Tiffany Holmes explores the potential of art and technology to promote environmental stewardship. Recent work includes a commission for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications where sequences of experimental animations visualize real time energy loads. Her paper detailing this work won a Best Paper award at Creativity and Cognition 2007. Other commissions include the creation of a street-level video installation to raise awareness about the perils of drinking bottled water in Chicago, a city with the top-ranked tap in the USA. In March of 2008, Holmes launched World Offset, a website that invites viewers to submit carbon offset commitments to highlight the problems of curtailment-based solutions to global warming. In April of 2009, Holmes premiered darkSky, a new interactive electricity visualization at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in a UBS 12 x 12 New Artists/New Work exhibition which was subsequently shown at the Microwave Festival in Hong Kong in November of 2009.

In January of 2010, Holmes successfully defended her PhD dissertation “Eco-visualization: Combining art and technology to reduce energy consumption,” in a viva at the University of Plymouth in the UK.  Examiners included Malcolm Miles, Professor of Cultural Theory from the University of Plymouth, and Tim Cooper, Head of the Center for Sustainable Consumption and Senior Lecturer in Consumer Studies, Sheffield Hallam University.  Holmes’ PhD, which successfully combined critical theory and art practice,  was earned via the Znode, a collaboration between the ICS: Institute for Cultural Studies, University of the Arts, Zurich and the Arts Department, University of Plymouth, UK.

Holmes is Associate Professor, and former Chair of the Department of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she teaches courses in computer programming for artists, interaction design, eco-art, and the history and theory of electronic media.  Holmes also has designed curriculum and facilitated the programming of  SAIC Wired a required digital literacy course of all first year students at the school.  Holmes will be serving as Interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies at SAIC from August of 2011 to 2014.