: Exploring Reading and Writing in Emerging Technologies or How an Apparatus Becomes Self-Aware. With the help of one of UNC-Charlotte’s University Writing Programs’ curricular development initiatives, she explored Google Cardboard as a means of economically introducing students of writing to the immersive art of digital media installation.  This project is documented in Doubletake: Stereoscopic Vision, Combinatory Play, & Project-Based Inquiries Into the Virtual. Recently, she has presented on STEM-based approaches to Writing Studies at conferences as well as in her book chapter, “Science Fiction as Platform for Problem-Based Learning & Teaching Writing as Design,” which describes ways that instructors can better prepare students in STEM-based fields for the design thinking, creative problem-solving and abstract reasoning they will be expected to do as professionals (Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering, Springer 2017). In 2018, she incorporated soundscape design and virtual reality into the First-Year Writing curriculum as part of a Course Redesign Award which resulted in an online digital exhibition entitled A Double Visitation: Stereoscopy, Synesthesia, & the Sound-Image (Or How I Learned to Hear Color).