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. Growing up in Southeastern 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, two dogs, a ferret, and a cat.
Whittenberger has presented his work at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Torrence Art Museum, Harvard University CAMlab, the Sie Film Center, and Superblue Miami. He has screened both nationally and internationally including at the Digerati Experimental Media Festival (Denver, CO, USA), the Future Visions Festival (Tokyo, Japan), the FILE Festival (Sao Paulo, Brazil), the RPM Festival (Boston, MA, USA), the Simultan Festival (Timisoara, Romania), Chroma Art Film Festival (Miami, FL, USA), Festival Fotogenia (Mexico City, Mexico), the Oak Cliff Film Festival (Dallas, TX, USA), the Capitol City Film Festival (Lansing, MI, USA), Fest Anča (Žilina, Slovakia) and many others throughout the world. He has been awarded a funding grant from the Puffin Foundation, received the Reno-Tahoe Artists Award for Best in Digital Media, and is a Nevada Arts Council Fellowship Award recipient.
The landscape is a symbol of timeless histories, directing contemporary narratives and the unknown futures of all species. My work focuses on how the landscape we presently walk on is part of a longer history of the Earth. This history represents every being the landscape has and will interact with. I use this symbolism to create metaphors of the landscape as a network, storing and moving data along the innumerable timelines of all species.
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 topographical network can be represented in my work through anything from grids and lines to rivers and dry lakebeds. I use circular forms to symbolize the sand, dirt, and cells that form the landscape. Each individual circular form is a node that is connected to other nodes in the network metaphor. I explore my ideas using a variety of digital media: video, net art, plotted drawing, gaming software, or other media as dictated by the intentions or potential of each artwork. My intention is to embrace the overwhelming inability to understand the ceaselessness of time, space, and material, in relation to our present narrative.