Hannah Tardie’s work exists as written scholarship, digital humanities projects, sculpture, performance, and teaching.
In their creative practice, Tardie combines a variety of digital and manual fabrication methods to create objects, installations, and performances that explore the cultural lineages of machines. Their interest in machines started at a very young age: Tardie grew up in a small family business in print manufacturing and spent their childhood around manufacturing equipment. Industrial machinery has long acted as a substrate through which their family connects and communicates. They currently manage a makerspace and work with digital fabrication machines every day. The sounds, maintenance, and operation of machines form the primary landscape of their work.
In every medium, their work aims to both honor the intimate relationship that laborers have with machines and propose a world that positions this labor as an act of community care and craft no longer constrained by the violent practices of capital accumulation.
Tardie’s work has been shown locally and internationally at places like La Gaite Lyrique, SPACE Gallery, Westbeth Gallery, One Brooklyn Bridge Park, Arizona State University, Arts, Letters, & Numbers, Vox Populi, Pig Iron Theatre Company, and online via websites like Artsy.net, maps-dna-and-spam, and p5.js. They’ve given artist talks, guest critiques, and paper presentations at New York University, the University of Maine, Bates College, Temple University, Arizona State University, Toronto Metropolitan University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2024 they started a conference/unconference event called the Electronics Faire at Temple University featuring a keynote series, hands-on workshops, an art exhibition, live electronic music performances, and a walkthrough faire tabled by organizations doing radical work with electronics They previously helped organize Slo MoCo 2021, a long-form iteration of the Movement and Computing Conference. They currently manage a Makerspace at Temple University, and live and work in Philadelphia.
You can learn more about their professional experiences through their cv, but keep in mind it is updated ~maybe once per year.