Dana Ilmari Polojärvi

Thank you for coming to my site and reviewing my portfolio. The work you see here is a record of my evolution as an artist and researcher/designer.

I began my career as a creative writer, photographer and film maker (my Ph.D. is in creative writing and film) with a deep interest in how people experience the world. I studied phenomenology/experiential analysis, and my early work was all about the experience of being in the arts. For example, on my writing page you’ll find work on the ethics of seeing as a photographer and the gestalt experience of reading super hero comics as a child. At this point I wanted to understand how the technologies of representation mitigated the experiences of making and receiving art.



My work as a photographer at this stage was about perfectly recording tiny slices of the world. For example, Ice Landscape (see below) is a picture of a small section of ice and melt in a frozen stream. I became aware of the two dimensionality of this work as a limit to full representation of perception and moved to split toning techniques to deepen the black and white experience (you’ll see some of this on my stereo 3D page), then to stereo and color frequency 3D techniques (both represented here on their own pages and in the film section).

As time has gone on I’ve started to wonder about sustainability issues in art practice (photographic chemistry can be quite toxic), and I’ve shifted emphasis from fine art making to human centered design as a way to refocus my creative energies on collaborative social problem solving and team built art production. I’ve made this career shift through my teaching (I’m a professor at the Maine Maritime Academy). My humanities classes are now research and problem solving labs that produce models of historical crisis points and use those models to help solve problems in the real world. Last term teams in those classes modeled aspects of the experience of the Bubonic Plague that we then cross-referenced with recent projections about Ebola. I hope through this new work to create useful and publishable material through crowd sourcing of knowledge production.

I’ve found this new direction (not yet represented here in this portfolio) incredibly hopeful. My Game Design teams this term produced four beautiful prototype games, and my Sustainable Design teams have produced many useful things (including a new composting process for our school, a social structure for increasing resilience of island communities here in Maine, a MakerSpace concept for better utilization of facilities here at our school, a webpage with information about local permaculture resources, etc.). I’ve found that I love the processes of design facilitation and team building as much as I love making art, and the reward I get from helping solve problems just can’t be beat.

I hope you enjoy this tour through my work.