Josephine Anstey’s career has been concept and project driven, engaging with a wide variety of media practices and technologies. Experiments with narrative & dramatic forms and questions of identity & consciousness have been constant themes. These questions are at the heart of IMPROVISING CONSCIOUSNESS (impcon.org), which is a creative work of speculative evolution which imagines an affirmative bio-political future. Its alternative world view exists as a hybrid media work online and at live events. Most recently she has been focusing on animation and economics.
Her early work includes a long collaboration with Julie Zando on a series of video-art pieces. Other early projects include radio documentary, web and prose fiction. From 1995, she refocused on the production of interactive computer-mediated experiences: stories, performances and games. This resulted in works of interactive drama, virtual & mixed reality, and intermedia performance populated by intelligent agents, networked human actors, and puppet avatars. Between 2001 and 2005 she was part of a group of artists who exhibited networked VR projects worldwide on CAVE systems and low-cost, CAVE-like VR systems. She is a founding member of the Intermedia Performance Studio at the University at Buffalo, an experimental center for collaboration among media creators, dramatic performers, and computer technologists.
Her VR and video works have shown widely in the US, in Europe, South America and Asia, and she has work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Ars Electronica Center, Austria. Her videos have won awards including Best Narrative Video Award at the Atlanta Film and Video Festival 1990. In 1996 she won the Chelsea Award for short fiction and in 1997 she won Multimedia Grand Prix 97 Award from the Multi-Media Content Association of Japan.