Peter Whittenberger is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work explores how the nature of the landscape serves as a continuous network of time and history, containing the data of all Earth’s species. Whittenberger has presented his work at the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Digerati Emergent Media Festival in Denver, CO, the Athens Animfest in Athens, Greece, the 2-Minute Film Festival at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, PA, and many others across Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia. His work has also received funding from the Puffin Foundation and the Reno-Tahoe Artists Award for Best in Digital Media.
Growing up in Eastern Montana, Whittenberger received his BFA from the University of Montana, Missoula in Printmaking and his MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno in Interdisciplinary Art. Currently, Whittenberger lives and works in Reno, Nevada with his wife, three dogs, and two ferrets.
The landscape is a symbol of timeless histories, directing contemporary narratives and the unknown futures of all species. I use this symbolism to create metaphors of the landscape as a network, storing and moving data along the innumerable timelines of all species. My work explores the myriad of macro/micro relationships throughout these timelines. The network of the landscape indexes the impacts of macro processes, such as evolution and climate change, and micro processes, such as war, migration, and development. The network can be represented in my work by anything from grids and lines to rivers and dry lakebeds. I use circular forms to symbolize the sand and dirt that form the landscape. Each individual form is a node that is connected to other nodes in the network metaphor. I believe the landscape we walk on now is part of a longer history of the Earth and represents every being the material engaged with or will engage with. My intention is to embrace the overwhelming inability to understand the ceaselessness of time, space, and material, in relation to the present.