Mediated Natures panel at ISEA Durban
This month I had the privilege of traveling to Durban, South Africa to present on a panel at ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Arts) with some very inspiring artists and academics. Our panel was called Mediated Natures, Speculative Futures and Justice and was organized by Meredith Drum and Margaretha Haughwout. The panel took place over two sessions. The first included: Cesar Baio + Lucy HG Solomon, Grisha Coleman and Meredith Drum. The second included: Tyler Fox, Magaretha Haughwout, Simone Paterson and Rachel Stevens (me). I presented research in progress—I am looking at the site of the St Lawrence River where it acts as a border between Canada and the US and bisects the Akwesasne Mohawk territory. The site is home to the St. Lawrence Seaway Eisenhower Lock and Moses-Saunders Hydropower Dam, three superfund sites created by General Motors and Alcoa Aluminum, and a host of invasive and migrating species—a rich site for entangled existences. I haven’t landed on a form for the project, likely to be experimental documentary, and I haven’t yet found my “radical aesthetics,” but in the meantime, the presentation is called:
Place of the Big River (Kaniatarowanénhne)
Infrastructure, Waterways and Alien Others: Technologies of Collaboration through Contamination
Of course, there were so many great projects and people at ISEA and in Durban to get to know. Visiting South Africa for the first time was a gift. Pieces of the continent started to become more distinct and legible to me and sociopolitical complexities articulated in real time. Durban is a busy seaport town and used to be a major hub in the sugar trade. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, his autobiography about growing up biracial under Apartheid, was recommended and now on my list.
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Port of Durban
Map of the St. Lawrence Seaway
Resilience for All book
Fish Stories Community Cookbook, the project I did in collaboration with Meredith Drum as part of Paths to Pier 42 – focusing on the Lower East Side and the East River Waterfront – is mentioned in this great new book. Our project is discussed in “Chapter 4: Lower East Side, Manhattan: Tactical Urbanism Holding Space for the People’s Waterfront.” Thank you Barbara Brown Wilson for writing such a relevant book.
Signal Culture residency
I am super excited for a week-long residency later this week with Signal Culture in freezing cold and snowy Owego, NY. I’ll be bringing some media from an installation I made years ago with the intention of trying out some of their cool signal processing tools to add abstration and editing it into a single channel piece. As I have never been before, I solicited information from media artists and theorists who have and got such great advice, synthesized (no pun intended) here:
Have fun!!
Bring lots of source material.
Don’t sleep!
Bathe very infrequently.
Prepare to have your mind blown by Dave Jones.
Don’t forget to visit Hand of Man!
Jail meal at your own risk.
Shop at Two floor thrift/vintage on the corner.
Walk along the river.
Have an amazing time!
Have a plan that you can abandon. The machines are alive and take a bit longer to get going.
Bring a notebook so you can get back to something that got interesting results. Some of the best things happen when you lose track of how you got this or that result.
Experiment!
Walk to the cemetery.
Breakfast at diner across the street to get a feel for the place.
Bakery downstairs.
Abandon control.
Take your time exploring town as all of this could take just one afternoon.
Don’t forget your snow boots!
If you’re up for a challenge ask about Ghost Pepper Pizza night at John Barleycorn’s!
Thanks so much Annie Berman, Torsten Zenas Burns, Karl Erickson, Kristen Lucas, Darrin Martin, Monica Panzarino and Jim Supanick for the advice!
A Field Guide to iLANDing
So pleased to have played a small role in the generation of scores for this wonderful book: A Field Guide to iLANDing: scores for researching urban ecologies. As part of the Urban Backstage Research Group, one of the year-long research residencies focusing on the East River waterfront area, we generated a few scores that you can try out yourself if you get this book.
What a treat to spend quality time exploring space, land, movement and ideas with these co-conspirators in the Urban Backstage iLAB Residency group: Julie Kline (Theater Actor/ Director), Clarinda Mac Low (Interdisciplinary Artist), Elliott Maltby (Urban Designer/ Landscape Architect), Jeremy Pickard (Eco-Theater Artist) and Shawn Shafner (Artist / Educator / Activist).
And a special thanks to the inspiring Jennifer Monson, the visionary behind the whole iLAND organization.
Space, Place and the Humanities research institute
So honored to be participating in the Space, Place and the Humanities, a three-week NEH research institute at Northeastern University in Boston this July and August. I am very much looking forward to hearing from engaged academics and artists and new colleagues from different disciplines, reading new texts and revisiting familiar ones, building on the Spatial Narratives course I taught in the IMA MFA program at Hunter College this past semester, thinking and learning more about our current geospatial situations, and beginning to develop new research.