Michelle Lee Proksell 媚潇 (b. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, 1985) – Michelle is a Third Culture Adult, born in Saudi Arabia to ex-pat American parents. She is a self-taught independent researcher, curator, artist and writer based between Europe, China and the US. The majority of Michelle’s previous research and practice has taken place in China, which influenced her to start Netize.net in 2014 in an attempt to understand the culture and her Chinese friends and fellow artists better.
As an artist, she works with video, sound, performance, the Internet and her ongoing Chinternet Archive – a collection of vernacular digital artifacts from the Chinese Web. She is most interested in the physicality of the Internet and its relationship to human behavior and social interactions. She sees herself as a cultural translator using forms of media and text to express her observations from the “in between”; a place she has spent most of her life while navigating the world through various cultures IRL and online.
Michelle recently finished her research master’s in sociology at Maastricht University in the Cultures of Arts, Science, and Technology. Her thesis focused on artists as ‘boundary shifters’ in the development of Virtual Reality as a technological artifact. She has now moved more into User Experience research but keeps a close eye on art and technology happenings in China.
