Urgent Inquiries with Ari Melenciano, Tega Brain, and Sam Lavigne, Tuesday, November 11, 6 to 8:30 PM Eastern, Secret Riso Club, 122 Central Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11221
In our first program, we welcome Eyebeam alumni, artists Ari Melenciano of Afrotectopia, whose work investigates our social and cultural relations using new media frameworks, and Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, who employ digital sabotage to frame climate crises and its mitigation in legible ways.
RSVP for Nov. 11 below
Artist Bios
Ari Melenciano is an artist and researcher whose practice investigates cultural behavior as a dynamic cybernetic field. She positions the self as an epistemic and ontological site, and elevates invisible intelligences as co-authors to perception. Whether she is composing botanical soundscapes or crafting intuitive choreographies that use the body as a cultural research instrument, her practice designs new grammars for understanding what it means to exist, through the remembrance of ancestral interfaces. Ari’s inquiries invite us to consider imagination as simultaneously a tool to excavate interiority, expand the performance of culture, and recover what the archive has forgotten. Ari has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture across NYU, the Pratt Institute, Hunter College, Parsons School of Design, and Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai. She is also the founder of Afrotectopia.
Tega Brain is an Australian artist and environmental engineer born when atmospheric CO2 was below 350ppm. Her work addresses issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure and has taken the form of digital networks controlled by environmental phenomena, schemes for obfuscating personal data, and a wildly popular, online smell-based dating service. Through these provisional systems she investigates how technologies orchestrate and reorchestrate agency. She is an Industry Associate Professor of Integrated Design and Media at New York University and her first book, Code as Creative Medium, is coauthored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press. She lives and works in New York.
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He is a Creative Capital grantee, recipient of the Pioneer Works Working Artist Fellowship, and the Brown Institute’s Magic Grant. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Synthetic Media and Algorithmic Justice at the Parsons School of Design.
