PLASMA 2022

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.

After studying theater and religion in college, ELLEN HORNE was executive producer of Radiolab, an award-winning podcast and radio show, for 12 years. During her tenure at Radiolab, Ellen played a wide variety of roles - from reporting, writing, editing, to directing Radiolab’s theatrical stage shows. Now, Ellen is the co-founder of Story Mechanics (along with her husband, Charles Michelet), an audio production company specializing in podcasts, musical scoring and character-driven audio content for apps.  Ellen also teaches courses in audio journalism for graduate students at NYU and Columbia University.

View On Demand: https://youtu.be/An3jEmByEqo

SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Through works of video installation, software, and real-time performance, her work often critically engages the technical language of instruction, especially the aesthetics and mechanics of practices from queer feminist BDSM communities, to direct viewers to read, play, or listen their way through narratives that guide them in and out of visceral memories, asking them to confront intense emotions like desire, shame, or regret, and to employ them as mechanisms to navigate through and/or away from abuses of power. Holloway has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), The Time-Based Art Festival (Portland),  Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Hebbel am Ufer HAU (Berlin), and NTS Radio (London). SHAWNÉ was a 20-21 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Queer Theatre & Performance Resident as well as a resident at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Creative Exchange Lab.

Part of her "Dog Whistle" project, i would’ve said goodbye if i thought you loved me back, will be visible in the window gallery at the Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center located at 617 Main Street, Buffalo NY -- UNTIL FEBRUARY 14th. The online component of this project can be found here.

JOSEPHINE ANSTEY’s career has been concept and project driven, engaging with a wide variety of media practices and technologies. Experiments with narrative & dramatic forms and questions of identity & consciousness have been constant themes. Her early work includes a long collaboration with Julie Zando on a series of video-art pieces. Since 1995, she has focused on the production of interactive computer-mediated experiences: stories, performances and games. This has resulted in works of interactive drama, virtual & mixed reality, and intermedia performance populated by intelligent agents, networked human actors, and puppet avatars. Her VR and video works have shown widely in the US, in Europe, South America and Asia, and she has work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Ars Electronica Center, Austria. Currently she is making animations with clay figures about economics and writing a scifi/ecofiction novel. She will retire from her position as UB Professor of Media Study at the end of Spring 2022.

www.josephineanstey.com

View On Demand:https://youtu.be/jWZn28ETE_g

February 28th : NO PUBLIC LECTURE – PLASMA CLASS ONLY

ALMUDENA ESCOBAR LÓPEZ is an independent curator, archivist, and researcher from Galicia, Spain. She is the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) in Rochester. Her work focuses largely on coloniality, anti-ethnography, visual historiography, and artistic practices that propose alternative ways of understanding territoriality. Almudena is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester.

As a guest curator, Almudena has curated and co-curated a number of film and video series which have been presented at Anthology Film Archives, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá, UnionDocs, ICDOCS, Visual Studies Workshop, Cineteca Nacional de México, Alternative Film/Video, among others. Her writing has been published at MoMA Magazine, Walden, Vdrome, Vertical Features, MUBI Notebook, The Brooklyn Rail, Afterimage, Film Quarterly, and Desistfilm Magazine, among other publications and catalogs. Since 2017 she serves on the Board of Trustees of the Visual Studies Workshop, and the Advisory Board of Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center in Buffalo, NY.

She was program advisor of the 2020 edition of Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and is the curator of Cinema of Sensations, an exhibition that will present the work of José Val del Omar at the Museum of Moving Image in New York with the support of the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. With Sky Hopinka, she is the co-curator of the 2022 Flaherty Film Seminar.

VIEW ON DEMAND: https://youtu.be/Xl_rc1KRgqc  

MARCH 14th:

JOEL ONG, PhD, Computational Media Artist

JOEL ONG is a media artist whose works connect scientific and artistic approaches to the environment, particularly with respect to sound and physical space.  Currently Assistant Professor of Computational Arts at York University in Toronto, Professor Ong’s work explores the way objects and spaces can function as repositories of ‘frozen sound’, and in elucidating these, he is interested in creating what systems theorist Jack Burnham (1968) refers to as “art (that) does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment”.

A serial collaborator, Professor Ong is invested in the broader scope of Art-Science collaborations and is engaged constantly in the discourses and processes that facilitate viewing these two polemical disciplines on similar ground.  His graduate interdisciplinary work in nanotechnology and sound was conducted at SymbioticA, the Center of Excellence for Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia and supervised by BioArt pioneers and TCA (The Tissue Culture and Art Project) artists Dr Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts.  In his doctoral studies, he was mentored by Dr Edward Shanken, author of the canonical “Art and Electronic Media” published by Phaidon Press in 2009, and was his Research Assistant in the “Systems” publication in the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series.  Since 2014, Professor Ong has been a visiting artist at the UCLA ArtSci Center.  His works have been shown at festivals and conferences around the world including Ars Electronica, Currents New Media Festival, the Ontario Science Centre, ISEA and Siggraph.  Previously he has held residencies at locations such as the Coalesce Centre for Biological Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Toronto, and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

View On Demand https://youtu.be/blvhHJdn6YY  

MARCH 28:

CRYSTAL Z. CAMPBELL, multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer

CRYSTAL Z. CAMPBELL(they/them/theirs) is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipino, and Chinese descents. A 2021-22 University at Buffalo Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Campbell finds complexity in public secrets— fragments of information known by many but untold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks' “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Sonic, material, and archival traces of the witness informs their work in film, performance, installation, sound, painting, and writing.

Honors and awards include the Pollock-Krasner Award; MAP Fund; MacDowell; MAAA, Skowhegan; Rijksakademie; Whitney ISP; Franklin Furnace; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Black Spatial Relics; UNDO Fellowship, and Flaherty Film Seminar, amongst others. Select exhibitions include the Drawing Center (US), Nest (NL), ICA-Philadelphia (US), REDCAT (US), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (US), Project Row Houses (US), and SculptureCenter (US), and SFMOMA (US). Campbell’s writing has been featured in World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic.

Campbell is a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021). Campbell is founder of the virtual programming platform archiveacts.com and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts.

View On Demand is available on request

APRIL 4:

ART JONES, Video Art and Performance

Video Performance Title: “Science for Disease Culture,”*Art Jones works with moving images, photography, sound, and objects. Jones often uses original and found media as raw material to be sampled and re-combined in order to examine implicit cultural meanings or suggest new ones. Jones' films and media art projects and performances have been presented at international and national institutions including Chinatown Soup in New York City, Times Art Center Berlin, Roulette Intermedium, and Mana Contemporary Art. Most recently, an exhibition at the Herter Art Gallery at UMASS Amherst featured work drawn from his 30-year career. Laura McGough, curator of that 2021 exhibition and DMS PhD ‘17, writes: “Working across film, video, live media performance, and 3-D printed sculptures, Jones explores how social information is both transmitted and received. Experimentation with traditional media forms through the manipulation of image, sound, text, and data is a key component in this exploration. In the early 1990s, Jones developed a unique visual hip hop aesthetic that translated the aural qualities of rap music to moving images .. and introduced video noise, rapid-fire repetitive editing, and image distortion to the traditional documentary format.”For PLASMA, Jones will perform “Science for Disease Culture” – a live video remix performance. Jones’ title refers to a passage in Rammellzee’s Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism (1979) that reads: “The Roman letter type and others have been armed to assassinate and/or abolish this supreme symbol known as infinity sign by removing the x from this written structure.This is symbolic war using slang and tonics to understand the very outline structure that makes a through z its mathematics and science for disease culture to understand the consequences of structure that have been disease culturally sabotaged and trickknowledged."

View On Demand: https://youtu.be/ORJrgw5WSOY  

APRIL 11:

EMILY MARTINEZ, New Media Artist and Serial Collaborator

Emily Martinez (they/she) is a new media artist working with machine learning, queer technologies, new economies, and consensual tech. They are a 1st generation immigrant/refugee (Cuba > Miami) and a self-taught coder who believes in the tactical misuse of technology. Emily is a collaborator with Anxious to Make and Queer AI. Their latest project, Unsupervised Pleasures is a DIY community practice that uses queer methodologies, glitch feminism, decolonial and other non-normative frameworks to un/make things with AI. When Emily is not working, they are learning to love and doing their energy work.

Emily’s art and research has been published in Art in America, Media-N, Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), Temporary Art Review, and Filmmaker Magazine. Their work has been exhibited at international venues, including Hebbel am Ufer HAU4 (Berlin, DE), Drugo More (Rijeka, Croatia), Transmediale (Berlin, DE), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, NL), The Luminary (St. Louis), The Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, NL), and The Wrong Biennale.

APRIL 18: 

NG'ENDO MUKII, Director, Documentary Animator, Photographer, and Writer

NG'ENDO MUKII is a Director, Animator, Photographer, and Writer. She holds a Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art (2012) in London, and a Bachelor of Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (2006), USA.

​An award-winning film director, MUKII is most well known for ‘Yellow Fever,’ her documentary-animation exploring Western influences on African women's ideals of beauty. Her films have won multiple international awards, including Silver Hugo for The Best Animated Short at the Chicago International Film Festival for Yellow Fever, and Encounters Immersive Grand Prix for my first 360 film, Nairobi Berries. She is a Design Indaba ‘15 Speaker and a Berlinale Talents Alum.

​In addition to this filmwork, MUKII has worked on short animated and 360 films commissioned by local and international organizations, including projects commissioned for Huffington Post and Plan International. Her projects have received funding from the New Dimensions Virtual Reality program (South Africa), Docubox Kenya, and Focus Features Africa First (USA) grants.

view on demand https://youtu.be/jWg_4oKneyA  

APRIL 25:

JORDAN LORD, Filmmaker and Artist

Jordan Lord is a filmmaker, writer, and artist, working primarily in video, text, and performance. Their work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts, framing and support, access and documentary. Their video and performance work has been shown internationally at festivals and venues including DOCNYC, QueerLisboa, Anthology Film Archives, Performance Space NY, Artists Space, and Camden Arts Centre, and they have been in study with the group No Total since 2012. Their solo exhibition of video work "After...After..." was presented at Piper Keys in London, UK in 2019. They received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College, CUNY, where they also teach.

May 2nd

Eliane Bettocchi is a black woman, who knows and feels what it is to be on the outskirts of a dominant civilization. As an Educator, she/they think it’s her/their duty to help healing these wounds, which she/they try to do through her/their research/teaching/design method as means to bring a dream into reality, a dream of seeing the entertainment and media industry as an inclusive place where people like her/them once was (a poor black woman from a third world country) can build a career; a place where the once oppressed can tell their stories, relate to their own role models and finally open the gates of diversity to everybody else.

She/they is a tenured professor of the Art Teacher Licensure Course at the Institute of Arts and Design of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. She/they coordinates the research groups Interactive Stories: study and project of playful narratives and Laroyê: research in decolonial bodies, arts, culture and languages,  and the Interdisciplinary Language Laboratory for undergraduate degrees at UFJF. She/they was a Design Consultant at the UNESCO Chair in Reading at PUC-Rio, where she/they coordinated a high school teacher training project with support from Faperj. She/they worked for 19 years as a Graphic Design and Illustration professional, with an emphasis on commercial and educational narrative games. Lato sensu postgraduate degree in Art Theory at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (1998), Master’s (2002) and Doctorate (2008) in Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.

Portrait by her/their daughter, Alice Klimick Bettocchi, 2020.

As a researcher, I have been intrigued by the potential of NARRATIVE GAMES as poetic expression and means of changing the world. However, as I am usually the only black woman in the group authoring a paper or creating a game, I still feel underrepresented and uncomfortable among the gaming community. This happens not only to me, but also to most of my black students, and this seems to be a broader issue, as stated by Lindsay Grace (2021). The issue seems to involve the problem of supporting diversity and underrepresentation that has been debated both in game environments and in other narrative productions.

The Ludonarratives & Re-signification Research Line of the INTERACTIVE STORIES group aims to investigate the possibility of re-significations being promoted and/or expressed through ludonarratives, understanding re-signification as the production of new meanings in the languages and supports of these ludonarratives, capable of promoting a recreation of the subject and its reality and critical construction of knowledge.

Curriculum&Portfolio: https://historias.interativas.nom.br/lilithstudio/

PLASMA 2022 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 curated by Dr. Paige Sarlin, Assistant Professor of Media Study, in collaboration with Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center.