DENTON (UNT), Texas -- Liss LaFleur, assistant professor of new media art in the University of North Texas’ College of Visual Arts and Design Department of Studio Art has been selected for an Immersive Scholar Residency to produce a new, digital-based artwork using data from the #MeToo movement. #MeToo is a hashtag used in social media to demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment.

“I want to create a piece that will make a viewer think both inward and outward,” LaFleur said. “My goal is for this work to enhance the visibility of the movement, provide emotional relevance to the viewer and maybe lead to policy changes that make a difference.”

LaFleur will spend the six-week residency creating immersive, open source content for one or more of the large-scale digital walls in the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University. This commission is part of “Visualizing Digital Scholarship in Libraries and Learning Spaces,” a grant awarded from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the advancement of tools and techniques for developing and sharing large-scale visual content for research.

“I plan to create a collection of immersive video animations that illuminate current social trends surrounding sexual assault, using the #MeToo campaign to gather data in the United States,” LaFleur said. “This work will tell a powerful human story, apart from celebrity feminism, through color, scale and shape.”

She says the heavily-coded project will be completed mostly by women and members of the Queer community, an underrepresented population in technology and new media art.