2024 Festival





SPAM New Media Festival is back for its second iteration, hosted by Georgetown Steam Plant. Launched last year, SPAM is a Seattle based experimental arts festival which brings together practitioners working on the fringes and frontiers of new media art and knowledge production. Taking place at various venues across Seattle, the yearly festival consists of a program of exhibitions and performances rooted in, or emerging from, technology driven art and digital culture.

For this year, rather than organizing under a single theme, we created a map of terms, key ideas, and areas of exploration that arose in last year’s festival. While for some participating artists the points of research and practice focus on the map may have been of use in situating their work within the ethos of the festival, applicants were not limited to these themes and ideas. We asked for artist contributions which would help us to expand our critical dialogue with new media art, digital culture and technology-driven work—growing our map and opening up new avenues of knowledge. In proposing this constellation of nodes as a structure for the Open Call, we hoped to augment and build it with the festival, cultivating its messy, but networked, patchy and tentacular intention.

The result is SPAM New Media Festival 2024— a program of over 25 installations, with a line-up of nine amazing performances, all happening over a three-day weekend in a single location. We are thrilled to have had artists from here in Seattle, across the nation, and abroad offer their work to be shown in this year’s festival at Steam Plant. Through their diverse practices, these artists harness technology to build alternative worlds and narratives. Whether exploring themes of religious symbolism, ghostly presences, obsolete technology, or local frequencies and stories, each project brings a distinct voice and vision to the festival. SPAM continues to be a platform where technology meets creativity, enabling profound and varied interpretations of our digital and physical landscapes. Within the building’s multiple levels, corners and hidden rooms, visitors will find video game technologies, animatronics, radio interventions, e-textiles, video and sound installations, and digitally mediated sculptural work, including ceramics and 3D prints.

In addition to this year’s program of installations and performances, Fantastic Ingenuity, in partnership with SPAM New Media Festival, will engage with the multifaceted conversation of Afrofuturism, through a rich blend of digital arts, textiles, fashion, visual art, performance, and storytelling.







Program:


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Partnered Curations:


Fantastic Ingenuity: Imagine Feeling Something




Performances:



Friday September 27th, 7pm-9pm

Alemseged Bishu
Zeynep Özcan
Michael Bruner & Jeff Moris ‏Maria Thrän



Saturday September 28th, 6:30pm-9pm

BLUE.WEAVE the INVENTOR
RedSpills Duo
Lauren Sarah Hayes ‏
St Celfer
Josiah Boothby, Laura Luna Castillo, Leanna Keith, Ashley Menestrina, Daniel Peterson & Ewa Trębacz ‏
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Installations:
Rose Ansari
Bailey Ambrose
Ali Balighi
 Cristina Brambila
Michael Bruner & Jeff Moris
Eunsun Choi & Kyung-jin Kim  
Linda Conforto  
Jo Cosme
Rebecca Cummins  
Brandon Dalmer  
Stephanie Deumer
ephemeral:data
Hexe Fey
Umut Gunduz  
Blake Johnston  
Steffi Klenz & Clare Strand
 Alex Lee Place ‏
Afroditi Psarra‏& ‏ Audrey Briot
Adamska Rakhilkina
Tivon Rice ‏
Sadaf Sadri 
Crassula Shang‏
Switcheristic Telecommunications  
Maria Thrän
Andrew Wood




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