H. M. Crickenberger Arts
Heather Marcelle Crickenberger is an artist, writer, and systems-minded tea crafter whose work unfolds at the intersection of garden, ritual, computation, and conversation. Grounded in seasonal rhythms and a lifelong devotion to plants, ink, and quiet inquiry, her practice explores how attention, material environments, and symbolic systems shape perception, knowledge, and care.
Working across digital installation, immersive media, speculative systems design, and embodied ritual, Crickenberger creates environments that invite slowing down—spaces where viewers become participants, readers become listeners, and information becomes something felt as well as understood. Her work frequently translates complex intellectual structures—fluid dynamics, nonlinear scholarship, narrative architectures—into sensory and spatial experiences that foreground intuition alongside rigor.
A central throughline in her practice is the design of living knowledge systems: multimodal structures that integrate ecological observation, symbolic logic, temporal pathways, and human–AI collaboration. These systems function simultaneously as artworks, research platforms, and sites of gathering. Whether through large-scale projections, affect-mapping environments, or intimate tea rituals, her work asks how meaning emerges through relationship—between bodies and landscapes, data and myth, machines and memory.
Trained as a scholar of rhetoric and new media, Crickenberger’s early research anticipated many contemporary concerns in AI-assisted interpretation, knowledge graphs, and interactive meaning-making. Today, her work continues to blur distinctions between scholarship and art, computation and craft, designing experiences that are intellectually rigorous, sensorially grounded, and quietly transformative.
She lives and works in North Carolina, where her garden operates as both studio and co-author.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS, EXHIBITIONS, PRESENTATIONS & PROJECTS
The Garden of Returning Light (2024–present) — Multimodal narrative-knowledge system integrating spatial design, symbolic computation, and ecological data into a unified ontology. Includes linked taxonomies, sigils, and temporal pathways enabling structured retrieval, dynamic storytelling, and AI-assisted co-authorship. Functions as a living testbed for narrative architecture and human–AI collaboration.
Unsolvable: Existence, Smoothness, and the Problem of Turbulence — NC State University (2025–present) Site-specific digital media installation translating the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem into a computationally driven visual environment. Uses fluid-simulation engines, spectral analysis, and adaptive models to explore turbulence as both an engineering challenge and an aesthetic field.
Dream Cats — NC Book Festival (2021) — Animated affect-mapping environment exploring listening as emotional topology. Presented as an intermezzo between readings at the Kings venue, Raleigh, NC.
Surfaces: Studies in Dimensional Downsizing — Hunt Library Visualization Wall (2019–2023)
Spatial translation of a 3D immersive narrative into a fragmented digital topography, inspired by Deleuze & Guattari’s smooth/striated space.
Illuminated Topographies: Using Immersive Media to Locate Hidden Narratives in Analog Underpainting — NC Book Festival (2019) — Narrative visualization system revealing hidden stories in analog underpainting. Presented as a 10-hour, 12′ × 40′ dual-projection performance at the Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC. Reformatted as Illuminated Topographies 2.0 for the ART WALL at NC State’s Hunt Library (2020–present).
A Double Visitation: Stereoscopy, Synesthesia, & the Sound-Image (Or How I Learned to Hear Color) — Course Redesign Award Faculty Development Publication, UNC Charlotte (Fall 2018). Website.
“Science Fiction as Platform for Problem-Based Learning & Teaching Writing as Design.” — In Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering. Springer Press, 2017. Book chapter.
Doubletake: Stereoscopic Vision, Combinatory Play, & Project-Based Inquiries into the Virtual — Course Redesign Award Faculty Development Presentation, UNC Charlotte (Spring 2015). Website and presentation.
Revisiting the Ruins: Virtual Reproductions and Their Artistic Originals (2015–present) — Scholarly website documenting the virtual reconstruction of Containment, an installation of photography, painting, and sculpture by Heather Marcelle Crickenberger and Jen Crickenberger, originally presented at The Light Factory, Charlotte, NC (May 2007).
The Critic as Producer: Projection, Reflection, and Remediation in Immersive Technologies (2015–present) — Long-term scholarly and artistic project examining how critical technique is shaped by emerging technologies of writing. Culminates in a digital installation exploring the scholar as producer.
PROJECTIONS: Exploring Reading and Writing in Emerging Technologies (or How an Apparatus Becomes Self-Aware) — AR-driven narrative mapping of writing-as-process across conceptual zones and spatial pathways. Creativity Studios, James B. Hunt Jr. Library, NC State University. Part of the 2014 NC Literary Festival. Featured in Unleashing the Power of Visualization and Collaboration. (2014–2019)
“The Structure of Awakening”: Walter Benjamin and Progressive Scholarship in New Media — Doctoral dissertation, University of South Carolina, 2007. Nonlinear scholarly architecture inspired by Benjamin’s montage and constellation methods; early prototype of semantic-network navigation and associative reasoning in digital environments.
Containment — The Light Factory, Charlotte, NC (May 2007) — Narrative installation of photography, sculpture, and found art with Jen Crickenberger, exploring enclosure, memory, and sensory architecture.
The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext (2004–2007) — Hypermedia experiment.
One Heart, One Blow — The Artist’s Basement, Columbia, SC (March 2006) — Exhibition of twelve sumi ink paintings on paper.
The Lemming (Creator, Webmaster, Editor-in-Chief) (2002–2004) — Ten-issue online literary and cultural e-zine.