PLASMA 2025

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.

February 3: Waylon Wilson - UB Indigenous Studies

The PLASMA 2025 speaker series presents Waylon Wilson, speaking on “Anti-Colonial Game Design and Digital Indigeneity".

February 10: Yvette Granata - University of Michigan, Film, Television and Media

Monday, February 10, 2025
6pm in CFA 112

PLASMA 2025 presents Yvette Granata, speaking on "Extended Animation, Extended Realities, Extended Feminisms"

Yvette Granata is a media artist, filmmaker, and media scholar. She is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan in the department of Film, Television and Media and the Digital Studies Institute. She creates immersive media installations, VR films, video art, and interactive environments, and she writes about media theory and digital visual culture. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at film festivals and art institutions including: Slamdance, CPH:DOX, Melbourne International Film Festival, Annecy International Animation Festival, Images Festival, The EYE Film Museum, Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, Radvila Palace Art Museum, and Squeaky Wheel New Media Art Center, among others. Her most recent VR project, I Took a Lethal Dose of Herbs, premiered at CPH:DOX in 2023, won the Jury Prize at the One World Film festival in Prague, was nominated for Best of Fest at Filmgate Interactive in Miami, and received an Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz Austria. Yvette has published in AI & Society, Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and the International Journal of Cultural Studies. She holds a Phd from SUNY Buffalo’s Media Study Program and a Masters from the University of Amsterdam.

February 17: Jess Erion - writer & game designer

We look forward to hosting writer, game designer, business owner Jess Erion. Jess’ talk is entitled “Does good (game) writing exist? Writing for audience & employment”

After completing a BA in English at Harvard University, Jess completed an MFA at the NYU Game Center and a fellowship with SUNY Buffalo’s Palah Light Lab. Currently, Jess is working as a narrative designer on various projects for clients like Carnegie Hall and Studio Chyr. Jess recently worked with Red Thread Games on their action-adventure title, Dustborn, and continue to work with them on as yet unannounced projects.

Jess is focused on subversive and thoughtful storytelling through interactive media.

This talk will be on Zoom - Meeting ID: 964 0655 9066

Email Dave Pape (depape@buffalo.edu) for the passcode

February 24: Kristian Mercado - filmmaker

Kristian Mercado Figueroa (UB Media Study BA, 2006) is a Puerto Rican filmmaker living in Spanish Harlem. Raised between New York’s Spanish Harlem and Puerto Rico, Kristian Mercado discovered his passion for the arts at an early age, often using film as a form of escapism. His psychedelic animated short Nuevo Rico debuted at the 2021 SXSW Festival, garnering the prestigious Animation Jury Award, and is currently being developed into a full-length feature film.

Recently, Mercado directed his first feature film entitled If You Were the Last, written by Angela Bourassa. The film is a warm and comedic investigation of life and love, set on a rocket ship adrift in space.

Mercado has directed content for Billie Eilish, Bad Bunny, Awkwafina, Eric Andre, Spotify, Adidas, Corona, Miller, Topo Chico, Alienware, De La Soul, MF DOOM, Planned Parenthood, Gatorade, and Adult Swim, among others.

He has also solidified a place in today’s comedy scene, directing specials for Michael Che, Ilana Glazer, Taylor Tomlinson, Hannibal Buress, Sam Jay, Phoebe Robinson, and Aida Rodriguez.

With work that has screened at numerous festivals, Mercado has a distinct voice for addressing issues of identity, family, and systemic oppression across race and class. His work is celebrated for its poetic portrayal of working-class struggles and highlighting the gaps between love and loss. Mercado has several scripts in the works, laying vital groundwork for the next phase in his career.

We hope you will join us.

March 3: Pam Swarts & Ryan Gurnett - creators of "The Buffalo Infringement Festival"

The Buffalo Infringement Festival is a non-profit-driven, non-hierarchical grassroots endeavor bringing together a broad range of eclectic, independent, experimental, and controversial art of all forms. 

Celebrating freedom of expression and designed as a real arts democracy, this festival is a critical response to the oppressive neoliberal worldview and all its billboard trucks, televisions, flyers, advertisements, jingles, made-for-TV wars; and the depoliticization of people through this diversionary spectacle. The Infringement Festival aims to emphasize both critical practice in the arts, and artistic practice in activism.

March 10: Helga Christoffersen on "Steina: Playback" exhibit at AKG

Steina: Playback presents the first solo exhibition in over a decade of Steina, the pathbreaking media artist whose work traverses video, performance, and installation. Since cofounding The Kitchen in New York City in 1971, Steina has created works shaped by her experimental approach to electronic processing tools, persistent explorations of what she called “machine vision,” and an enduring ethos of play. A classically trained violinist, Steina took up video in 1970, bringing to her new instrument—initially a Sony Portapak—a musician’s attention to the “majestic flow of time.” Unlike many of her peers working in video in its early decades, the Icelandic-born artist did not consider US television culture a central force against which her video activity was defined. Instead, human perception was a key site of confrontation as she sought the exuberant and even utopian possibilities of an “intelligent, yet not human vision.” Steina also shaped the avant-garde media arts environment that characterized Buffalo in the 1970s. Steina: Playback represents a homecoming for the artist, who taught at the Center for Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo in that decade, and exhibited at the Albright-Knox in 1978 in The VASULKAS / Steina: Machine Vision, Woody: Descriptions.

Mar 24: Joost Rekveld "Liberate the Machines!"

Joost Rekveld is an artist who wonders what humans can learn from a dialogue with the machines they have constructed. In a form of media archeology, he investigates modes of material engagement with devices from forgotten corners in the history of science and technology. The outcomes of these investigations often take the shape of abstract films that function like alien phenomenologies. In their sensuality they are an attempt to reach an intimate and embodied understanding of our technological world.

His films have been shown world-wide in a wide range of festivals and venues for experimental film, animation or other kinds of moving image. He had retrospectives at the Barbican in London and the Ann Arbor film festival amongst others, and in 2017 he was filmmaker in focus at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Individual films were screened at hundreds of venues, including the ICA and the Tate Modern in London, The Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. His film “#11, Marey <-> Moire” was the first Dutch film ever to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival. He realized several installations and did many collaborative projects involving composers, music ensembles, theatre companies and dance companies.

Since 1990 he has been putting together many film programmes, he curated several exhibitions and he occasionally publishes essays. He has been giving lectures since 1993, has been teaching since 1996, and from 2008 to 2014 he was the course director of the ArtScience Interfaculty of the Royal Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Since 2017 he has been affiliated to the School of Arts University College Ghent (KASK) as an artistic researcher

March 31: Andrew Lison - UB Media Study

“Digitality from Computation to Mediation”

As a former information technologist and systems administrator, Dr. Lison’s scholarship spans the practical and the theoretical, connecting issues across a variety of humanistic fields to focus on the way in which digital media has, since the Second World War, progressively come to absorb previously distinct social relations. Dr. Lison is currently working on two book-length projects. The first, New Media at the End of History, examines the rise of digital multimedia alongside the collapse of state socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The second, tentatively entitled 100% Utilization, revisits the technical limits of computation in light of increasing socio-economic dependence on automation.

April 7: Cynthia Starr

"Supporting Science Communication at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio"

Cindy Starr is a data visualizer in NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She focuses on creating cinematic scientific visualizations to promote a greater understanding of Earth and Space science. She works with a team of advanced visualizers, scientists, producers and writers to create accurate representations of scientific data derived from satellites and computer models. Her visualizations have been an integral part of scientific presentations, news broadcasts, museum exhibits, classroom instruction, and science documentaries. Cindy's work supports the scientific community at NASA by providing an accurate representation of scientific findings in a way that the intended audience can understand.

April 14: Sama Waham  "Media Artivism: Expanding Cinema for Justice"

Sama Waham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study, and an international award-winning director, producer and cinematographer. Her films have screened in numerous prestigious festivals including Hot Docs, Yorkton, European Independent Film Festival and many others in the United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East, winning over 21 awards and nominations. She has an MFA in Film Production from York University in Toronto.

Her latest film ‘Sing for Me’ is a poetic, experimental documentary that contemplates the notion of belonging, connecting with heritage and inherited nostalgia, while investigating the viewpoint of fractured diasporic identities and ethnic solidarity, and meditating on Mandaeanism; a fading ancient practice that sends its roots back to the depth of Babylonian history. A multilayered personal journey that departs from loss and follows a river, to recreate an image of a city that no longer exists. The film travels through shared family memory, a collage of stories and archival footage to a new exposition of ‘home’. Sing for Me premiered at Dubai International Film Festival in 2015 and received the ‘Best Long Documentary Award’ in the Alexandria Mediterranean Countries Film Festival in September 2016, along with 6 other international awards to date.

Professor Waham is an Associate Member of the Canadian Society of Cinematographers where she was nominated for the Robert Brooks Award for Best Documentary Cinematography in 2014. She has a wide range of experience working on narrative, documentary, experimental and hybrid films as a director, cinematographer and editor, and has also produced eight films, including three feature length documentaries in Canada. She worked extensively in academic and professional settings teaching a wide array of filmmaking courses and skills from lighting and cinematography, to editing, screenwriting, producing and directing. Her research is focused on the moving image’s expanding forms and formats, revisiting the boundaries of traditional genres in filmmaking and considering inventive approaches to storytelling.

April 21: Tim Portlock - University of Wisconsin, Art Department and Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies

"Landscape and Storytelling"

Tim Portlock is a professor of Art and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin. His current creative work combines special effects software and the visual conventions of 19th-century American painting to creatively simulate real-world American cityscapes. In recent years, his large format print images have depicted imagined landscapes populated with the empty buildings that surround his home in Philadelphia as well as developments in post-boom and bust Las Vegas. Other work utilizes large outdoor video projections onto buildings, creating temporary public art that incorporates new media and the visual language of murals while engaging with architecture and city space.

Professor Portlock taught courses in emerging media as an associate professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. In previous work in the Anglophone studies department at l’Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), he served as a creative and technical director on a number of projects—including “Virtual Montmarte” and “Virtual Sorbonne"—that utilized interactive 3D computer game technology to simulate spaces deemed to be historically significant. He received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2011 and won a Festival of Murals Prize to commemorate the 1,000-year anniversary of Gdańsk, Poland.

Recent exhibitions include Ruffneck Constructivists at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, curated by Kara Walker and Anthony Elms; the 2014 Visiting Curator Exhibition at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, curated by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Curator and director of High Line Art; and SPRING/BREAK Art Show, curated by Complex Magazine art critics Leigh Silver and Ellie Clark. Professor Portlock also exhibited at PULSE New York, represented by the West Collection (2013); Broadstone Studios in Dublin as part of Photo Ireland (2012); the Tate Modern as a member of the artist collective Vox Populi (2011); Christie’s London, represented by Philagrafika (2012); the International Guerrilla Video Festival in Dublin (2009); and This is Not a Gateway, a group exhibition of outdoor video projections in London (2009). Prior to this period, Portlock exhibited at the 404 Festival for digital art in Argentina and Italy, ISEA Japan, and Ars Electronica in Austria, where his work is part of the permanent collection. Portlock has been an artist in residence at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand), 18th Street Arts Center (Santa Monica), the International Center of Photography (New York), and the Abrons Arts Center (New York).

April 28: Maria Roussou - University of Athens, Informatics & Telecommunications

May 5: Althea Rao - University of Washington, DXARTS

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.