PLASMA 2024

PLASMA (Performances, Lectures, and Screenings in Media Art) brings to Buffalo celebrated theorists and artists who are exhibiting in some of the world’s most renowned museums and galleries, and writing on the cutting edge of new media theory and expression.

Each event brings internationally celebrated artists to discuss varied arts practices, models, modes, examples, and experiences in media arts.

The series serves as a kind of hub as to how courses in new media, digital poetics, game studies, locative media, robotics, installation, media theory and performance arts can be experienced.

In this series you can see and interact with artists that you would encounter in New York, Europe and Latin America, offering of a rich experience for the University at Buffalo, the city and Western New York.

The series provides, not expressive answers, but raises intriguing questions, exploring new avenues in the digital age, who we are, how we interact and where we are going.

For enrolled students, the class begins at 6:00pm.

PLASMA is presented by the Department of Media Study and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Kalpana Subramanian, PhD is a scholar-practitioner of film and media arts focusing on experimental practices through a transcultural and interdisciplinary lens. Her films have showcased at several prestigious venues worldwide and won various awards and honors. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright fellowship (University of Colorado Boulder), the UK Environmental Film Fellowship and the Humanities Institute Advanced PhD. Fellowship and the New York State Council on the Arts among others. She is presently an Assistant Teaching Professor at the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Laura Kraning’s moving image work navigates liminal spaces at the intersection of nature and machine and have been described as a form of “esoteric archeology,” delving into an experience of the subconscious of a landscape. Her work has screened widely at international film festivals and venues, such as MoMA's Doc Fortnight, the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Visions du Réel, National Gallery of Art, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, REDCAT Theater, and Los Angeles Filmforum, among others. She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation John H. Johnson Film Award, Jury Awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award at the Athens International Film and Video Festival, the Jury Award for Short Film at the Rencontres Internationales Sciences et Cinémas, a 2019 NYSCA/Wave Farm Media Arts Grant, and a 2023 New York State Council for the Arts Support for Artists Grant. Laura currently resides in New York, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University of Buffalo.

Cameron A. Granger is Sandra’s son & came up in Cleveland, Ohio. Inspired by the rigorous archival & homemaking practices of his grandmother, Pearl, Granger uses his work as a means to quilt his communal and familial histories, into new, not just potential, but inevitable futures. He’s an alumni of Euclid public schools, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem AIR program.

Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental space in New York City. He directed the documentary features Scenes from a Revolt Sustained (2015) and Spaces of Exception (2019), and co-edited the books In the Name of the People (2018), The Mohawk Warrior Society (2022), and The Reservoir (2022). Since 2014 he has collaborated with Malek Rasamny on “The Native and the Refugee”, a multi-media documentary project on American Indian reservations and Palestinian refugee camps.

Karolina Żyniewicz (DE/PL) is an artist&researcher&educator, a liminal being, existing and performing between various contexts and disciplines. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, and holds PhD in cultural sciences (title obtained in the transdisciplinary Nature – Culture doctoral program at the Faculty of Artes Liberales of the University of Warsaw). While executing art&research projects, she also conducts ethnographic and autoethnographic observations, which constitute the basis for her reflections on the role of nonhuman actors in creating contemporary culture. In her work, she underlines the epistemic and didactic dimensions of art. In 2016–2018, she cooperated with the education departments of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, running workshops and museum lessons for regular audiences and with accessibility for visually impaired and deaf visitors. She uses these educational experiences in her own liminal practice. She is a member of The Eco-and Bioart Lab (hosted by Linköping University), a collaborator of Art Laboratory Berlin, and an associated editor of the Technoetic Arts journal.

CO-SPONSOERED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF ART AND COALESCE: CENTER FOR BIOLOIGCAL ART

Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting a scene in the public space through a chosen medium and techniques, while his performances focus on the process of producing a visual and sound phenomenon using analog devices. His films have screened at film festivals worldwide, such as Berlinale, Hong Kong, New York, Rotterdam, and Toronto, and he performed at Block Museum, Chicago Film Society, Exploratorium, Microscope Gallery, Nanahari, among others. Nishikawa is also an active film curator, and he founded SEFF Binghamton and co-founded KLEX: Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video, & Music Festival and Transient Visions. Nishikawa currently teaches in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.

Ceci Moss is a curator, writer and educator with twenty years of professional practice organizing solo, group, touring, and online exhibitions, as well as public programs, performances and screenings, in museums, galleries and artist-run spaces. She currently serves as the Director and Chief Curator of the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego, a non-collecting institute for contemporary art with a five-decade history of presenting innovative exhibitions in the context of a major research university. She also holds a dual appointment as a Professor of Practice in the Department of Visual Arts, where she teaches courses in Museum and Curatorial Studies. Previously, she was the Founding Director of Gas, the Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organization Rhizome, and Special Projects Coordinator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She has a MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in History and Sociology from U.C. Berkeley. www.cecimoss.com

CO-SPONSOERED BY THE BUFFALO INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Jenson Leonard (b. 1990, Detroit, Michigan) is an artist whose work takes form out of the collapsed context of the internet, often critiquing its slippage of meaning and techno-capital excess while pointing out its attraction at the same time. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute, and has completed residencies at Obracadobra (Oaxaca, Mexico), Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, NY) and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY). Jenson teaches in the Department of Media Study at the University of Buffalo.

**THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED BY UB DUE TO THE SOLAR ECLIPSE**

Anne Pasek is an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture, and the Environment at Trent University, cross-appointed between Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment. Her research explores the cultural politics of climate change, with a particular emphasis on the social and technical means through which carbon is enumerated and mobilized within the tech sector, academia, and the arts. She is also the director of the Low-Carbon Research Methods Group, a network of scholars examining the social impacts of decarbonizing academic work, and the Experimental Methods & Media Lab, a hub for research-creation and critical making at Trent.

CO-SPONSORED BY THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES RESEARCH WORKSHOP

T. J. Demos teaches art history and visual culture at UC Santa Cruz, and directs its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes about contemporary art, global politics, and ecology and is the author of numerous books, including Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (2016), Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017), and most recently, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (2023). He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21).

CO-SPONSORED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF ART

0rphan Drift has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision since its inception in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. Now co-channelled by co-founders Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee, it operates across London, San Francisco and Capetown. 

In recent years, 0rphan Drift has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus - as a distributed, many-minded consciousness. The multiple channel video installation If AI Were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery San Francisco (2019), and the ACE funded IMT Gallery Becoming Octopus Meditations (2020), suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception and navigate what it means to communicate with an alien intelligence and how to address human exceptionalism’s limited understanding of ourselves in relation to other kinds of life, whether as the distributed intelligence of the octopus or the synthetic architecture of an Ai. They combine video, animation and text with newer tools such as Lidar, Blender, Touch Designer, to explore new spatio-temporal formations and ask what kinds of bodies might inhabit these new coordinates and ecologies. 

0rphan Drift was partnered by the Serpentine Gallery’s Creative Ai Lab with Ai consultancy Etic Lab, for ISCRI, and now their current 9 Brains project. Installations, performances and speculative fictions have been exhibited nationally and internationally in gallery and museum spaces for over three decades. Recent exhibitions include Seismic: Art meets Science, Giant gallery, Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, UK; Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon; Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or; Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery NY and in the book Fictioning,The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, 2019; Interview in Interalia Magazine and contribution to Strike Art #77 on Ai, both 2023. 

For further information, visit https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/

Mark Shepard [www.andinc.org] is an artist, architect and researcher whose work addresses contemporary entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power. His recent book, There Are No Facts: attentive algorithms, extractive data practices and the quantification of everyday life (MIT Press, 2022) examines the uncommon ground we share in a post-truth world. He is an editor of the Situated Technologies Pamphlets Series (The Architectural League of New York) and editor of Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space (MIT Press, 2011). His work has been exhibited at museums, galleries and festivals internationally, including the Venice International Architecture Biennial; the Prix Ars Electronica; Transmediale; the International Architecture Biennial Rotterdam; The Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF); Arte.Mov Festival for Mobile Media Art, São Paulo, Brazil; Haus für elektronische Künst, Basel; FACT Liverpool; the Medialab Prado, Madrid, Spain; and Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York. It has been supported by Creative Capital, the European Union Culture Programme 2007-2013, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Architectural League of New York, and Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, among others. Mark is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, where he directs the Media Arts and Architecture Program (MAAP) and the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies (CAST).

Christine Marie is an interdisciplinary media artist whose work reflects upon industrialization, oppositional forces, and the media’s gaze within sensory narratives. Her work (antiquated) Augmented Reality was presented at the Sundance Film Festival: New Frontier featuring live, large-scale, 3D stereo-images created by her reinvention of the shadow-stereoscope. She holds an MFA in Integrated Media and Experimental Theater from the California Institute of the Arts. Marie was awarded the Andrew Mellon Arts and Technology Professor of Practice grant. She has taught animation at Pixar and DreamWorks Studios. She currently teaches in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo.

PLASMA is sponsored by the University at Buffalo's Department of Media Study and funding is provided by the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The series is taught and organized by Dr. Elia Vargas.