Jane Prophet

Professor Jane Prophet Ph.D

Transforming Lives Fellow


Summary

Jane Prophet is an academic and artist whose work combines contemporary art, technology, and health studies. Her research explores how creative practices intersect with challenges such as climate change, sustainability, and health. Prophet uses digital tools like AI and projection mapping to address ecological change and human-environment interactions. She has collaborated with scientists to create art that bridges art and science. Her research on arts-informed approaches to health includes studies on chronic pain and public art's impact on reducing youth firearm injuries. She holds a PhD from Warwick University.

About

Jane Prophet is an academic and artist whose interdisciplinary work combines contemporary art, technology, and health studies. With a background in fine arts and digital media, Prophet’s research explores how creative practices intersect with societal challenges, including climate change, sustainability, and the promotion of health and well-being.

In her artistic practice, Prophet employs digital tools such as artificial intelligence, projection mapping, and interactive media to explore themes of ecological change and human-environment interactions. She has collaborated with scientists to create art that bridges the divide between art and science, demonstrating the potential of these collaborations to address societal issues. Her work is included in collections such as The Arts Council of England.

Prophet’s research on arts-informed approaches to health and well-being includes studies with pain researchers and social work experts on chronic pain. She developed a novel adaptation of Photovoice methodology to examine the experiences of women of colour, drawing attention to health inequities. Recently, she led a research lab funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in Michigan, which demonstrated that public art can reduce youth firearm injuries.

Professor Prophet earned a PhD in Arts Education from Warwick University in 1995. She has contributed significantly to discussions on art in higher education, particularly around interdisciplinary and practice-based PhDs and the role of the academic artist-researcher. Her work highlights the potential of integrating art, technology, and health research to engage communities and address critical global and local issues.

Teaching

Sheffield Creative Industries Institute

College of Social Sciences and Arts

Research

1. National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab on Commissioning Public Art Through Community Engagement Arts to improve Health, and Social / Emotional Well-Being by Reducing Youth Firearm Injury: transdisciplinary research about relationships between public art and firearm injury prevention, building on a pilot study database created at the University of Michigan. We hypothesise that public art can benefit communities by reducing firearm-related police incidents (and other violent crimes). Preliminary results from our pilot data support the hypothesis. The research agenda is to deepen understanding of relationships between public art and firearm and other interpersonal violence; report results in new publishable research and policy briefs; conduct community engagement in Detroit via beneficial public art projects that reduce firearm incidents.

In partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, this NEA Research Lab prioritizes community-centred design and engagement, as well as rigorous methodology, to enhance the evidence base and improve the built environment for residents of Detroit. Our research partners, community partners, advisors, and funders help us fulfill our commitment to providing a dedicated space for investigation of the intersection of community firearm violence and the arts.

2. An Online Photovoice Study Designed by Researchers from Art and Social Work to Better Understand the Experience of Chronic Pain by Women of Color: this study involved twenty women of colour who created photo-text works about their experiences living with and being treated for chronic pain. In this novel online Photovoice study, participants engaged with asynchronous videos created by an artist-professor about the meanings viewers make of a photograph, including how perspective, angle, and lighting can affect the viewer’s emotional response to photographs. Participants then deployed Photovoice through six synchronous sessions led by a social work professor with extensive experience designing and facilitating Photovoice studies. The resulting image-text works by study participants address health inequity and argue for health equity as a hallmark of social justice in healthcare by focusing on exposing and reducing healthcare disparities.

3. Plants by Numbers anthology: a queer, feminist, and decolonial technoscience approach to the ecologies that emerge from our entanglements with nonhumans (air, rocks, algae, trees, soil and plants) and computational hard/software. Artists and theorists working with computation address the urgent need to think beyond the human paradigm, opening up new fields of debate that question the troubled relationship between ecosystems and human technology.

4. Kinetic Sulptures: a collaboration between Tobias Klein, Victor Pok Yin Leung, and Jane Prophet. These biologically inspired, transparent kinetic sculptures are filled with suspended Ferrofluid liquids contained in interlocking blown glass structures in a net of 3D-printed tendrils supported by a gyroscope-like framework. The movement of the sculpture is influenced by a shift in magnetic fields, emitted by a series of moving magnets embedded in the 3D printed structures. Liquids move as the sculpture shifts and spins, creating higher complex entropic movements by reacting to changes in magnetic fields.

5. Neuro Memento Mori: portrait of the artist contemplating death. In a fMRI trial co-designed with two neuroscientific teams, the artist-subject looked at memento mori and vanitas paintings and separately meditated on death while being scanned to see if memento mori really prompt us to “remember, we must die”.  An intricate life-sized self-portrait was 3D printed from data and lit with projection-mapped videosonto life-sized 3D printed self-portrait sculptures produced by combining 3D facial scanning with fMRI brain data that is gathered during novel MRI experiments.

1. https://firearminjury.umich.edu/project/to-support-a-national-endowment-for-the-arts-research-lab-on-the-arts-health-and-social-emotional-well-being/
2. https://fmkjournals.fmk.edu.rs/index.php/AM/article/view/496
3. https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350351042
4. https://weblogin.umich.edu/idp/profile/SAML2/Redirect/SSO?execution=e1s1
5. https://www.janeprophet.com/
6. https://vimeo.com/179540550

Sponsors: 
1) National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Research Lab: Commissioning Public Art Through Community Engagement Arts to Improve Health, and Social/Emotional Well-Being by Reducing Youth Firearm Injury, $590,000

2) Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research NSF, University of Michigan: Using Art and Design for Translational Medical Research with Pain Researchers and Patients, $100,000

3) Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Award, Research Grants Council, Hong Kong. $115,000 


Publications

Journal articles

Prophet, J., Rahman, R., & L. Hassett, A. (2023). An Online Photovoice Study Designed by Researchers from Art and Social Work to Better Understand the Experience of Chronic Pain by Women of Color. AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, (32), 69-89. http://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i28.582

Klein, T., & Prophet, J. (2023). Signs of Life – Hearts, Blood and our Breath. Performance Research, 28 (1), 114-123. http://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2222497

(2019). Introduction to the Special Issue on Big Data, Machine Learning, and AI Technologies for Art and Design. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 15 (2s), 1-3. http://doi.org/10.1145/3338002

Suh, A., & Prophet, J. (2018). The state of immersive technology research: A literature analysis. Computers in Human Behavior, 86, 77-90. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.04.019

Prophet, J., & Pritchard, H. (2015). Performative Apparatus and Diffractive Practices: An Account of Artificial Life Art. Artificial Life, 21 (3), 332-343. http://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00174

Goel, A.K., Harrell, F., Magerko, B., Nagai, Y., & Prophet, J. (2011). C&C 2011 Program Chairs' Welcome. C and C 2011 - Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition, iv.

Prophet, J. (2011). Model Ideas: From Stem Cell Simulation to Floating Art Work. Leonardo, 44 (3), 262-263. http://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_00177

Bird, J., D'inverno, M., & Prophet, J. (2007). Net Work: an interactive artwork designed using an interdisciplinary performative approach. Digital Creativity, 18 (1), 11-23. http://doi.org/10.1080/14626260701252368

Fishwick, P., Diehl, S., Prophet, J., & Löwgren, J. (2005). Perspectives on Aesthetic Computing. Leonardo, 38 (2), 133-141. http://doi.org/10.1162/0024094053722372

Pritchard, H., & Prophet, J. (n.d.). Diffractive Art Practices: Computation and the Messy Entanglements between Mainstream Contemporary Art, and New Media Art*. Artnodes, (15). http://doi.org/10.7238/a.v0i15.2594

Prophet, J. (n.d.). The artist in the laboratory: co-operating (t)reasonably. Artnodes, 0 (11). http://doi.org/10.7238/a.v0i11.1218

Conference papers

Prophet, J., Kow, Y.M., & Hurry, M. (2018). Small trees, big data. ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Posters, 1-2. http://doi.org/10.1145/3230744.3230753

Prophet, J. (2015). (Projection) mapping the brain. SIGGRAPH ASIA 2015 Art Papers, 1-5. http://doi.org/10.1145/2835641.2835645

Prophet, J. (2009). One person's everyday creativity is another's extraordinary insight. Proceedings of the seventh ACM conference on Creativity and cognition, 3-4. http://doi.org/10.1145/1640233.1640235

d’Inverno, M., & Prophet, J. (2005). Multidisciplinary Investigation into Adult Stem Cell Behavior. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (pp. 49-64). Springer Berlin Heidelberg: http://doi.org/10.1007/11599128_4

Book chapters

Prophet, J. (2023). Codely Phytographia: An Artist's Material History of Writing Code with Trees. In Prophet, J., & Pritchard, H.V. (Eds.) Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience. Bloomsbury Academic

Prophet, J. (2023). Codely Phytographia: An Artist's Material History of Writing Code with Trees. In Prophet, J., & Pritchard, H.V. (Eds.) Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience. Bloomsbury Academic

d’Inverno, M., & Prophet, J. (2021). Designing Physical Artefacts from Computational Simulations and Building Computational Simulations of Physical Systems. In Designing for the 21st Century. (pp. 166-176). Routledge: http://doi.org/10.4324/9781315264660-12

Prophet, J., Kow, Y.M., & Hurry, M. (2018). Cultivating Environmental Awareness: Modeling Air Quality Data via Augmented Reality Miniature Trees. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science. (pp. 406-424). Springer International Publishing: http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91470-1_33

(2016). A Conversation about Models and Prototypes. In Art Practice in a Digital Culture. (pp. 63-80). Routledge: http://doi.org/10.4324/9781315567976-10

Prophet, J. (2016). Self-portrait of the artist meditating on death: A feminist technoscience reading of the apparatus of contemporary neuroscience experiments. In The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. (pp. 482-503). http://doi.org/10.4324/9781315687896.ch28

Prophet, J., & Wakeford, N. (2010). A conversation about models and prototypes. In Art Practice in a Digital Culture. (pp. 43-59).

D’Inverno, M., Theise, N., & Prophet, J. (2006). Mathematical modeling of stem cells: A complexity primer for the stem-cell biologist. In Tissue Stem Cells. (pp. 1-16).

Ekman, U., Bolter, J.D., Díaz, L., Søndergaard, M., & Engberg, M. (n.d.). Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity, and Culture. Routledge: http://doi.org/10.4324/9781315781129

Books

Prophet, J., & Pritchard, H.V. (Eds.). (2024). Plants by Numbers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. http://doi.org/10.5040/9781350351042

Prophet, J., & Pritchard, H.V. (Eds.). (2023). Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience. Bloomsbury Academic. https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350351042

Artefacts

Prophet, J. (2024). herbAIrium: AI generated video. [Video]. The Age of Artifice, Laird Norton Gallery, Winona State University & 103 Gallery, Bucknell University 103 Gallery, California.

Prophet, J. (2024). ///glorified.clearing.discusses. [Lightbox with collaged pressed plant samples between 35mm slide mounts]. Butley Mill Studios, Suffolk.

Klein, T., & Prophet, J. (2021). Common datum. https://doi.org/10.1145/3450507.3457433

Prophet, J., Klein, T., & Leung, V.P.Y. (2021). Unruh (Blood work 2.0). [Kinetic sculpture with liquid filled vessels]. 1) Venice Biennale 2021 Exhibited online as part of the group show FEEDBACK // It's About Time! at the Italian Pavilion, at the 17. International Exhibition of Architecture at La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Eric Goldemberg and co-edited with Andrew Santa Lucia.2)Exhibited at Ars Electronica 2021 - Art in the Cloud | Online Exhibition.

Presentations

Prophet, J. (2022). An intersectional aesth-ethics of care: using Photovoice to challenge gendered and racialized experiences of chronic pain treatment. Presented at: College Arts Association Annual Conference, Virtual

Other activities

Grant Reviewer Hong Kong Research Grants Council (Humanities, Social Sciences and Business Studies Selection Panel). Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme; Hong Kong Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme
Grant Reviewer for Austrian Science Fund Fellowships

Journal Reviewer for EvoMUSART: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Music, Sound, Art and Design; APRJA: A Peer Reviewed Journal About…; artnodes; Catalyst Journal
Peer Reviewer for ISEA, SiGGRAPH

Member: The National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity (USA)

2026 & 2019: Committee Member of the Creative Arts, Performing Arts & Design Panel for Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), University Grants Committee, Hong Kong

2018-20: The International Council of Fine Arts Deans; Arts Administrators of the Big Ten (since 1895 ten top US public universities work together to form intercollegiate standards)

 

Postgraduate supervision

1. Supervisor. Ellen Pearlman (Completed). The Brain As Site Specific Surveillant Performative Space, City University, Hong Kong. 
2. Supervisor. Alessandro Carboni  (Completed). Embodied Map: a tool for urban mapping and performance arts practices, City University, Hong Kong. 
3. Co-Supervisor. Winnie Soon (Completed). The Understanding of Liveness in Software Art Practice, Aarhus University, Denmark. 
4. Co-Supervisor. Helen Pritchard (Completed). Thinking with the Animal-Hacker: Articulation in Ecologies of Earth Observation, Queen Mary’s College, University of London. 

 

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