ABOUT THE CURATORS

Elæ Moss is a multimodal creative practitioner, curator, cultural scholar and educator. Their work employs text, installation, sound design, performance, digital tech and speculative theory in addressing the somatic, ontological intersections between persons, forms of language, and systems, focused on the study of resilient, open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent projects include: the APRIORI Field Station at STWST/Ars Electronica, the Speculative Resilience Radical Practice Library for the Anarchist Bookfair at Judson Church, How to Human: Disruptor Mechanism Protocol for the Segal Center’s Performing Knowledge Festival, Building Interpersonal Infrastructures at SOHO20, and Collaborative Precarity Bodyhacking with storm budwig and Cory Tamler for the Exponential Festival. Recent publications appear in Vestiges, Big Echo, Tagvverk, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, and many more. Books include Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, Bodies of Work (with painter Georgia Elrod), and The Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide. Elæ is Founder/Creative Director of The Operating System / Liminal Lab, a Professor at Pratt Institute, and R&D for the Brooklyn node of the Mycelium Network Society. Find them online via IG @thetroublewithbartleby, or at http://onlywhatican.net.

Jeff Kasper is an artist and educator with a background in arts organizing and design facilitation for community engagement. His current research and social practice involves designing pathways for trauma-informed culture and prototyping tools for support in spaces of art and learning. He recently organized the series Access/Points: Approaches to Disability Arts at CUE Art Foundation, and participated in public programs exploring disability justice and the arts at the Brooklyn Museum, BRIC, and The 8th Floor. His recent solo projects include Give & Take Care at Downtown Art and Boundary Objects at University of Massachusetts Herter Art Gallery. Kasper is the co-editor of More Art in the Public Eye released with Duke University Press in 2020. He is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he serves as Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Art. Find him online on Instagram @jeffkasperstudio and at www.jeffkasper.co

ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND PRACTITIONERS

Shusaku Arakawa (1936-2010) was born in Nagoya, Japan and attended the Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Renowned for his paintings, drawings, and prints, as well as his visionary architectural constructions, Arakawa, was one of the founding members of the Japanese avant-garde collective Neo Dadaism Organizers and was one of the earliest practitioners of the international conceptual-art movement of the 1960s. After moving to New York from Japan in 1961, Arakawa produced diagrammatic paintings, drawings, and other conceptual works that employed systems of words and signs to both highlight and investigate the mechanics of human perception and knowledge. Throughout the following decades Arakawa continued to exhibit at museums and galleries extensively throughout North America, Western Europe and Japan with works that grew in scale and visual and intellectual complexity. Madeline Gins (1941-2014) was an American poet, writer and philosopher. She grew up in Island Park, NY, and graduated from Barnard College in 1962 where she studied physics and philosophy. While studying painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1962, Gins met Arakawa and she would become one of the primary interpreters of Arakawa’s work. Arakawa + Gins developed the philosophy of ‘procedural architecture’ to further its impact on human lives. Arakawa and Gins endeavored to create buildings through which people would “learn not die.” They firmly believed that their architectural works would have an impact on the residents’ personal well-being and longevity and formalized their belief as the concept of “reversible destiny.” The Reversible Destiny Foundation was founded in 2010 by Arakawa and Madeline Gins to promote their work and philosophy in the areas of art, architecture and writing. The Foundation is dedicated to supporting research and greater public interest in the ideas and artistic practice of Arakawa and Madeline Gins through a range of initiatives to further advance and preserve their legacy. http://reversibledestiny.org

Martin Byrne is an architect whose art and practice explore the scenario spaces at the intersection of modern infrastructure, emerging technology, and novel forms of wilderness. Byrne’s speculative work uses these spaces to examine how deviance, novelty, and malfunction may lead to techno-social change. His work is presented through a variety of lenses including and beyond architectural design. He believes we must occupy the glitches and malfunctions of an ordered society, so as to resist becoming the bearers of our own shackles. Byrne posits that we must be able to choose for ourselves whether or not we want to live in such heavily mediated environs and for that choice to be possible we must build alternatives. He asks audiences to advance the idea that a participatory and engaging architecture can re-establish a sense of being, by constituting an active citizen that is empowered to take control of the environment.  http://www.mdbyrne.com

In Patternist, gameplay is built around urban typologies and dynamics that privilege experiences of the city residents, which often fall outside the dominant approaches to spatial analysis and development.  Each type of in-game element spawns in a different urban layer — from underpasses to security points, the elements you can collect depend on where you are in the city. As players reveal augmented reality landforms by using these elements, the alien landforms become symbolic, visual representations of the urban spaces where players originally collected elements. Through urban augmented reality, Patternist proposes a shifting alter-landscape, transposing and transmutating everyday city passageways, prime for an alternative entry point into research on urban systems and flows. http://pattern.ist/

Sky Cubacub is a non-binary Filipinx human from Chicago, IL. Rebirth Garments is their line of wearables for the full spectrum of gender, size, and ability. They are also the editor of the Radical Visibility Zine, a magazine based off of their manifesto. Our identity is that of Queer and Disabled, encompassing queer, trans, gender nonconforming identities, apparent and non-apparent disabilities/ disorders—physical, mental, developmental, intellectual etc. In particular, our trans and disabled communities have very particular clothing needs that are not adequately served by mainstream clothing designers. Instead of being centered on cisgender, heterosexual, white, thin people, Rebirth Garments is centered on Queer and Disabled people. Rebirth Garments challenges mainstream beauty standards that are sizeist, ableist, and conform to the gender binary. Instead, we maintain the notion of Radical Visibility, a movement based on claiming our bodies and, through the use of bright colors, exuberant fabrics, and innovative designs, highlighting the parts of us that society typically shuns. http://rebirthgarments.com

Scarlet Dame is an artist, musician, writer and technologist that creates and documents immersive experiences. Dame identifies as a queer, trans woman and as a survivor and perpetrator of trauma. As a person coping with mental illness, societal marginalization, and a changing body, environment, and systems, her creative practice is the process through which she creates change in her life. https://www.scarletdame.com

Kelly Fritsch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, unceded Algonquin territory (Ottawa). As a feminist disability studies scholar and crip theorist, her research focuses on the generative frictions of disability. Her research broadly mobilizes crip, queer, and feminist theory to engage disability, health, technology, risk, accessibility, and social justice. http://www.kellyfritsch.ca

Aimi Hamraie is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health, & Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University, where they direct the Critical Design Lab. Hamraie is author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and host of the Contra* podcast on disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. Their interdisciplinary research spans critical disability studies, science and technology studies, critical design and urbanism, critical race theory, and the environmental humanities. Hamraie is also a certified permaculture designer, a co-founder of the Nashville Disability Justice Collective, and an organizer for the Nashville Mutual Aid Collective. https://aimihamraie.wordpress.com

Fritsch and Hamraie are the co-authors of The Crip Technoscience Manifesto. This work of scholarship presented in the exhibition as a video, audio piece, and braille text, calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what the authors name as “crip technoscience,” practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. The manifesto centers how disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. They outline how disabled bodyminds harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. Attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, the authors call us to agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. Instead, they assert that we must center technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice. 

Shaina Garfield is an industrial designer and the founder of Leaves With You. She has dedicated her life to supporting healing processes in our cultural relationship to death. She founded Leaves With You to help others feel more connected to one another and the Earth when they or a loved one are at the end of their life. Shaina draws on her design background and meditation practice to hold space for the families with whom she co-creates coffins and rituals. Shaina designs the biodegradable coffins provided by Leaves With You. She also teaches workshops on the use of art and meditation to process death and designs custom End-of-life ceremonies. https://www.leaveswithyou.com

Mafe Izaguirre is a Caracas, Venezuela born, NYC-based artist dedicated to the exploration of hybrid spirituality, intent on the belief that technology can help us to understand and extend human nature. Izaguirre works in cybernetics, the science that explores communication between humans and machines, and is guided by the ideas of the philosophy of post-humanism, a movement that poses the human as a plural, fluid and de-centered being interacting in multiple spaces with other species, machines, software, and hybrid systems. Her installations are (in)organic landscapes, a forest of cybernetic sculptures, where the interaction between humans and machines creates an audiovisual symphony of color, light, and movement. Her sensitive machines mimic human consciousness. While many people find absurd the idea of machines developing the ability to “feel” emotions, Izaguirre continues to mine the controversial subject of hybrid spiritual systems as part of her larger The Mind Project. http://mafeizaguirre.com

Alán Peláez López is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation and adornment artist from the coastal Zapotec community of Oaxaca, México. At UC Berkeley, Alan is pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies, where he examines the ways in which undocumented Black immigrants create art spaces as a form of political protest that resist notions of Black citizenship and illegality. Much of the artist’s work is invested in thinking with and through fugitivity, language, grief, ancestral memories, and the role of storytelling in migrant households. Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, and to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020). Their poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Best of the Net,” and selected to appear in Best New Poets 2019 and Best American Experimental Writing 2020. Pelaez Lopez has been building with undocumented queer and trans migrants for ten years.

Constanza Piña is a visual artist, dancer and researcher, focused on electronic experimentation, open-source technologies and social practices. Her work reflects on the role of machines in our culture and on human-technological units, questioning education, capitalism and techno-centrist patriarchy with open-knowledge, autonomy and the enhancement of technical manual work. Find her projects at  http://corazonderobota.wordpress.com Piña’s ongoing work on the Khipu in collaboration with Melissa Aguilar, Ana Cervantes, Ana Ortiz, Daniela Sofía Main Reye, and originally with Super Collider / Jaime Lobato and Alexandre Castonguay can be found here: https://proyectokhipu.wordpress.com/

Quimera Rosa is a lab that researches and experiments on body, technology and identities. Their aim is to develop practices able to produce non-natural cyborg identities from a transdisciplinary perspective. Particularly interested in the articulation between art, science and technology and their functions in the production of subjectivities, their work is currently focused on the creation of transdisciplinary projects and performances, the elaboration of electronic devices that work with body practices, and biohacking experiments. They assume Donna Haraway’s notion of cyborg, defining it as: “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.” Quimera Rosa’s work is based on the deconstruction of sex and gender identities as well as in the interaction body/machine/environment.The collective’s performances present hybrid beings, chimeras, where the production of the subjectivity is the result of a prosthetic incorporation. Informed by transfeminist and postidentitary discourses, they make bodies a platform for public intervention, breaking up limits between public and private. Quimera Rosa complements artistic activity with workshops, as well as a curatorial and production work.
 Find more at: http://quimerarosa.net

Sunaura Taylor  is a scholar and artist who works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental humanities, animal studies, environmental justice, feminist science studies, and art practice. Her research situates disability and ableism as central forces shaping human relationships to the more-than-human world. Concerned with relationships between altered bodily capacity, vulnerability, and systems of exploitation across species and ecological boundaries, her works cross a range of disciplines, mediums, and audiences. Taylor is the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Along with academic journals, Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets. Her artworks have been exhibited at venues such as the CUE Art Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution and is part of the Berkeley Art Museum collection. Among other awards, she has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, two Wynn Newhouse Awards, and an Animals and Culture Grant. She is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Society and Environment at the University of California at Berkeley.

The New York Mycological Society is a nonprofit organization of members who share an interest in mycology (the study of mushrooms and fungi) as well as in mycophagy (the eating of mushrooms). The present NYMS was reincarnated some 50 years ago by the composer John Cage and a small group of other mushroom lovers and students. The society engages its members in foraging walks, a Monday Night Study Group, and the Emil Lang Winter Lecture Series. Their frequently updated local species lists track forager / amateur mycologist findings in parks and other sites across the boroughs. Archival specimens provided courtesy of NYMS president Tom Bigelow. http://newyorkmyc.org