Residency

ricky sallay zoker (YATTA) is a multimedia artist and musician from Houston, Texas. Their practice combines music combines poetry, video art, movement, and the use of their voice in a variety of different ways.

We visit the artist, inventor, and designer Andrea Lauer in her studio for a look into her process around science inspired creations, plus Janna Levin reflects on their friendship, collaboration, and shared love of unconventional Brooklyn spaces.

Umber Majeed uses virtual reality, collage, video art and her uncle’s tourism company, Trans-Pakistan as a starting point to create alternative and speculative realities. Majeed often questions larger narratives around the relationship between nationalism and Western influence. She explains her creative process including using personal archival material and how she plans to create subversive narratives that infiltrate the Pakistani tourism culture.

With work spanning sculpture and installation yet grounded in video, Ilana Harris-Babou speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor as a means to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever-unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner seeking to make her learning and thinking visible through an ecosystem of iterative projects including “architecturally-scaled collages,” poetic gestures, long-form essays, publications, large-scale public works, digital archives, teaching, curriculum development, lecture performances, stand-up comedy, and other forms yet to be determined.

Jen Liu is a New York-based visual artist working in video, performance, and painting on topics of national identity, economy, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. In 2017, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video, the NYFA/NYSCA Gregory Millard Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Media, and she premiered her most recent work, PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT, in 2018’s Berlinale Forum Expanded exhibition.

American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work extends dialectics formalized in Black radicalism and organized labor into a context of networked virtual life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing to reveal historical dynamics embedded within contemporary culture and technology.

Considered one of the pioneers of interactive cinema, New York-based artist Toni Dove creates hybrid performance, installation, and screen-based art that fuses film, game, or instrument based interaction, and experimental theater. Her work has been shown internationally at such venues as Banff Centre for the Arts, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Museum of the Moving Image, ZKM, REDCAT, EMPAC, and the Kitchen. Dove creates large-scale responsive environments, both performance and installation, that connect embodied interface technologies, like vocal analysis or video motion sensing to media and robotics to create immersive narratives.

Ezra Wube is a mixed media artist born in Ethiopia and based in Brooklyn, NY. His work references the notions of past and present, the constant changing of place, and the dialogical tensions between “here” and “there.”

MV Carbon is an artist and composer whose work encompasses live performance, sound art, painting, sound for film, and multi-media installation. Her current work explores interchangeability, the human mechanism, perceptive states of consciousness, habitat, animism, and the empirical force of nature. In live performances, a non-traditional approach to music is embraced with the use of electric cello, sculptural sound objects, gongs, amplified objects, oscillators, and hand constructed instruments. Carbon reinterprets the physical form associated with virtuosity, and challenges the way a musical instrument is defined, and approached. She is interested in the psychological effect of sound and works to heighten our senses through spatial, psychic, and temporal based explorations.

Mani Nilchiani and Caroline Sinders are a collaborative duo exploring the future of surveillance and networked identities in VR with their interactive narrative project “Dark Patterns.” Their project and residency is imagining a near future dystopia in a world with zero net neutrality, rising fascism, and surveillance in everyday products. “Dark Patterns” has previously been shown at MoMA PS1, the Weird Reality Conference at Carnegie Mellon University, and at Pioneer Works Second Sundays. Caroline Sinders is a researcher and artist working at the intersections of emerging technology and public good through critical design and narrative. Sinders holds a masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She is from New Orleans, Louisiana and is currently based in Brooklyn. Mani Nilchiani is an artist, technologist, and musician. His work explores displacement, memory, and diasporic psyche. Nilchiani holds a masters from the Parsons School of Design’s Design and Technology Program. He is from Tehran, Iran and is currently based in Brooklyn.

Claudia Hart emerged as part of a generation of 90s intermedia artists in the “identity art” niche. She still examines identity, but updated through the scrim of technology. Her art is about issues of the body, perception, and nature collapsing into technology and then back again. Hart was an early adopter of virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, then later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR, and objects using computer-driven production machines, all based on the same computer models. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she developed a pedagogic program based on this concept called Experimental 3D. It is the first art school curriculum dedicated solely to teaching simulations technologies in a contemporary art world context. She lives in New York and Chicago and works with Transfer gallery and bitforms gallery.

Taeyoon Choi is an artist and a co-founder of School for Poetic Computation in New York City. His practice involves performance, electronics, paintings, and installations that form the basis for storytelling to explore the connection between race, gender, disability and environment. He was a fellow at Data and Society and Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. His projects were presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2019, Taeyoon is working on Distributed Web of Care and ongoing research with a critical perspective towards technology, ethics, justice and sensitivity to the concept of personhood.

Ziemba is the performing moniker of NYC-based musician, composer, perfumer, and cultural geographer René Kladzyk. Ziemba’s multisensory creations playfully interrogate space, perception, and the body. Since first making an incense for her debut album (using flowers from the yard of her childhood home), Ziemba has increasingly employed fragrance as a vehicle for transforming sonic spaces. Her new full length album, ARDIS, functions as a series of portals into a feminist sci-fi adventure and parallel world. It will be released sequentially throughout the spring and summer of 2019, in the form of audio download, limited batch fragrance, video, tape and vinyl.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Brandon Ares has recently produced and directed music and media content for Pink Room Project and other artists as well as participated in performances with Goldlink, Homeshake, and A-Trak. Ares, alongside Pink Room Project, has cultivated a DIY scene in New Orleans that combines 90s rave and punk culture in a series of secret underground hotline parties. Open and inclusive to all, the sights and sounds of this scene serve as the backdrop for his first mixtape, “GOOD LOVE 2017: DYKE,” a personal look inward at the line between sexual exploration, addiction, and desensitization.

Abdu Ali is an independent music artist, writer, and multimedia arts curator based in Baltimore. Ali has released five musical projects, all notable for their idiosyncratic blend of punk, futurism, jazz, Baltimore Club Music, and rap music, with lyrics yielding poetic uprise. Through their work as a rapper and curator, emphasized by their writings and outspokenness via social media/interviews, Ali has been elected as a radical underground Baltimore music and cultural figure. Ali, was also the founder of Kahlon, an iconic underground party that radicalized the artistic climate and made space for marginalized musicians in Baltimore. Unapologetically Black, gay, and queer, Abdu Ali’s work is bold, raw, and most importantly life-affirming.

Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work uses the language of collage to explore dissociative states through cinema, bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code. Using the conventions of narrative, language, and genre, her films explore shifting subjectivities and the limits of the embodied camera.

Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary artist interested in creating platforms for ongoing dialogue about artificial intelligence (A.I.) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Her art employs lens-based practices, the manipulation of space, and technology to grapple with notions of consciousness, agency, perception, and social equity. Her work has been exhibited at a broad spectrum of public, private, and institutional venues by design.

Victoria Scott is a Canadian-born educator and visual artist, mainly a sculptor, working between physical materials, emotional energy and electronic media of many flavors. Her projects include constructing material representations of conceptual objects and images that exist in simulated digital environments, the public commons and in the space of cultural imagination. She is currently developing interactive Virtual Reality environments to visualize human energy fields and has just founded Imaginary Objects, a VR/AR company based in San Francisco. Victoria has exhibited throughout North America and Europe, and completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ka Baird is a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist living and working in NYC. She is one of the founding and continuing members of the experimental outfit Spires That In The Sunset Rise founded in Chicago in September 2001. Since relocating to NYC in November 2014, she has set off in numerous directions apart from Spires with new collaborations as well as honing in on her own solo work. She is interested specifically in performance/sound as a means to break reoccurring thought patterns in order to create passages into pure energy potential.

Michael Beharie is a musician based in New York City. His music sits at the imagined intersection between sound system culture, pop transmission and free improvisation. Michael’s latest efforts include the song-cycle EP Voices, three film scores for Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo and a duo piece for himself and cellist Teddy Rankin-Parker. Beharie performs regularly in and outside of NYC and recently joined avant-noise outfit ZS.

Michael Beharie is a musician based in New York City. His music sits at the imagined intersection between sound system culture, pop transmission and free improvisation. Michael’s latest efforts include the song-cycle EP Voices, three film scores for Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo and a duo piece for himself and cellist Teddy Rankin-Parker. Beharie performs regularly in and outside of NYC and recently joined avant-noise outfit ZS.

Saxophonist, composer, and educator María Grand was born in Switzerland in 1992, to a Swiss mother and an Argentinian father. Upon her move to New York in 2011, she quickly became the protégée of legendary musicians such as Billy Harper, and Antoine Roney, as well as NEA Jazz Master Von Freeman; in just a few years, she became one of the few fresh and unique voices on her instrument.

Composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra creates live and immersive music that explores rhythm, indigenous practices, and interaction with cities and the natural world. Ibarra is a Yamaha, Paiste, and Vic Firth Drum Artist. In 2017, Ibarra will premiere DreamTime Ensemble with a forthcoming new album on Decibel Collective titled Perception, a collection of pieces around the idea of finding unfixed meaning in sensory experiences and interaction in one's environment.

Kristian Matsson is a Swedish songwriter/singer, based in Gagnef and Brooklyn, who performs under the stage name of The Tallest Man on Earth. He has been making records and touring the world since 2006. His latest album ‘Dark Bird is Home’ (2015), set him on a tour where he was honored to be let into places like Massey Hall in Toronto, The Beacon Theatre in New York, Royal Albert Hall in London and The Sydney Opera House.

Oral histories from Mexican and Native peoples, post-colonial historical texts, and spaces that are safe and inclusive for people of color are the cosmologies that surround Mexican-American artist Carlos Rosales-Silva’s work. His most recent output reclaims the colors and forms that have long been (ab)used to create oppressive stereotypes of Mexican and Native American peoples. Draining direct references, symbols, and figures have allowed him a freedom to study the color and form of his identity. Rosales-Silva’s central intellectual and artistic project is de-centering his white, hetero, Euro-centric western education. He has exhibited throughout Texas, and in Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, and Brooklyn.

Watch an interview with the rhythmic punk Tashi Dorji about his artistic journey to residency. Tashi Dorji talks about what growing up in Bhutan, on the eastern side of the Himalayas, was like as a young music-lover. Dorji’s musicianship brings haunting beauty and mindfulness to each of his listeners.

Nate Lewis is a Washington DC-based artist originally from Beaver Falls, PA. Working within portraiture and figuration, Lewis’ current focus has been on creating sculpted paper photo works that combine elements of drawing, sculpture, etching, embroidery and fabric. In these works he sculpts out unseen tensions on bodies, representing them with an array of textures and patterns to reveal hidden layers of empathy.

Genesis Belanger is a Brooklyn-based sculptor. She is currently working in ceramics hand building handsome jokes about the absurdity of the patriarchy in a material that lasts forever. The work engages in a conversation about the present and its relationship to the past, a past that so many were denied their rights to shape.

This video features the iconic collaboration between Tahir Carl Karmali and Bob Bellerue. Brooklyn-based artist Tahir Carl Karmali, interests lie in manipulating materials that perpetuate colonialism expressing his art across multiple mediums, materials, and photography. He draws from his own experiences as a well-traveled Kenyan citizen to structure narratives around migratory identity. Bob Bellerue is a noise composer, experimental musician, and creative technician based in Brooklyn NY. Over the last 30 years, he has been involved in a wide range of sonic activities – noise art, experimental/abstract music, junk metal percussion ensembles, Balinese gamelan, sound scores for dance/ theater/ video/ performance art, and sound/video installations.

The work of Canadian-Trinidadian artist Curtis “Talwst” Santiago incorporates mixed-media and performance practices. He is currently engaged in an ongoing series of miniature dioramas in reclaimed ring boxes that highlight absent or misinterpreted narratives, revealing the non-linear complexities of history and exploring intercultural relationships. Talwst’s work has been exhibited internationally at The Art Gallery of Mississauga (Ontario), Angell Gallery (Toronto), Studio Museum Harlem (New York) and Galerie White Projects (Paris).

MSHR, the collaborative hyperscape sensory duo, discussing their generative sculptural installation Knotted Gate Chant Cycle on Clocktower Radio.