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FEMeeting Sister Labs: Artist Presentations
April 5 @ 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm EDT
Join FEMeeting Sister Labs, a conference bringing together women in art, science and technology, for two days of speakers, workshops, and community activities. NATURE Lab hosts FEMeeting Sister Labs right here in North Central Troy, NY, welcoming local and international artists, scholars, students and community members. All are welcome for this exciting weekend of events!
Schedule:
April 5, 7 pm – 9:30 pm: An Evening of Radical Women’s Voices in Art, Science and Technology
- Suzanne Thorpe and Stephanie Rothenberg: Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling celebrates the listening body of the heroic oyster. Whereas other marine animals use chemical exudates or patterns of light, oysters determine suitable settlement habitats through a distinction of sound signatures in underwater soundscapes. They are also sensitive to loud sounds at certain pitches, which potentially disturbs their reproductive process.
- Cecilia Vilca: Exorcisms of the Territory. This Lecture-Exorcism, delivered by Cecilia Vilca, invokes texts that draw a conversation of times, and a history that heals itself.
- Praba Pilar: Nixtamalízaté-té-té. Praba Pilar will share her convivial project Nixtamalízaté-té-té, which subverts emergent AI systems into fellow travelers, into beautiful pluriversal monsters.
April 6, 9am – 2pm: Workshops
- NATURE Lab Workshop: Community Science in N. Central Troy with Kathy High, Sarah Cadieux, Ellie Irons, Azuré Keahi, Abby Kinchy, A’Livija Mullins-Richard, and Emilly Obuya.
- Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail, walk with Ellie Irons, Kathy High, Azuré Keahi, Branda Miller
- L Lot Workshop: AilanthusXYucca, with Azuré Keahi and Ellie Irons
FEMeeting is driven by the desire to develop and promote a more direct collaboration between women working at the intersection art, science, and technology. The conference aims to disseminate projects being undertaken by women worldwide and, as a result, to contribute to the development of art-science research methodologies and to the growth of cooperation strategies that can increase knowledge sharing and bring communities closer.
More about the Presenters on April 5:
Cecilia Vilca Ocharan is a Peruvian transartist, feminist chola techno-witch, and language activist. She is a founding member of the creative and digital heritage division, MyAP Electron Microscopy Laboratory. From a decolonizing vision, she exercises her epistemological rebellion using technology as a tool and object of analysis. Her main goal and poetics are to encourage reflection through revelation. Her projects are born from her personal crusades, and therefore, they are micropolitical flesh. ISEA2020 Montreal and ISEA2023 Paris IPC Member. FEMeeting 2023 Taos and TTT2023 Malta Scientific & Artistic Committee member. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR) Reviewer. Eight Art Residency Programs: Mexico, Bolivia, USA, and Canada. She has exhibited her work, organized exhibitions, and given lectures in Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, Spain, Cuba, Chile, Norway, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, and the USA. Born, lives and dreams in/from Lima, Peru, she has a M.A. Digital Arts, UPF, BCN, Spain.
Praba Pilar is a diasporic Colombian artist disrupting the overwhelmingly passive participation in the contemporary ‘cult of the techno-logic.’ Over the last two decades Pilar has presented cultural productions integrating performance art, live work, digital works, video, electronic installations, radio programming, street theatre, invisible theatre, websites and writing. These projects have traveled widely to museums, galleries, universities, performance festivals, conferences, public streets, political meetings, bookstores, bars, and radio airwaves around the world. Check out Praba Pilar’s website here.
Suzanne Thorpe is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar whose creative research intersects electronic music, feminist and ecological theory. She interweaves critical listening practices with acoustic ecology, improvisation and technology to craft immersive sound engagements and creative research sites that question circulations of power within human and nonhuman systems. As an electroacoustic flutist and sound artist she’s performed and exhibited internationally, has a large discography, with releases on Columbia Records, Beggars Banquet, Geffin, V2, and her research has been published in journals and edited volumes. Thorpe has been granted several residencies and awards for her artistry and research, such as the Frog Peak Collective Award for innovative research in technology, a Gold Record from the Recording Industry Association of Americas, as well as grants from the MAP Fund, NYSCA, New Music USA and Harvestworks Digital Media Foundation. Thorpe holds an MFA in Electronic Music & Media from Mills College, a Ph.D. in Integrative Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and is a certified Deep Listening Instructor, having studied in depth with pioneering composer and Deep Listening Founder Pauline Oliveros. Most recently she was a Mellon Fellow and member of the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Sound Studies at Manhattan College. She also remains a co-founder and director of TECHNE, a nonprofit arts-education organization dedicated to dismantling social and cultural barriers in technical learning environments.
Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore symbiotic relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces, she engages a variety of media platforms that include interactive installation, drawing, sculpture, video and performance. She has exhibited internationally in venues and festivals including MassMOCA (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), House of Electronic Arts / HeK (CH), LABoral (ES), Transmediale (DE), and ZKM Center for Art & Media (DE). She has received awards from Harpo Foundation, NYSCA and Creative Capital among others and has participated in numerous residencies including Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace/LMCC and Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in NYC, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ZK/U in Berlin. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic. She is Professor in the Department of Art at University at Buffalo SUNY where she co-directs an interdisciplinary design studio collaborating with local social justice organizations.
More about FEMeeting and Sister Labs
Launched in 2017, the conference “FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science and Technology” was driven by the desire to develop and promote more direct collaboration between individuals who identify themselves as Women, independently of their sex. The idea behind FEMeeting was orchestrated by the Portuguese artist Marta de Menezes and scholar Dalila Honorato, after realizing that women in the field of Art and Science have an unquestionable presence worldwide.
In 2021, FEMeeting Sister Labs launched as an hybrid model of interaction between local and global, between digital and physical: where FEMeeting members address to the community of women in art, science and technology an invitation to their lab spaces.
Discover the lab spaces already presented by FEMeeting members through Sister Labs and learn more about the community of women in art, science and technology! Check out Sister Lab around the World!
We are particularly interested in hearing about the experiences of BIPOC, trans women, non-binary women, and gender queer women, and people living with disabilities.
This event is a collaboration between the iEAR Presents series with support from RPI’s ARTS department and School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, and from the New York State Council for the Arts/ NYSCA, with The Sanctuary for Independent Media, and is a featured project of the NEA Our Town “Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail” creative placemaking grant.
We are committed to lowering the barriers to access for events at The Sanctuary for Independent Media. For people who are hard of hearing or deaf, blind or low-vision, or whose physical limitations can interfere with a satisfying experience, let us know two weeks in advance so we can make appropriate arrangements.
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