Karl Erickson makes videos, animations, and audio/visual-performances about language, transformative experiences, self-betterment and environmentalism. His screen-based work takes place in galleries, museums, film festivals and music venues. He is particularly interested in how communication and kinship can be made across different entities, plants to humans, machines to animals. His audio-visual performances usually take place under the name “Stupid Leption” and feature plant-driven, human activated bleeps and sample grinding from a peperomia, a modular synthesizer and a human named Karl.

Recent exhibitions include “Know No Now” at TSI/Harland Snodgrass Gallery, Alfred University, Alfred, NY, “Language as Shapes” (with Andrew Falkowski), at The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI, “Learn Sing Plants Counting Monsters Colors Alphabets,” at Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN, “Another Dimension: Digital Art in Memphis,” Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN, “Are You Connect?” at the Electronic Arts Gallery of Colorado State University, “Time For Something Else” with Laurie Nye at Day & Night Projects, Atlanta, "We Could Be Transcendent Apes" at Field Projects Gallery in New York City, “Megalith'' at The Wrong Biennial,  and “Screen2019: Climates” at UMASS, Amherst, MA.

His animation Know No Now has been screened at the 2023 LINOLEUM Animation and Media Art  Festival in Kyiv, Ukraine, Chroma Art Film Festival in Miami, FL  (where it won the 2023 award for Best Animation),  and the 2023 West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival. He has been an artist in residence at Loop Art Critique, The Arctic Circle, Plyspace and Signal Culture. He received his MFA from California Institute of the Arts and his BFA from Wayne State University. He lives in Memphis, TN where he is an Associate Professor of Digital Art at Rhodes College.
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©Karl Erickson 2025