2
Merve Ünsal
Glitching Sinkholes
stereo audio installation
Map
2
3
3
Berk Yagli
Transhuman Trilogy
Fixed-media
5
5
Raphael Arar, Scott Cazan
Intimate Commons
audiovisual installation, web application
7
7
Nassim L'Ghoul, Joshua Arnaut (sound)
soft links
3D-Animation
9
9
Aaron Oldenburg
Night Walks
Software (original game engine in C++)
8
8
Most Ancient: Veronica Graham, Holly Newlands, Julia Kim, Sharleen Chen
Diatribes
VR
6
6
Tivon Rice
Pattern 254 - Tetrapods
concrete, video, sound
1
1
Maria Thrän
AEOLIAN TREE
Saturday Sept 13
Kinetic Em soundsculpture and performance
10
10
Afroditi Psarra w/ Zoe Kaputa
Kirigami Antennas
E-textile sound installation and radio art
11
11
Schuyler deVos, Ezekiel Maben
MAMMON.exe
New media installation
4
12
Dorothy R. Santos
You are not a Monster
Multi-media and digital installation
12
12
jiawen uffline
let yourself l̴͓̥̠̼̏̑̃̂̂͘ḛ̷̺̟͓͈̜̓̋̍̄̆ä̸̞̝̳́̾̓̈̾k̷͎̰̓̒͘ a little
video essay
13
13
Bailey Ambrose
Mylove
Mechatronics
14
14
Jorge Ramos, Anna Kim and Julien Gaillac
BLUR
Video Projection/Playback
17
17
Ainaz Alipour
OutsideIn/Khandaq
Multimedia Installation
15
15
Leilei Xia
The Palace
Video Installation, workshop
16
16
Shelby Wilson and Alex Miller
Light Quilt
cardboard, projection, code
18
18
Edmar Soria
Silistrato
Fixed Video. Full HD+Stereo Sound
2
2
Maria Thrän and Afroditi Psarra
Live signals, live bodies (in conversation)
Friday Sept 12
Sound performance
3
3
Style King of the Week
Friday Sept 12
Sound performance
4
4
St Celfer
St Celfer ft. Tom Moody and Fluffy Crumb (images) presents Etude for Proofs as Fabrications, qahr - A Buffer Finger Ride & Fifty One
Friday Sept 12
Sound and Video
5
5
Marcin Pączkowski
Into the Lucid Chamber
Friday Sept 12
Interactive sound performance
6
6
Natalia Quintanilla Cabrera
menos que nada / un futuro
Saturday Sept 13
Live performance with live electronics (accordion, voice, fixed media, and live processing)
7
7
Charles Peoples III
(a)temporalities
Saturday Sept 13
Site-specific immersive performance for voice and spatialized sound
8
8
BAKUDI SCREAM
Prey
Saturday Sept 13
Performance, electronics, visual art
20
20
Rose Xu
Am I Alive?
Video installation
19
19
Kate Bailey
Is It Listening?
Weather balloon, Raspberry Pi, battery pack, thermal receipt printer, paper roll
21
21
Vishal Kumaraswamy
dreams of transformation
Single channel video
22
22
Hans Kuzmich
Radiant Center
4 speakers, 4 speaker stands, and inkjet print, 4-channel audio, 45 min. Loop
23
23
Mare Hirsch (with sounds by Robert McClure)
Soft Infrastructures for Falling Worlds
generative visuals, projection mapping, modular synthesizer
24
24
Abram Stern (aphid)
numb.station
Radio/Sound/Software Installation
25
25
Afroditi Psarra
Altar of interdimensional entanglements
Multichannel sound installation with knitted textiles
26
26
Neeti Sivakumar
The Hug
Single-channel video
27
27
Harshini J. Karunatane
Siren Speaks
Single-channel video
28
28
Drishya Subramaniam
Last One Standing
Interactive Website
29
29
Umut Gunduz
Something To Say About It All
Video, 3D Printed Sculptures, Mechatronics
30
30
Lena Ferro
<in the cloud>
Interactive Installation
31
31
McKinley Smith
FOR ALL EARTHKIND
Agar memorial plaque, aluminium, acrylic, electronics, thermo polymers
32
32
Alina Nazmeeva
Bug in my Software
Multimedia Installation (textile, simulation, XR)
1
1
Alemseged Bishu
Versioned Memories
Friday Sept 12
Sound performance
Georgetown Steam Plant is located at 6605 13th Ave S, Seattle, WA 98108
Schedule
Free and all ages. Open 5–10pm Friday and Saturday and 4–7pm Sunday, with live performances Friday and Saturday nights and a workshop on Sunday.
Join us for a weekend of critically engaged, experimental, and research focused new media work.
To give visitors ample time to explore over 30 installations, we've divided the 5–8pm window into one-hour slots. Please reserve your free tickets for the time slot that works best for you!
Performances
Friday September 12th,
6pm–10pm
Workshop
Sunday September 14th,
6pm
15Leilei Xia
Empty
Touch
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Versioned Memories is a sound performance using field recordings from urban soundscapes and personal moments combined with live electronics.
Live performance Friday, September 12.
Artist statement
Alemseged Bishu is an architect based in Seattle. He is interested in sound / noise and how it shapes one’s experience of a place / a moment. His work explores the materiality of sound, and how it can be added on, remixed and transmitted in a field of space–taking form as it bounces-off of its surrounding environment, and thus continuously becoming. His research thesis, B-Side Urbanism: A Dub City, explores the act of making Dub music as a medium to reflect on how we engage with the built environment.
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Through different embodied antenna systems — a swinging wire tuned to the electromagnetic field, and diy/handheld/wearable antennas — we receive and process transmissions at the Hertzian spectrum in real time. Our performance is a practice of co-tuning, interference, and spatial resonance; an improvisation with invisible fields — received through software-defined radios, and processed through live electronics and SuperCollider. Grounded in the broken harmony of the Georgetown Steam Plant’s architecture, bodies, machines, and noise converge in a listening practice that resists control and invites uncertainty.
Live performance Friday, September 12.
Artist statement
We work with unstable signals and shared noise.
Maria Thrän is a Berlin- and Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and Ph.D. researcher in the University of Washington’s DXARTS program. Their immersive kinetic installations and performances integrate mechatronics, spatial sound synthesis, light, and video to explore rhythm, memory, and more-than-human communication.
By transforming exhibition spaces into responsive perceptual systems, Thrän invites audiences to resonate with their own ecological entanglements and to consider how bodies, voices, and technologies can operate as instruments of memory, protest, care, and resistance. Their research-driven practice examines ecological interdependence, technological agency, and the poetics of signal and noise through speculative approaches to preservation.
Thrän’s work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions and developed through residencies around the globe.
Afroditi Psarra’s research focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts with a critical lens. She sees the praxis of crafting technological artifacts as an act of resistance against black box systems. One that contains embodied knowledge and carries with it oral histories of intergenerational practices. One that can transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries, and can be transmitted through direct engagement with materials. Likewise, she sees the use of electronics, open software and hardware, and the act of creating collectively as means of cultivating digital commons that have the potential to empower individuals through shared knowledge. She believes that the ability to craft your own technology is a powerful tool for world building, one that enables you to speculate about alternative presents and plausible futures.
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Style King of the Week is two childhood best friends, reunited after decades on opposite coasts. A New Media project as much as a musical one, they create beats, atmosphere, and environments, using cassette tapes and other “obsolete” technology–like magnetic card-readers and instrument tuners–plus analog synths, a small drumset, and found-object percussion.
They split the difference between meticulous reassembling of cherished memories and exuberant, messy, forward-looking creation. Using cassette tape players and card readers instead of samplers and drum machines adds a layer of intentional uncertainty, imprecision, and the impossibility of ever playing something exactly the same way twice. The music mutates and shifts over time, like hazy memories. It’s musique concrète, if that concrete was covered in spreading moss with saplings stretching up from cracks.
This music mines the depths of their shared history, tracing their creative and personal paths leading apart and back together–digesting everything they’ve ever listened to and loved, from hardcore punk, experimental jazz, and 90’s hip-hop, to 2000’s indie rock, metal, and electronic music.
Nothing is sequenced or programmed, everything is played or triggered in real time–so both members are always doing too many things at once. A choreography of tangled wires and flashing limbs.
Live performance Friday, September 12.
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4
St Celfer
Etude for Proofs as Fabrications, qahr - A Buffer Finger Ride & Fifty One
Sound and Video
“There is a lot of noise today—we just need to hear the music within it.”
Post-apocalyptic is constructive: St Celfer resists technology’s facilitation of power by navigating glitch-tronic failure and counterblasts through the vanishing point. Sound is amalgamated and congealed into a resolution of crossed and overloaded signals, opening new ways of perceiving a world constrained by the impositions of power. St Celfer devises instruments that focus on the interface between human and machine, mounted on a single microphone stand with interconnected gear designed to make music in the moment.
By enunciating the temporal, mechanical, and human elements of these audial conjunctions, the artist probes how these forces actively shape, and are shaped by, the fabrications of power. In the midst of this deliberate complexity, we are reminded: amidst the noise, the music is already there, waiting to be heard.
Live performance Friday, September 12.
Artist statement
St Celfer (john macdougall parker), of American and Korean origin, is a former Olympic athlete and coach, and now a creator of interactive sound devices. St Celfer floats between New York City, Seattle, and São Paulo, where you can find drawings on the 'Space Between Points' in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACUSP). 4 albums over 4 years are named "New & Notable" by the editors at Bandcamp.com including one featured wave track for Infrasonica.org, ‘Voicing Abstraction.’ His music has been broadcast on Ridgewood Radio (WFMU), Radio Eclectus (KHUH) and Flotation Device (KBCS). Recent interviews include TomMoody.us, Invert/Extant (UK), and the School of Commons (Zurich). Part of the '00's Williamsburg, Brooklyn music scene, John is currently in the band, Nancy, with David Weinstein and Tim Spelios.
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When I first visited the Steam Plant, I was struck by its unique acoustic character—its rich reverberation, resonant frequencies, and the surprising musicality of its materials when awakened. This piece treats the space not merely as a venue, but as a collaborator. Field recordings made in and around the Steam Plant form the basis of an electroacoustic composition projected throughout the building via a multichannel distributed speaker system. The sounds are transformed in real-time using an accelerometer-based control system, drawing both performer and listener into a shared sonic field. In a sense, the space begins to “play itself”: its resonances processing the very sounds it once generated. The machine dreams on, and we eavesdrop—just for a moment—on the echoes of its past.
Live performance Friday, September 12.
Artist statement
A central focus of my artistic practice is the exploration of movement as a poetic and expressive force in music, particularly through real-time performance integrating motion-controlled sound processing. My engagement with motion sensors began during my studies in symphonic conducting, which coincided with my training in composition and electronic music. From early on, I was drawn to the expressive potential of gesture—not only in conducting but as a means of shaping sound in live computer music performance. This vision has taken shape in a series of works featuring custom-built, accelerometer-based motion sensors, through which I investigate new performance techniques, mapping physical gestures to musical parameters. The spatial aspect of sound is another essential dimension of my work. I frequently use Ambisonic spatial audio systems to craft immersive sonic environments, aiming to envelop listeners and shape their spatial and temporal perception of the music. I am especially interested in expanding this dimension of my practice through the use of distributed speaker systems throughout performance spaces, creating dynamic and responsive sound worlds.
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6
Natalia Quintanilla Cabrera
menos que nada / un futuro
Live performance with live electronics (accordion, voice, fixed media, and live processing)
menos que nada / un futuro is a two-part live performance for accordion, voice, and live electronics. In both pieces, the acoustic sound is processed in real time.
The works explore themes of absence, memory, and resistance. menos que nada is a meditative piece for solo accordion and electronics, reflecting on migration, loss, and the lasting emotional presence of those who are no longer with us. Inspired by Cristina Rivera Garza’s writing that voices her own and collective experiences of crossing the Mexican and U.S. border and Alejandro Santiago’s sculptural response to mass migration in Oaxaca, the piece considers how sound can hold space for absence and preserve memory.
un futuro draws from field recordings made during the 2025 Women’s March in Mexico City, where thousands of women gathered in protest against gendered violence. These recordings—layered, fragmented, and shaped into musical material—are combined with live vocals and accordion to create a sonic space of remembrance and resistance. The piece ends with the reading of names of murdered women, followed by the crowd’s response: “¡Presente!”—a collective affirmation of presence beyond erasure.
Live performance Saturday, September 13.
Artist statement
Natalia Quintanilla Cabrera is an electroacoustic music artist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist from Mexico City. She studied composition and theory at CIEM and earned an M.A. in Media Arts from the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance. In Fall 2025, she will begin a Ph.D. at DXARTS. Her research focuses on hybrid spatial audio systems that combine binaural headphones, Ambisonics arrays, and natural acoustic sound fields to create augmented immersive experiences.
Her work has been presented in Mexico, the U.S., Austria (Ars Electronica), and Slovenia (Festival IZIS), and at institutions including the University of Michigan, University of Gloucestershire, and University of Colorado Boulder. Her music was featured at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), where her research was also published in the proceedings. She was commissioned by the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth through The Mexican Repertoire Initiative, with wind ensemble works published by The Valley Winds.
Natalia’s practice engages with social narratives, especially gender violence in Mexico. Her thesis explored this theme through hybrid diffusion and 3D audio, building on her sound design for Ni Une Más. She performs under the solo project Nati Bu, blending electronics with Latin American sounds, voice, accordion, and sensor-based performance.
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7
Charles Peoples III
(a)temporalities
Site-specific immersive performance for voice and spatialized sound
For the SPAM New Media Festival, this iteration of (a)temporalities will be composed specifically for the Georgetown Steam Plant. Taking advantage of the site's unique acoustic and architectural properties, the performance will use a multichannel speaker setup to spatialize sound throughout the space, placing my voice and sonic textures in the far corners of the room to create an immersive, enveloping sound field.
The piece is designed as a slowing-of-time ritual, unfolding with no conventional plot or narrative arc. Live vocal performance, processed and layered through the spatial sound system, creates a shifting sonic atmosphere that blurs the line between voice and environment.
The voice may crack, whisper, shimmer, or dissolve entirely into breath or electronic hum, emerging from multiple directions and evoking the sensation of presence without source.
(a)temporalities explores disorientation, devotion, and the slow erasure of self. It is part meditation and part invocation. It is performance as altered state.
This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
Live performance Saturday, September 13.
Artist statement
We perceive the world through our senses. Although we primarily think of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing as our only means of interpreting reality, we often perceive underneath and in between these senses. It is this liminal space that my work seeks to bring forth. My practice, rooted in the voice and the body, provokes visceral experiences that simultaneously deactivate familiar senses and awaken the unfamiliar. Using experimental sound, custom instruments, and extended vocal techniques, it uncovers the inherent fragility within modalities of sound and motion.
Though trained in Western vocal techniques, my work explores beyond its confines. My interest is not in telling stories and creating characters, but in forging pathways to sensitized listening and experiencing. I compose with extended vocal techniques, custom instruments, light, movement, and electronics. These elements create an immersive, durational sonic terrain that invites us into the present moment.
There a five concepts central to my practice: sonic changemaking (the practice), rehearsal as ritual (the method), worldbuilding (the vehicle), self-misremembering (the illusion), and performance as medium (the container). I engage deeply with these elements, focusing my practice on creating transcendental experiences. The work becomes an encounter with the unknown, the unseen, and the unsensed.
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Within the past decade, the South Asian community in the United States has found itself at a complex political intersection. As noted by journalist Aprameya Rao in reference to the 2024 presidential election:
“President Trump’s appearance at the ‘Howdy Modi’ event, where PM Narendra Modi cheered for Trump 2.0, reflected a shift towards the Republican Party among the traditionally Democrat-leaning community.”
As Rao describes, this shift contradicts the history of the South Asian immigrant community. Legacies of hindu nationalism, islamophobia, caste discrimination, and its gradual cozying with hypercapitalism and the alt-right has shifted the perspective of the diaspora out of a rhetoric of equity. To many this would seem bizarre– how could a country and people once subjugated by colonialism be growing closer to the very traditions that enslaved them?
Prey is a piece attempting to not only respond to this question, but to also terraform an alternative. Assembling a collection of faith engaged music from American, Indian, and European history, Prey presents a hyper-dense, hardcore collision of musical style against a cyberpunk ritual.
Strobe lights are used in this performance.
Live performance Saturday, September 13.
Artist statement
Rohan Chander (a.k.a BAKUDI SCREAM) is a media artist and electronic musician based in the United States. Described as “hypersensory” (Washington Post), “remarkably alive” (The Wire Magazine), and of “transcendent metamorphosis” (I Care If You Listen), Chander’s work considers questions of postcoloniality in the diaspora through hindoo historical research and speculative fiction. Built on the creative practices of DJs and long form composition, his work manifests as cyberpunk performance art pieces with costumes, dance, music, and light.
BAKUDI SCREAM won the 2022 Guadeamus Prize for Music Composition for his debut solo album, FINAL SKIN on Cantaloupe Music and has had work featured at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Klang Roma, and others. He has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the California Council for the Arts, and support from Mid Atlantic Arts, REDCAT NOW, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, the Netherlands-American Foundation, and others.
Installations
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AEOLIAN TREE is an electromagnetic–kinetic sound sculpture and ritual performance on a living oak. The ritual frames the work: a practice of caretaking and shared attention that treats the tree as a sacred, living archive—a portal between spiritual and physical worlds, between ancestors and the present.
Three pendulum antennas, each hung from a separate branch, form a triadic constellation around the trunk. This geometry holds harmonic symmetry and gentle dissonance, centering the tree as the anchor where natural, technological, and human rhythms meet.
Each pendulum carries a small magnet bob above a floor‑mounted coil. Acting as electromagnetic Aeolian harps, their motion gathers the site’s invisible “winds” of radio energy; the swing imprints slow polarity changes and gentle Doppler bends onto the received spectrum. Each antenna feeds a software‑defined radio; signals are shaped in SuperCollider and diffused on small speakers in a listening ring beyond the pendulums.
The work moves between a quiet, all‑day installation and a three‑part ritual—Listening/Translation, Invocation, Transmission/Closure. In performance, Thrän engages antennas and voice while collective voicing invites visitors to whisper, forming a temporary choir. Non‑invasive rigging, minimal intervention, and shared authorship enact care, opening a brief portal between human, tree, and signal.
Live performance Saturday, September 13.
Artist statement
Maria Thrän is a Berlin- and Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and Ph.D. researcher in the University of Washington's DXARTS program. Their immersive kinetic installations and performances integrate mechatronics, spatial sound synthesis, light, and video to explore rhythm, memory, and more-than-human communication.
By transforming exhibition spaces into responsive perceptual systems, Thrän invites audiences to resonate with their own ecological entanglements and to consider how bodies, voices, and technologies can operate as instruments of memory, protest, care, and resistance. Their research-driven practice examines ecological interdependence, technological agency, and the poetics of signal and noise through speculative approaches to preservation.
Thrän's work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions and developed through residencies around the globe.
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Glitching Sinkholes is built on field recordings that I have been gathering at and near sinkholes to compose a speculative recording that imagines an underground vibration and resonance-driven kinship among sinkholes across the world.
I imagine aural and sensual links between sinkholes. Those who have been nearby as sinkholes opened up comment on the sound that precedes the sinkhole’s appearance. Some describe it as a guttural growl, while others comment on the unfamiliarity of the sound until they realize where it emerged from. On the one hand, the sounds described are not sounds of the sinkhole but rather the sounds of the sinkhole’s emergence, a moment preceding the cognizance of the thing. On the other hand, the memory of these sounds and their description afterward is inevitably linked to what exists as a hole in the ground, a physical collapse, a defamiliarizing of the ground we tread. With this work, I listen to the field recordings of sinkholes alongside my imagination of what the moments of collapse could have sounded like. By conducting a close material and aural inquiry into what the sinkhole is as a sudden and ongoing body of collapse, the catastrophe of collapse becomes a possibility through which we can access other catastrophes.
Artist statement
In my work, I consider the discourse around the sudden and unexpected appearance of sinkholes as a tool to continue the practices of slow violence; the treatment of this landscape phenomenon mirrors the lack of accountability that institutions have adopted as an unofficial policy. By looking at the temporality of collapse and catastrophe in the landscape, I produce a framework that conceptualizes a reckoning with the ongoing, constant state of catastrophe, tracing apparatuses across languages, physical phenomena, and actions.
To achieve these goals, I use sound-driven installations and terrestrial radio transmissions. I sense that to be in public space, now, is to insist on the speculative. I actively imagine listening as an intervention beyond considering it as an epistemological and ontological tool to situate it as an ongoing state.
As an artist, I work around methods of tuning in. I think through the media of photography, video, radio, sound, performance, and site-specific installations. I am currently pursuing a PhD in Film and Digital Media Studies at University of California Santa Cruz, with a designated emphasis in History of Consciousness. I am also the founding editor of m-est.org , an artist-driven publication.
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As technology advances at a rapid pace, promising not only to change the way we live but even to transform the very essence of what it means to be human, one must ask: are we, as a species, ready for a radical, potentially irreversible leap?
The Transhuman Trilogy, originally composed of three pieces, focuses on finding methods to create balanced hybrid pieces with the aesthetic of dystopian futurism. The main aim behind this form is to create narrative-focused (cinematic) hybrid pieces which mix the aggressiveness, heaviness, and darkness of metal, containing the endless merging of timbral possibilities, spectromorphological thinking, and abstractness of electroacoustic music.
In terms of contemplating the future, The Transhuman Trilogy specifically explores the process of merging human minds with computers. It also reflects the possible horrific (even haunting) experiences that a person can go through if people decide to turn back to normal or if such technology is used maliciously.
Artist statement
Berk Yağlı (born 1999) (born 1999) is a Cypriot guitarist, composer, and producer. His mission with his music has been to talk about social, political, and philosophical matters to invite the listeners into reflecting on these topics. He is working on hybridisation between electroacoustic music and metal as part of his PhD at the University of the Arts London. His works have been presented internationally in more than 100 festivals and in more than 30 countries. He regularly composes his music in studios worldwide. He won more than 15 awards in international composition competitions.
I like exploring using/forming different forms of hybrids to engage and build (or intentionally break) relationships between metal music with electroacoustic music. My intention in my works is to challenge the notions of high art and low art and criticize the oppressive uniformity that surrounds genres (even in avant-garde). In my recent pieces, I aimed on forming abstract passages by finding seamless ways of getting in and out of metal and electroacoustic forms and dissolving the genres into one 'alien' format that is fuelled by aggressiveness, power, and darkness. Even though my current works explore specifically the methods to hybridise electroacoustic and metal, my ultimate goal is to find ways that these methods could also apply to other genres.
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You are not a Monster (2024-2025) is a lyric game intended to be played over 28 days (a typical moon cycle), but it may be played or read in any way the player sees fit. It is dedicated to the caregiver who bathes their mother or takes their partner with an alarmingly increasing fever to the hospital in the middle of the night, to the individual who cooks, cleans, and provides order despite unexpected and often unpredictable situations that require quick response and unwavering resilience, even when the caregiver provides care through fatigue and pain.
The work is named after experiencing intense envy, anger, rage, and sadness through caregiving moments. Yet, being socialized and conditioned to provide care and be in service to another, when these feelings arose, I often associated them with feeling monstrous because those feelings seemed counterintuitive to care. Caregiving is not meant to be fun or joyous. Yet, as a culture, it is often associated with emotions and themes of selflessness, charity, and obligation, particularly for women or feminine figures. Through this work, I want players, particularly caregivers, to feel that a moment of "play" is explicitly meant for them. This work is intended to serve as a reminder that embodying emotions is vital to healing and liberation because caregivers require constant healing to be present.
Artist Statement
I create work informed by social interactions, language, and labor. My creative practice is a culmination of being born to immigrant Filipino parents who raised me in San Francisco’s (California) Mission District. I create interactive, text and sound-based works that process complex familial and cultural histories from intersectional, intergenerational, and cross-cultural dialogues.
My primary modes of making include durational (experimental) writing, creative interactive non-fiction, field recordings combined with recitations, and imposition of constraints. Audio formats are strategies I incorporate to experience art through our auditory sense because the same sound cannot be recreated or reproduced with identical fidelity and conditions. This deeply fascinates me and leads me to explore the repetition of sound and speech to test my endurance.
Collaborations and sustained exchanges are imperative parts of my artistic practice. My work involves the participation of long-time collaborators or strangers and the intentional use of open-source software.
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Intimate Commons is an interactive web installation that explores the boundaries of commoning in the age of AI. The work invites participants to contemplate the hypothetical exchange of their most personal experiences, spaces, and relationships through a series of AI-generated questions.
The installation consists of a digital experience where users anonymously share what they would be willing to exchange—from pets and spouses to memories and traumas. These responses are processed by a large language model that continuously generates a narrative, imagining a day in a world of increasingly communal and shared resources. Each answer directly informs this evolving story, which reflects participants' collective input about the limits of sharing.
Presented as both a mobile and desktop experience, Intimate Commons can be accessed during exhibitions and revisited afterward. The work becomes increasingly fine-tuned to each community's unique gravitational pull through continuous training of the underlying AI model. pull through continuous training of the underlying AI model.
This ongoing conversation about intimacy and its boundaries in our networked age questions where we draw the line between private and communal, using AI as both medium and metaphor to explore our evolving relationship with privacy, ownership, and collective experience.
Artist Statement
Raphael Arar works at the nexus of complex systems, transdisciplinary design and arts-based research. His work highlights the social, political and economic implications of technological acceleration and human-to-machine interaction. Raphael currently leads Design at One Project, an organization that seeks to co-design, implement and scale new forms of economics and governance that are equitable, ecological and effective. He also serves as a Board Member at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology and serves on the steering committee of the Beyond Academia track of the Participatory Design Conference.
Previously, he led design for learners at Khan Academy, tackled ethical platforms of AI at IBM Research, taught media theory at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and designed over a hundred iOS apps with Apple. His artwork has been shown at museums, conferences, festivals and galleries internationally including the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Moscow Museum of Applied Art, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Gamble House Museum, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Science Gallery, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, and Athens Video Art Festival. Notable commissions include Dublab, Noema Magazine, Goethe Institut, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Intel Labs, and IBM Research. His design work has been featured in publications including TED, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, FastCompany, Wired and others.
Scott Cazan is a Los Angeles based composer, performer, creative coder, and sound artist working in fields such as experimental electronic music, sound installation, chamber music, and software art where he explores cybernetics, aesthetic computing, and emergent forms resulting from human interactions with technology. His work often involves the use of feedback networks where misunderstanding and chaotic elements act as a catalyst for emergent forms in art and music.
Scott has performed and received numerous commissions with international organizations such as The LA County Museum of Art, MOCA (Los Angeles), Issue Project Room (NY), Feldstarke International (with CENTQUATRE, PACT Zollverein, and Calarts), Ausland (Berlin), Art Cologne, Ensemble Zwischentöne, The University of Art in Berlin, Toomai String Quintet, Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Guapamacátaro (MX), Umbral (MX), the Media Mix Festival (Monterrey), the BEAM Festival (UK), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Machine Project and many others. He has collaborated and performed alongside a variety of artists such as Ulrich Krieger, Mark Trayle, Michael Pisaro, Carmina Escobar, Carole Kim, Jana Papenbroock, and many others. As an active educator he has taught at institutions such as the University of California, Santa Barbara, Art Center College of Design, and is currently a special faculty member of the California Institute of the Arts where he teaches topics on the intersections between art and electronics.
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Tetrapods represents another chapter in Tivon Rice’s long-term research project Pattern Language 2-253, inspired by the 253 chapters of Christopher Alexander’s 1977 text, A Pattern Language. The project begins with investigations of expansive rural landscapes and gradually zooms in on cities, neighborhoods, streets, and individual architectures. These patterns function as a kind of prototypical hypertext, suggesting combinations of multiple socio-spatial forms and relationships. Rather than updating Alexander’s original text, Rice imagines 253 new, near-future patterns, creating a matrix of relationships between increasingly specific spaces and a variety of descriptive voices—paranoid, surreal, speculative, and science fictional, among others.
These micro-narratives envision future built environments where algorithmic design and artificial intelligence have blurred the boundaries between physical and virtual landscapes, cities, and architectures. Within this framework, the repeated form of the tetrapod marks a boundary between technology and nature, between the struggle to protect the land and the surrender to monotonous uniformity. A paranoid narrative is delivered by an equally monotonous voice, while a landscape of physical and virtual tetrapods is rendered absurdly small in scale, amplifying the tension between control, adaptation, and the absurdity of human intervention.
Artist statement
Tivon Rice is an artist and educator working across visual culture and technology. Based in Seattle (US), his work critically explores representation and communication in the context of digital culture and asks: how do we see, inhabit, feel, and talk about these new forms of exchange? How do we approach creativity within the digital? What are the poetics, narratives, and visual languages inherent in new information technologies? And what are the social and environmental impacts of these systems?
These questions are explored through projects incorporating a variety of materials, both real and virtual. With recent films, installations, and A.I. generated narratives, Rice examines the ways contemporary digital culture creates images, and in turn builds histories around communities and the physical environment. While much of Rice's research focuses on emerging technologies, he continuously reevaluates relationships with sculpture, photography, and cinema. His work then incorporates new media to explore how we see and understand a future thoroughly enmeshed in new data/visual/production systems.
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soft links is a two-channel 3D animation that explores different states of consciousness, inner disorientation, and the oscillation between the imaginary and the real. At its core, it is a digital model of an urban space based on the Frankfurt underground system and extracted from a video game simulation. This environment provides the backdrop for a fragmented journey through memories and subconscious associations.
The piece reflects the tension between physical movement and mental projection, and between simulation and introspection. It evokes the strange sensation of being in a familiar place yet feeling lost, wandering through one's own body as if under external control and detached from space and time.
Scenes unfold with a dreamlike logic, featuring moonlit streets, animal-like figures, and fleeting encounters drawn from memory. These elements merge into monochrome spaces where meaning hovers just out of reach. The soundscape, constructed from natural recordings, is closely tied to each environment through loose, intuitive links.
The term 'soft links' (borrowed from computing) refers to symbolic connections and, here, to how subconscious fragments surface in dreams. Like details that linger briefly before fading after waking, the work traces an inner landscape where clarity slips between moments of recognition and disorientation.
Artist statement
Nassim L'Ghoul's practice explores socio-political themes, communicative gestures, and personal experience. His work shifts between individual and collective perception, blending experimental set-ups with abstract reflection.
Digital tools, machines, and media-based processes play a central role. L'Ghoul uses these tools to capture and reshape thoughts, memories and images, creating hybrid environments where the real and the imaginary and the personal and the shared, overlap.
Starting from casual encounters or everyday observations, he transforms these fragments by shifting their form, content and medium. The result is a network of notes and found material that is sampled, re-contextualised and layered to reveal new connections.
For him, recontextualisation is a way to not only revisit, but also renegotiate experience. His works avoid fixed interpretations, opening spaces where transitions, ruptures and uncertainties can be seen and felt.
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Diatribes is a poetic VR interactive narrative that explores the internal conflicts surrounding climate change. Inspired by the ecological philosopher Timothy Morton’s description of climate change as a “hyperobject,” a thing that is so massively distributed that it is invisible yet conceivable, the members of this collective looked into how art movements like Surrealism resolve the tension between visibility and intelligibility. The climate crisis is increasingly present in our daily lives, but understanding its enormity is still confusing for many, often triggering strong emotions that undermine constructive conversations.
In a 15-20 minute experience, players navigate a surreal mindspace filled with distractions and emotional turmoil. Diatribes transforms based on your emotional state—sometimes inviting contemplation through meditative tasks, while at other times thrusting you into a high-stakes gauntlet between nature and civilization. As you journey through diverse landscapes, you’ll unlock ancient myths and receive guidance from a therapeutic companion. The experience intertwines personal reflection with broader climate issues, encouraging players to confront their anxieties and envision a hopeful future.
Artist statement
Most Ancient is a creative studio known for blending experimental storytelling, handcrafted art, and immersive digital experiences. Specializing in comics, VR, videogames, and art books, the studio’s work explores themes of climate change, the subconscious, and emotional geography. Most Ancient’s virtual worlds, supported by Meta and Kala Art Institute, have been featured at festivals including FIVARS (2024), IndieCade (2024), and Slamdance (2025), with their books held in collections such as SFMoMA and the Library of Congress. Most Ancient creates impactful experiences that encourage discovery and offer new perspectives through intentional, innovative design.
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This is an autonomously-walking death meditation. In it, the player is wandering lost in a semi-wilderness, on the edge of a once-inhabited environment. They go from area to area, trees, marsh, empty roads, in each place experiencing the world through their senses as well as their thoughts. They also sometimes encounter bodies on the ground. Sometimes they bury these bodies. Occasionally they encounter mounds where someone or thing has been buried. They are wandering at night and at the break of dawn they lie down to sleep, dream, and then die. The position where they died is uploaded to a server to potentially be found and buried by another instance/repetition of the software, another ‘player’.
The server provides the memory of each play session, a life that transcends the death of each individual 'player'. The individual dies and becomes a piece of shared data or an invisible web of relationships. A similar process happens in physical death, as our bodies continue to be used by the environment without our agency.
Artist statement
My work comes from a mix of autobiographical experience and theoretical experimentation. Exploring technical constraints and limitations helps me give shape to concepts and subjects that are not inherently technical.
My mediums tend to be videogames, interactive and non-interactive procedural software, and video, with the latter often using the former as material. I create work using game engines, various coding languages, 2D and 3D digital art creation software, and audio sampling.
Simulations of instability, the overwhelming power of nature, post-human worlds and dissociation are themes I lean toward. They all come from a similar place, even if they produce different results. All of them can be seen as a form of rupture with our assumed control over our world and reality. There is a spiritual element of letting go or riding the discomfort.
Exploring technical constraints and limitations helps me give shape to concepts and subjects that are not inherently technical. Recently, I have created procedural software work where, although I might have started with some interaction or game mechanics, I eventually reduced interaction to almost nothing. These works generally have some form of generative landscape and occasionally also artificially-intelligent non-playable characters whose behaviors one can observe.
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Kirigami Antennas is a research exploration centering on e-textile meta-materials, using the technique of Kirigami, a Japanese art-making process where flat paper is cut and folded to form 3-dimensional shapes. In this project, kirigami-inspired freestanding lace patterns have been designed in order to fabricate soft sculptural 3D antennas that are cognizant of their use and relation to space.
With the progression of technology as integrated into daily life, physical tech has become increasingly embedded or hidden from the user’s view. Because of this design change, many of the aesthetics that previously defined everyday technology have disappeared from the public eye. Our ability to connect the capability of technology with the spacial world it utilizes has disappeared with it. This notion is especially true for antenna design. An object that was once visible on cars, houses, and phones is now so embedded in the devices that use it that its technology is essentially formless. Kirigami Antennas is a research exploration centering on e-textile meta-materials, designing antennas that are cognizant of their use and relation to space. This collection of antennas are not embedded nor hidden. They instead borrow from the art of Kirigami to re-insert themselves into the 3D space from which they receive their signals. Through experimentation with Kirigami antenna shapes, we are able to design freestanding lace antennas that effectively received electromagnetic signals at a wide range of frequencies, picking up AM, FM, and HAM radio, along with other data transmissions. Kirigami Antennas provides a space for experimentation with antennas as objects that help us reach and search through space.
Artist statement
My research focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts with a critical lens. I see the praxis of crafting technological artifacts as an act of resistance against black box systems. One that contains embodied knowledge and carries with it oral histories of intergenerational practices. One that can transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries, and can be transmitted through direct engagement with materials. Likewise, I see the use of electronics, open software and hardware, and the act of creating collectively as means of cultivating digital commons that have the potential to empower individuals through shared knowledge. I believe that the ability to craft your own technology is a powerful tool for world building, one that enables you to speculate about alternative presents and plausible futures.
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MAMMON.exeinvites festival visitors to confess their cravings to three AI deities of consumption—Gratis, Häfoff, and Luxior—inside the Georgetown Steam Plant. Each participant approaches an altar, scans its QR code, and enters a chat where the god probes purchase histories, bargain impulses, and luxury fantasies. The dialogue drives a projection-mapped reliquary that blossoms in real time, turning private desire into a shared spectacle. When the rite concludes, a thermal printer issues a “Proof of Purchase” receipt summarizing the pact for the visitor to keep. Part confessional, part checkout lane, MAMMON.exe transforms familiar swipes and taps into ritual gestures, exposing the sacred logics embedded in the wheels of commerce. By fusing large-language-model dialogue, game-engine visuals, and ritualistic framing, the piece reframes our everyday, mindless consumption as exultant worship to forces greater than us, and investigates what those forces might ask from us in return.
Artist statement
Schuyler deVosis a New-York–based creative technologist whose practice turns everyday interfaces into portals of playful unease. With a background in Classics, cognitive science, and NYU ITP, deVos builds speculative bureaucracies, animist apps, and altar-like installations that expose the hidden value systems encoded in software and commerce.
Projects such as The Department of Tenderness and Spiritwood invite viewers to negotiate with unseen forces—whether surveillance systems, folklore, or algorithmic ghosts—revealing the small terms-of-service we tacitly accept each day. By combining the logics of ritual (offerings, oaths, judgments) with the feedback loops of contemporary UX, deVos creates spaces where participation is both wonder and reckoning.
Ezekiel Mabenis a Jersey City-based writer, artist and project manager. His work focuses on exploring how people structure their relationships to cities, ecologies and each other. His previous work with Schuyler includes The Department of Tenderness.
At SPAM 2025, Schuyler and Ezekiel propose to restage and expand MAMMON.exe, letting three AI-gods of consumer desire possess the Steam Plant's cathedral-scale machinery and confront visitors with their own appetites.
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let yourself l̴͓̥̠̼̏̑̃̂̂͘ḛ̷̺̟͓͈̜̓̋̍̄̆ä̸̞̝̳́̾̓̈̾k̷͎̰̓̒͘ a little leaks through the cracks on the leaking gas pipe, the space station, the express warehouse, into the leaking signals, leaky compression algorithms, leaky network packets, leaking categories, leaked tiny face and tiny activity dataset. Through this central theme, it seeks to ask multidirectional questions: who is making it not ok to leak, who is capturing leak, how leak is weaponized and who is killing leak to stop solidarity from happening. Our faces are reduced to facial features for machine learning, personal medical records end as image embedding in a training dataset. Our voices leak as analyzable waves, irises leak as unique high-contrast photographs. We, as users and as citizens, are encouraged by the tech giants and governments to leak. A message you send out to your loved one over the TCP/IP protocol is slutty. Audio and video signal cables are constantly radiating RF signals. Buffer overflows when data overwrites, memory leaks can be used to navigate into forbidden memory, software ages, like human beings, aging leads to more leaks.
Artist statement
jiawen uffline exists as a user most of the time in their life, having little agency as a standard user, both technologically and politically, she seeks for otherwise possibilities for queering the given identity of a user, their wish is to be an analogkäse in the digital figurations and drip sizzling fat on the cables and ports, into cracks of servers.
apart from that, jiawen's research focuses on technology as memory and desire, with contaminated history but appearing pure, sterilized, decontextualized and dehistoricized, operating through reducing rather than relating. jiawen looks into the (counter)history, materiality, poetics and politics of technology. She sees l̴͓̥̠̼̏̑̃̂̂͘ḛ̷̺̟͓͈̜̓̋̍̄̆ä̸̞̝̳́̾̓̈̾k̷͎̰̓̒͘ as an instance of the space-time continuum and a definite part of the digital reality, and leaking as a method to survive together.
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Mylove is a depiction of love that weaves together classical and modern imagery of robots and machinery, reflecting the artist’s broader practice of exploring the history and processes of manufacturing. Built primarily from 3D-printed parts, the piece takes the form of a jellyfish whose vibrating arms synthesize a singing voice. Alongside it, a human figure performs instrumentals through a speaker while holding a custom circuit board that directs the work’s movements and sounds.
The voice synthesis is powered by a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm, which decomposes audio into individual electrical frequencies and channels them into the jellyfish’s arm motors. Its arms expand and contract in a pulsing jellyfish-like motion, while LED components scatter light like a disco ball, merging with the audio to create a hybrid soundscape.
Artist statement
Bailey Ambrose is a Seattle artist who specializes in mechatronic and robotic art. He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in DXARTs.Online portfolio: baileyambrose.myportfolio.com
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BLUR is a multimedia, interdisciplinary work born of artists’ collaborative explorations into multi-dimensionality. Commissioned by the cities of Braga (Portugal), Enghien-les-Bains (France), and Gwangju (South Korea)—all members of the Media Arts Cluster of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network—the project brought together one artist from each city, working across visuals, new media, and sound.
What began as dialogue around cultural differences—mental, spiritual, and perceptual—evolved into a meditation on globalization through the act of creating and experiencing art. In BLUR, no time-travel is allowed; yet the making of one’s own reality is. The artists ask: Will virtual reality still exist in a time when our reality has long been virtual?
The work premiered on September 2, 2022, at Theatro Circo in Braga, Portugal, as part of UNESCO’s City to City: PLAY!, simultaneously live-streamed worldwide, extending the project’s inquiry into virtual presence and shared experience.
Artist statement
Jorge Ramos is a Portuguese composer and sound artist based in London. His work spans solo, orchestral, choral, electronic, film, stage, and installation music, presented across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Recent collaborators include the London Philharmonic Orchestra, ORA Singers, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, RTP/Antena 2, The Hermes Experiment, and the Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology.
Ramos is drawn to perception and psychoacoustics, crafting music that blends orchestration with electronics, machine learning, and AI. His hybrid aesthetic merges futuristic techniques with vintage textures and noir atmospheres, often inspired by overstimulating urban spaces and the clash of eras.
He has participated in notable programs including ENOA (Gulbenkian Orchestra), Estúdios Victor Córdon, TalentLAB (Luxembourg), and ACTOR (Canada), and was mentored by artists such as Tania León and Roger Reynolds. He is the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Young Composer for 2024/25 and a CESEM ESML and ACTOR collaborator.
Upcoming projects include An Aria for the Mallard, an installation with Rosana Antolí and Claire Rocha Santos (Gulbenkian Foundation), and Music for a Greek Museum, a permanent sound work for the Kotsanas Museum as part of the EUROMUSE project. His music seeks to create immersive, multisensory listening experiences.
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The Palace is a combination of tactile experience and visual storytelling. The holographic and immersive experiences render the piece both as a tutorial and a narrative, and its narrative perspective is both first and third person. The plot adapts the story of he Emperor's New ClothesT and the Buddhist scriptures Śūraṅgama Sūtra in terms of expanding upon the theme of touch. When we have something, remembering it won’t last forever helps us value it more. Even when it’s gone, we don’t need to feel anxious —having and not having are connected. We can hold onto the memory and the feeling of its touch, which no one can take away. In The Emperor's New Clothes, the emperor is deceived into wearing invisible clothing, but in my story, the emperor voluntarily chooses to do so because he believes that memories from cherished ones are more important than luxurious garments made of jewels. As long as one believes, even in ruins, the treasures in one's heart will not disappear.
Workshop Sunday, September 14 at 6pm.
Artist statement
Leilei Xia was born in Guangzhou, China. She is a multimedia artist who works in tactile art, experimental animation, video art, and participatory collective art. As the founder of the tactile art collective Tactileye and one of the editors of the independent science magazine Icosa Magazine, Leilei explores how tactility and bodily feelings are manifested in different mediums, and is interested in combining the process and result of creating art, treating art not merely as a noun but as a verb.
Her workshops have been hosted at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, The Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, A4 International Artist Residency, and her films and animation have been awarded or selected in the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Stop Trik Animation Festival, Berlin Female Film Festival, Paris International Animation Festival, among others. Her works have been exhibited internationally in New York, Greensboro, Richmond, Guangzhou, and other cities. She was also one of the speakers at TEDxVCU 2023. She holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA at the Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently teaches at University of North Carolina Greensboro.
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Light Quilt is a projection-mapped quilt, exploring the mathematical relationships of both patchwork quilting traditions and optical art. It consists of modular blocks made from cardboard and projection mapped animations.
While patchwork quilts often create patterns through geometry and color, this quilt creates patterns through dimension as well. Using cardboard as our primary material is a nod to the practice of "foundation piecing" in patchwork quilting, in which paper is used to stabilize fabric as it is cut and sewn together.
The projected animations highlight the physical geometry of each block, as well as the hidden geometries within the piece as a whole. The interplay of static forms and dynamic projections creates moments of visual harmony and ambiguity.
Artist statement
Shelby Wilson ( shelbywilson.cv ) is a computer programmer and artist. Drawn to the seams of things both physical and digital, her work spans animation, textiles, sculpture, and web interfaces that examine handcraft, material, and methods of computation. Her efforts have been featured by Frieze, MIT Technology Review, The Seattle Times, and Are.na Editorial.
Alex Miller ( alexmiller.cv ) is an artist, teacher, writer and programmer. He incorporates low fidelity computer simulations into installations and audiovisual performances, interrogating our human relationship to computation, math, and nature. His projection mapping work consists of creating pleasantly disoriented spaces emphasizing ambiguity of space and form. His work has been shown in Benaroya Hall, Henry Art Gallery, Specialist Gallery, and SOIL Gallery, and featured by CreativeApplications.net, The Stranger, and the Seattle Times.
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OutsideIn/Khandaq is a single-channel video work from my larger project Karvansaray/Khandaq, which reimagines Iranian caravanserais as gendered architectures of passage, protection, and control. My focus is on caravanserais commissioned by female rulers—among the earliest infrastructures of hospitality—where openness and enclosure, movement and containment, coexisted.
This video speculatively reconstructs the andaruni—the private interior realm historically reserved for women—through digital renderings, archival fragments, and forms drawn from my textile sculptures. The work unfolds as a slow passage through imagined architectural thresholds, evoking both bodily presence and absence. Projected across translucent fabric bodies, the imagery slips between material and immaterial, memory and interface.
Presented within the industrial vastness of the Georgetown Steam Plant, this soft digital architecture creates a counterpoint to the site’s monumental concrete and steel. The work stages an encounter between feminized, intimate space and institutional infrastructure—foregrounding the tension between visibility and concealment.
Artist statement
I work across textiles, soft sculpture, video, and interactive media to explore how diasporic, gendered bodies move through architectures of control, care, and visibility. My practice inhabits the friction between material and immaterial, softness and code, tradition and technology. Rooted in personal and collective histories of displacement, it navigates the textures of cultural memory and the ruptures of migration.
I am drawn to the convergence of fabric and digital media—not as aesthetic contrast, but as conceptual resistance. Embroidery, layering, and stitching, shaped by Iranian traditions and passed down through generations of women, carry embedded knowledge of survival and self-definition. In my work they become acts of reclamation.
Digital media, often coded as disembodied and masculine, becomes a site of tenderness and disruption. By merging sewing with video, projection, sensors, and interactive systems, I create environments where fabric becomes screen, memory becomes interface, and the viewer's presence completes the work.
My installations invite participation, slowness, and intimacy. They trace a lineage of marginalized experience while refusing containment, collapsing binaries that have long excluded bodies like mine.
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The term Silistrato is proposed here, as the conceptual and epistemological union between “silicon” and “substrate”, in reference to the problem of substrate independence that, from the perspective of General Artificial Intelligence, raises the mind-body separability and, as a consequence, the possibility of implementing “artificial consciousness” in any medium or substrate.
Starting from a speculative fiction located in some temporal moment of some post anthropocentric scenario (thought from the context futurology), it is proposed, from a transmedia narrative landscaping context, the next statement:
A sentient, one-of-a-kind machinic entity, wanders under a pre-programmed schedule, through territorial landscape extensions, dozens of years after 80% of the water on the planet became sterile water; that is, water whose chemical composition has changed in such a way that any form of biological life (carbon-based) is almost incapable of surviving in/on/through it. this entity has one single preprogrammed goal: to search for any remaining life form and find the way to preserve it.
This work is proposed as a transmedia experimental videoart that allows the viewer to place her/himself in the first person position, in the journey of this machinic entity that wanders over the vastness of the different post-anthropogenic landscapes. It is in this way, this is a re-contextualization of the classical notions of utopia-dystopia, to establish new conceptual categories that from the crossroads of futurology, speculative research and computer art, allowing us to reflect critically on the different possible scenarios that the Anthropocene era is posing.
Artist statement
Edmar Soria (April 1983, Mexico) got a PhD. and M.Sc. in Music Technology, a B.Sc. in Mathematics and an M.Sc. in Applied Economics. He holds a postdoctoral research position in mathematics and artificial intelligence (applied to audio and music) at the Research Institute for Applied Mathematics and Systems-UNAM (Mexico) and has studies on Quantum Computing.
Winner of the Acousmonium INA GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicale) Contest 2016 (France-Mexico), he also obtained the 3rd place in the Xenakis Electroacosutic Music Contest 2023 (Greece), and was selected as winner in the 8th Daegu International Computer Music Contest (Korea, 2024). Winner of the SONOM 2014 contest (International Festival of Sound Art, Mexico), finalist of the "Concours International de Composition Electroacoustique SIME 2018" (Lille, France), he has received recognitions and grants from different Mexican art and music programs. He has been internationally recognized in the digital art field with the ‘Best Photography Award’ at the URTIcanti Festival 2024 (Italy) for the short film category, with the ‘Finalist’ award at the Digital Art Zurich Festival 2024 and as ‘Feature Artist’ at the Intact Festival 2024 (Thailand).
He has completed residencies at Cambridge University (Fitzwilliam College - Deep Learning applied o music analysis academic research), Musique & Recherches (Belgium - Acousmatic music composition), INA GRM (Paris, France - Acousmatic music composition), DXArts (Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media, University of Washington - Digital Art & Interactive computing), the Conservatory of Belo Horizonte-Brazil (under the direction of composer Joao Pedro Oliveira). He has been recognized internationally through official commissions for multimedia compositions and performances by Difrazzioni Festival 2016 (Florence, Italy), Multiphonies GRM 2017 (France) and New York University Music Ensemble (2017), as well as in Digital Art Biennials (UK and Colombia, both in 2020). His works include digital art (3D procedural modeling/animation), multimedia/transmedia research, multichannel electroacoustic music and experimental music and his works have been selected and presented in several international forums in Europe, USA, Asia and Latin America.
As an academic researcher he is a member of SNI-CONACyT (National system of Researchers, Mexico) and his areas of interest and work include visual digital art, spatiality/localization of sound (acoustics/psychoacoustics),, data visualization/sonification, applications of artificial intelligence to digital art, philosophy of AI and topics of mathematics applied to art and speculative research among others and has several refereed publications in this regard. He has published so far, three books as author and two as co-coordinator and author. He is Director and founder of the International Colloquium Espacio Inmersividad, which has so far 3 issues (2018-2019-2020) and Desfases, Festival Inmersivo de Producción Multimedia (2021-2022-2024).
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19
Kate Bailey
Is It Listening?
Weather balloon, Raspberry Pi, battery pack, thermal receipt printer, paper roll
Entitled 'Is it listening?,' these robotic sculptures operate as autonomous digital beings that draw viewers into a form of active listening, gathering and loosely transcribing conversations in real-time from a miniature onboard printer. This process underscores the unavoidable distortions in interpretation, converting ephemeral spoken words into tangible artifacts, capturing the beauty of fleeting remarks, yet still influenced by the universal imperfections of interpretation.
Sculpture 001 is wall-mounted, while 002-003, equipped with neutrally buoyant helium balloons, move autonomously through the exhibition space, listening to and transcribing conversations within earshot. As wandering entities, these floating sculptures subtly alter the environment, playing the role of autonomous participants and silent observers, capturing the essence of the ambient dialogue.
Artist statement
Kate Bailey's work delves into the human experience through the playful use of electronics, microcontrollers, and robotics. Known for creating sensory-rich, interactive installations, she reveals the diverse ways we perceive and experience reality. Her projects, like Reality Massage and Comfort Creatures, use biofeedback and sensory manipulation, allowing participants to engage with and reshape their cognitive landscapes.
Based in Seattle, Kate launched her career at Microsoft, where she played a pivotal role in the development of the Microsoft Surface, ultimately leading the design of the Surface Pro 7. Her versatility in hardware, electronics, and AI complements her new media practice, which has been showcased at venues such as MoPOP, Bellevue Art Museum, and Heller Gallery.
In addition to her art, Kate founded Actualize AiR, an artist residency that provides free, long-term studio spaces to Seattle artists. Actualize AiR offers a unique, community-driven alternative to formal art programs, providing free studios and resources to support artists in their creative development.
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Am I Alive? is an interactive installation that bridges art and technology to explore artificial life through data-driven video, system art, and live performance. Integrating machine learning based emotion recognition, the system captures and responds to participants' facial expressions in real-time.
The work simulates human perception of other's faces, emotional inference, and introjection, where unconscious identification transfers affect between entities. This bidirectional exchange allows the system to "perform" uniquely for each participant, creating ephemeral moments of connection.
Artist statement
Rose Xu is a new media artist and researcher who works at the intersection of human movement, technology, and creative research. She holds a BA in Math and Dance from Bard College, an MPhil in Data Intensive Science from University of Cambridge, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work explores how computational tools can support not only scientific research, but also creative practices across disciplines. She brings a hands-on, inclusive approach to teaching, and is passionate about making open-source tools accessible to all researchers and makers.
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dreams of transformation engages with the greenhouse as a site where colonial desires, visual regimes, and plant life converge. I’m interested in how contemporary video technologies inherit and trouble the imperial impulse to categorise, possess, and display life. I’m seeking to interrogate visual capture technologies and the ways they continue to reproduce structures of control, while also offering space for resistance and re-imagination. Central to this inquiry is film scholar Teresa Castro’s evaluation of the figure of the mediated plant, a botanical subject shaped not through direct observation, but through layers of technological translation, algorithmic vision, and colonial desire.
In this developing work I’m moving between multiple contextual histories to invite non-western gestural and ritualistic modalities of being. The octopus cactus is filled with desire to transform beyond its environmental and bodily constraints towards a form (an octopus) filled with fluidity and motion. Its image acts as an allegory of the inherent disconnection and un-belonging faced by both humans and non-humans as the mediated plant begins to offer a conception of the body-site as a space filled with potential for refuge and belonging. The images form and break open as ambient sounds hint at environmental tensions both inside and outside this being. The voiceover provides contextual pathways and permeates queer botanical desire in between and inside each pixel.
Artist statement
I’m an artist-curator and community worker from Bengaluru, India. Drawing from my aboriginal Dalit identity (Adi-Karnataka), I posit critical inquiries into the role of technology to create experiential bodies of works. I draw from traditions of anti-caste counter histories, resistance strategies & artistic forms preserved through folk tales, oral histories, ritualistic, sonic and movement practices. I work with a range of emergent media technologies like lidar sensors, photogrammetry, motion capture to employ the computational image as a counter-tactic to resisting assimilation into dominant cultural histories. My works unfold bi-lingually in Kannada & English and contain sonic atmospheres with dialogues, voice overs, readings and recitals accompanied by soundtracks incorporating caste specific instruments and musical traditions.
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22
Hans Kuzmich
Radiant Center
4 speakers, 4 speaker stands, and inkjet print, 4-channel audio, 45 min. Loop
Radiant Centeris a four-channel sound installation examining the convergence of security practices, media technologies, and geological environments at the Russian-Lithuanian border on the Curonian Spit, a peninsula along the southeastern Baltic Sea. Engaging with the site's cultural history as a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its wind-blown sand dunes, the project investigates how borders and wind function as media infrastructures that are simultaneously local and global, geopolitical and ecological, mobile and emplaced. The methodology centers on embodied listening to the border's acoustic and transmission ecologies, informing the creation of documentary and performative recordings of radio communications, broadcasts, and electromagnetic emissions related to border security and atmospheric science, alongside field recordings that capture how aeolian forces resonate across the Spit's terrain. Bridging border studies, environmental humanities, and sound art practice during a period of heightened xenophobic border rhetoric across American and European contexts, Radiant Center advances an understanding of borders as porous, contested zones where political, technological, and environmental forces continually reshape both human and non-human mobilities.
Artist statement
Hans Kuzmich is a Belarus-born artist based in Los Angeles whose work examines gender as an interface between subjects and the state, seeking to unsettle their regulatory logics. Using transmission arts, media installation, and performance, his practice is grounded in site-specific listening and sonic fiction methodologies. Kuzmich is currently completing a hybrid doctoral dissertation in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His recent exhibitions and residencies include Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania; Wave Farm, Acra, NY; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; The 8th Floor, New York, NY; and SOMA, Mexico City. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
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23
Mare Hirsch (with sounds by Robert McClure)
Soft Infrastructures for Falling Worlds
generative visuals, projection mapping, modular synthesizer
Soft Infrastructures for Falling Worlds is a dynamic system that fuses modular synthesizer soundscapes with real-time generative visuals. These elements are not merely linked; they are co-constitutive, forming a living interface between analog and digital.
This piece consists of a series of short, distinct sections. Each one operates as a kind of microcosm—an experiment in texture, behavior, and rhythm that gestures toward its own internal logic. Inspired by Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics—the idea that all technologies are rooted in particular cosmologies—I treat each section as an exploration of a possible world. These are not discrete vignettes, but technological cosmologies, each offering a glimpse into a different way of relating to time, space, and sound.
Rather than viewing technology as a neutral tool or a vehicle for control, I approach it as a relational and expressive medium. The modular synthesizer becomes a site of indeterminacy and emergence, where sound is sculpted through contingent feedback loops. The generative visuals embody these unseen forces—shifting, pulsing, reacting in ways that are never fully knowable in advance.
Artist statement
My practice is mediated by data, light, and sound, resulting in work that weaves together code, installation, and sculpture to explore the complex intersections of queerness, identity, and place. Rooted in fluidity, transition, and transformation, my practice unfolds as a network of processes—each piece a moment within a larger, generative system of connection and reflection.
A central concept in my work is the idea of the sub-grid, inspired by computational models in physical simulations. In these systems, the sub-grid represents phenomena occurring at scales too small to be captured by the simulation's resolution, yet whose impacts reverberate throughout the larger structure. My art explores this interstitial space, revealing the unseen forces, subtleties, and complexities that drive transformation in both personal and collective contexts.
Through my work, I invite viewers to inhabit these spaces, to contemplate how systems—both societal and computational—mediate our experiences, and to imagine new ways of being and belonging that embrace the generative power of the unresolved.
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In numb.station, collected utterances of numbers are broken into very short segments and reassembled. Several historical speech-to-text methods “listen” to the reassembled sounds. A speaker plays each sound as it is tested. Sounds recognized as numbers by software are broadcast using a software-defined radio (SDR) transceiver over an analog radio. This recognition, however, might more accurately be understood as misrecognition, as these sounds functionally become gibberish.The selected sounds are also archived and logged with metadata about the model, source material, recognition confidence, timestamps, broadcast location, and other details.
Essentially, this multi-channel radio installation includes scrambled transmissions of people who speak like machines for audiences of people, as well as people who speak like people for audiences of machines. Cold War era techniques of counter-intelligibility meet cybernetic training models. An interference signal occasionally broadcasts from the hollow space between these two logics, escaping into the air.
numb.station listens and archives these signals for future analysis; these findings can be found at oversightmachin.es/findings/numb.station.
Artist statement
I am fascinated by the ways that technology can tell on itself and its social contexts. I work with collections of media, much of it government-produced. I seek out residue that might surface details about the institutions and infrastructures the media comes from (and through). These projects function in real-time, computationally "working" to organize and analyze gaps in intelligibility in these corpora. This "work" is less to solve a problem by closing these gaps than to articulate a poetics in the spaces between sense-making and the unintelligible.
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25
Afroditi Psarra
Altar of interdimensional entanglements
Multichannel sound installation with knitted textiles
Altar reflects on the idea of portals as objects of intergenerational, interdimensional and celestial connections. It materializes through a series of knitted tapestries which depict Al-generated images of portals imagined as tunnels, or caves, or black holes. Each tapestry activates a sound recording of a composition of radio signals sourced from personal field recordings with handmade antennas, as well as open-source recordings from the Signal Wiki repository. The sounds are subtle and directional, as moving away from the tapestries they disappear.
I chose to work with radio waves as they are both a natural phenomenon (electromagnetism exists everywhere in nature, the cosmos, our bodies, etc), but also a human made medium of communication. Radio has long been associated with extrasensorial activity; it is said that the first time that people heard AM radio they thought they were hearing voices from the past, and even to this day ghost detectors are primarily electromagnetic field detectors (radios that are tuned to a lower frequency than AM or FM). The use of textiles is a material choice that connects to the idea of embodied knowledge which carries histories of intergenerational practices, it refers to the multiplicity of bodies, and cultures that have inhabited this land, and it also symbolizes a way of physicalizing the fabric of spacetime.
Artist statement
My research focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts with a critical lens. I see the praxis of crafting technological artifacts as an act of resistance against black box systems. One that contains embodied knowledge and carries with it oral histories of intergenerational practices. One that can transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries, and can be transmitted through direct engagement with materials. Likewise, I see the use of electronics, open software and hardware, and the act of creating collectively as means of cultivating digital commons that have the potential to empower individuals through shared knowledge. I believe that the ability to craft your own technology is a powerful tool for world building, one that enables you to speculate about alternative presents and plausible futures.
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The Hug is a short video essay reflecting the anticipated loss of the artist’s grandmother. Mimicking the aesthetics of quick online tutorials and digital workflows, it explores themes of digital autonomy, consent, and the role of posthumous technology in grief. Using photogrammetry and motion capture as a way of memorialization, the artist choreographs a hug between herself and her grandmother. The workflow, developed over the course of a year, reveals a lack of intimacy in the making through 3D scans that smoothen wrinkles, movement locked in time and space, and a virtual body that responds to the artist. The piece confronts the fact that a virtual body will never be felt, if not only by virtual hands.
Artist statement
Neeti Sivakumar is a South Asian multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, working at the intersection of the body, sociology of space, and technology. Grounded in performance studies, social psychology, and game design, Sivakumar's practice explores how ‘play’ can inform, heal, and offer respite in contemporary life. Play simulates real-world systems through fiction or immersion, providing participants with a framework to critically reflect on their roles, relationships, and social structures.
Sivakumar creates video games, internet art, and participatory installations that engage audiences in immersive experiences, often centering community collaboration and co-authorship. Sivakumar has received grants from the Goethe-Institut Mumbai, ZKM Karlsruhe, and BeFantastic Bangalore, and was a member of NYU's HEAR US (Honoring, Elevating, and Recapitalizing Underrepresented Stories) cohort in 2024.
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In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Ophelia's grief and the decline of her mental health is due to the actions of men. In classical paintings, her violent death is portrayed as a calm and erotic peacefulness. What if, after Ophelia drowns in the lake, she re-emerges from the water as a grief-stricken, angry siren? In this afterlife, how can Ophelia be laid to rest and finally be freed from her grief?
Sirin Speaks emerged as a reflection on Ophelia, the artist’s fear of the water, and the desire to imagine an afterlife where Ophelia is powerful. The artist creates a self portrait that transforms the site of Ophelia’s demise, the water, into an extension of the body–an entity swimming in pixels.
Artist statement
Harshini J. Karunaratne (they/she) is a Sri Lankan-Peruvian digital artist working at the intersections of film, theatre and technology. Rooted in a practice of artistic research and performance, they develop projects that explore themes of eco-grief, gender, the body and afterlife.
Harshini graduated in Film & New Media and Theater from New York University Abu Dhabi in 2018. They have had their work shown in the UAE, Italy, Germany, Japan, at the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, Burning Man in Nevada, the Athens Digital Art Festival, and at Art Dubai. Harshini is currently based between Berlin and London.
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Last One Standing: In Search of Myths at a State of Apocalypseis an interactive speculative fiction project that explores how myth can help us make sense of ecological collapse. Inspired by the 2024 landslides in Wayanad, Kerala, the work reimagines the Hindu mythological figures Garuda and Varahanot as distant deities, but as grounded, flawed beings navigating a post-disaster landscape.
The project examines the land as both witness and participant in ongoing climate trauma. Garuda, traditionally seen as a divine scavenger, becomes a symbol of labour and survival amidst debris. Varaha, the cosmic boar who once lifted the Earth, reflects on regeneration and the limits of rebuilding. These mythic characters narrate from the landscape, offering more-than-human perspectives rooted in memory, grief, and cultural inheritance.
Drawing from speculative fabulation, oral traditions, and ecological research, Last One Standing builds a counter-archive of a land in crisis where broken tools, forgotten objects, and fading stories become carriers of meaning. The work questions how we remember places marked by disaster and asks what myths can teach us in the face of irreversible change.The project engages with themes of cultural memory, ecological grief, and speculative futures, inviting audiences to reflect on what remains and how we choose to carry it forward.
Artist statement
I am a multidisciplinary Indian artist and researcher currently pursuing an MA in Interaction Design at the University of the Arts London. My practice explores how we remember places and how our relationships with them are shaped through memory, ecological change, and systems of power.
I use anarchiving to preserve non-verbal, embodied, and emotional forms of knowledge that are often left undocumented. My interest lies in what archives do not record and how that absence affects our understanding of culture, land, and history. By working with non-linear counter-archives, I explore how storytelling can offer alternative ways of relating to place and memory.
My recent projects examine oral traditions that are fading, reframe mythological symbols in the context of environmental disasters, and question missing data in militarised regions like the Siachen Glacier. I use methods such as counter-mapping, digital reconstruction, and interactive storytelling to foreground voices and perspectives often left out of mainstream narratives.
Inspired by thinkers like Donna Haraway, I consider how knowledge is always situated and how the personal and political are deeply intertwined. My work sits between memory and data, fact and fiction, individual and collective, inviting others to reflect on what is remembered, what is lost, and what can still be reimagined.
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A coin slips into the machine slot. With a mechanical shudder, my suspended head stirs to life. Projected across its surface, my face begins to speak: a childhood memory unfolds. A memory half-performed, half-possessed. In the background a hacked Skeever from the world of Elder Scrolls: Skyrim emerges as a giant printed rat, part digital beast, part sculptural spectre. It echoes the Qarakorshaq, a creature of Turkic folklore that lives in shadow – part myth, part mnemonic. This installation is a theatre of hauntings. It asks what it means to animate memory, to stage the self as an artifact. A single coin activates the loop: personal history delivered like an arcade confession, fleeting and transactional. The audience becomes witness, accomplice and ghost. The spectre is transferred.
I draw on the language of games, folk monsters and gothic discourse to fold past and present into a sculptural gesture. The uncanny body speaks; the machine remembers. In this fragile choreography of light, sound, and plastic, something intimate lingers - half-finished, half-felt - on the edge of forgetting.
Artist statement
My practice moves across video, installation, sculpture, and interactive media to explore memory, displacement, and the politics of visibility. As a second-generation British Turk from a working-class background, I draw from personal and intergenerational histories to examine how trauma, identity, and belonging are mediated through technology and image-making.
Informed by a prospective nomadic lineage, I consider how digital worlds - game environments, interactive fiction, and virtual architectures - can be mapped and integrated into memory and the embodied experience of space. These terrains become sites of both rupture and repair, where generational trauma and identity shock may be navigated and reimagined.
My recent works incorporate 3D printing, mechatronics, and AI-generated material to question machinic perception and cultural bias. I build speculative, temporal spaces, interactive installations or playable fictions, where hauntology and queer temporalities unsettle linear narratives.
Through layered soundscapes and tactile media, I explore how the janky, the incomplete and the hand-made offer resistance to systems of speed, polish, and disposability. My work seeks to build psychic, political, and emotional maps that trace alternate routes through past and future worlds, asking how we might hold space for healing through the shifting architectures of memory.
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<in the cloud> is a multimedia installation that seeks to digitize an image of a burial pit. The organic element of an earthen pit creates an absorbing juxtaposition with the digitally projected image of the sky in the screen, which invites the viewer to step on the mound and observe the screen. As they interact with the work, the viewers can modify the image on the screen by pressing a hidden button on the mound of earth.
Once the viewer chooses to engage with the work, at their feet appears an epitaph that tells the time they have been interacting with the work, measured in Megabits per second (Mbps). This is a measurement used to indicate the speed of internet connection, and the idea of the work arose as a way to measure the time spent in front of screens with the organic weight of a human body measured in terms of uploading and downloading digital files. This interaction is conceived as an obituary, a calculation that symbolizes the “footprint” that the spectator spent in front of the screen.
Artist statement
Using digital techniques, I want to question the transformation of bodies in space and time. I want to focus on the relationship between devices as metaphors for the way in which human animals communicate with and within the environment. I am interested in the fleeting and the enduring as starting points for creation. That is why my work moves between the materiality of data, the use of the internet, intervening open access codes and the re-signification of devices in space and time.I like to appropriate my digital footprint towards a ‘neo-footprint’ generated by my mutant and organic steps product of a conscious (in)volution of a technified being. I like to see my creations as a visit to the infinity of 1 and 0, mediating between the real and the fictional, and also between the organic and the digital. As a contemporary artist, I am interpellated by the use of technology, which is why the materiality of my work focuses on the use of technology reinterpreted in search of a connection with others from a new and collective place. I could say that my intention is to move towards a pixelated embrace in a technified present.
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31
McKinley Smith
FOR ALL EARTHKIND
Agar memorial plaque, aluminium, acrylic, electronics, thermo polymers
FOR ALL EARTHKIND re-commemorates the Apollo 11 moon landing through a posthuman narrative. Rather than framing the event solely as a triumph of human achievement, the work reflects on humanity’s position within broader planetary and biological systems. It provokes viewers to consider their role as conscious individuals as well as nonconsenting participants in Earth’s complex entanglement of evolving life and ecosystems. In making “a memorial plaque for all earthkind”, this piece shifts the perspective away from human-centric notions of national pride and speciest superiority–speculating on how such narratives can be re-written, and thus contribute to an ongoing dialogue between technology, biology, and the shared future of all earth based life.
At the base of the container rests a commemorative plaque, its message engraved upon a modeled lunar surface generated from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data. Cast in agar in order to sustain life, the surface is seeded with Physarum polycephalum, a surprisingly single celled organism. This slime mold is often studied for its uncanny ability to map highly efficient networks that challenges traditional notions of intelligence. Acting as a microbial metaphor for the human players in the moon landings, it begins to spread and colonize the surface. Over time, the plate blooms with additional molds and bacteria from the natural environment, revealing the lunar landing as an inter-species moment, rather than any single organism's achievement.
Artist statement
Under the moniker TERRAMOTO, I draw from the technical aesthetics of aerospace engineering to create artworks that inspire interest in STEM, while interrogating contemporary issues of the human condition. This practice highlights how solving the extreme engineering challenges presented by the most inhospitable environments can yield unexpected solutions to urgent conditions on Earth.
How might Martian habitat research inform responses to homelessness, displacement from war, or climate-driven migration? How could breakthroughs in material science or new access to extraterrestrial resources reshape our reliance on terrestrial supply chains and entrenched power structures? What might agile micro-factories designed for frontier fabrication reveal about the future of manufacturing, production, and distribution on Earth? And how will all of this impact what it means to be human? Such questions ask how we can use our knowledge differently–to deliver greater security, environmental resilience, and egalitarian possibility.
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Bug in My Software juxtaposes handmade textile landscapes with AI-driven ecosystem simulations, questioning the relationship between manual and automated labor, human and non-human intelligence.
The physical component of Bug in My Software is a soft textile landscape. The visual patterns of the textile are derived from the silkmoth’s DNA sequence, functioning both as a blueprint and a historical document of the species’ anthropogenic transformation. Though the textile’s design is informed by algorithmic processes, its materiality and construction are the result of manual, repetitive labor, performed by the artist over several months. This juxtaposition of handcraft and computational automation highlights the dynamics of hidden labor behind both traditional and digital production systems.
A speculative AI-driven ecosystem simulation unfolds in real time atop the textile landscape, populated by digital bugs— the silkmoths, silkworms and their digital ecosystem.Through XR headsets and multiple screens, visitors can observe the bugs' behaviors, interactions, and life cycles as they evolve, explore, live, find food, socialize, procreate and transform their digital ecosystem. This simulation runs outside of the artistic control, and bugs evolve and change their appearance, transform their environment, and occasionally react and follow the visitors as they explore the hybrid digital/textile landscape. For the SPAM New Media Festival, I am interested in advancing the simulation by adding more interactivity and complexity to the simulation, by introducing real time data and more species within the simulated speculative ecosystem.
The visitors are invited to embed (or re-embed) themselves into the speculative garden: find a position, feel the ground, envelop in the landscape, contemplate, cuddle, and rest in this hybrid landscape.
Artist statement
Alina Nazmeeva is a Tatarstan-born media artist and educator whose practice explores the material, cultural, and political dimensions of technology. Her work integrates digital simulations and video games with textiles and physical installation as both storytelling devices and as sites of critique. With these diverse media, Alina constructs complex worlds that interrogate how technologies, both emerging and established, shape the ways of knowing, living and becoming - for both humans and non-humans.
Alina's work is attentive to seductive and destructive potentials embedded within technological imaginaries. Approaching technology as a situated and relational practice, Alina seeks to hijack, hack, and reimagine existing computational systems and their material manifestations, towards the project of other technologies rooted in the ideas of cyberfeminism, cosmotechnics, and pluriverse. Her works intervene into complex situated technological processes to examine their legacies, inherent violence, and contradictory promises.
Her installation Bug in My Software juxtaposes handwoven textile landscapes with AI-driven ecosystem simulations, questioning the relationship between manual and automated labor, human and non-human intelligence. Pre-game shifts focus to embodiment and spectatorship, using football culture as a lens to investigate gender, bodies, and digital multiplicity.