Torsten Zenas Burns is a media arts educator living in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He received his BFA in experimental video in 1990 from the New York State College of Art & Design at Alfred University, and his MFA in New Genres: video and performance art from The San Francisco Art Institute in1993. He has created & curated video, photo and installation projects exploring speculative content, including re-imagined educational practices, experimental space programs, zombie /afterlife relationships, post-human medicine, and improvisational (splatstick). Other collabotronica projects include collaborations with Anthony Discenza under the name HALFLIFERS, Darrin Martin, VIROCODE, and Christian K. Burns / The Foundry. Burns' selected video work is distributed by Vtape, (Canada), Video Data Bank (USA), Lux (England) and EAI (USA). Over the past ten years Burns has participated in eight residency programs including Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), Experimental Television Center (NY) L.M.C.C. World Views Studio Program and Eyebeam (NYC). Burns has had video work screened at the NYC Museum of Modern Art's Video Viewpoints and Premieres series, The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), The Pacific Film Archive (CA), SF Cameraworks (CA), Aurora Picture Show (TX), Migrating forms (NYC), The Chicago Underground Film Festival, The European Media Arts Festival (Germany), The Impakt Festival (Netherlands), The Melbourne International Film Festival (Australia), The Oberhausen Short Film Festival (Germany), and The Busan international video festival (South Korea), and The Stuttgarter Filmwinter: Festival for Expanded Media (Germany), In 2010 he curated “The Jellification” for Parsons Hall Project Space in Holyoke, Massachusetts & was featured with an artist page in the just released Radical Light: Avant Garde Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000.
holyokeresearch.blogspot.com/
halflifersprojects.blogspot.com/
parsonshallprojectspace.blogspot.com/