Season 6: September 2019–March 2020
September 19, 2019
Amy Langer, Ghost Buildings: The Experimental Architecture of Sarah Winchester and the Female Players of the Sims
Amy Langer is co-artistic director and founding ensemble member for the San Francisco Neo-Futurists. She maintains the most casual video game website at gentlegamers.com. You can hear her ever-changing, bite-sized audio pieces at 510.900.9831.
Silk Worm, If You Shout "Brick!"
Silk Worm is a San Francisco-based artist working in drag, dance, and performance. With Brittany Newell, she leads and organizes HUSH-HUSH, a platform for queer and trans artists making experimental work in the Bay. Silk is known as a very good sport.
October 17, 2019
Marlo Longley, Bookstores that Love Other Bookstores: Gay Information Spaces
Marlo Longley Marlo Longley is researcher based in Oakland. He is a bookseller at Moe's in Berkeley and 34 Trinity in San Francisco. He has completed digital archival projects for organizations including Canyon Cinema and OutHistory.org. He's passionate about queer history, media archaeology, and archives in their many forms.
Zully Adler, Hermetic Networks: New Age Cassettes in Northern California
Zully Adler is the Shorenstein Research Fellow at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and founder of the Goaty Tapes music label and House Rules publishing house. Raised in Los Angeles and currently living in San Francisco, his research focuses on artists and musicians in the context of California's alternative communities. Zully is co-curator of Mythos, Psyche, Eros: Jess and California, now on view at SFMOMA. State of the Ding, a multi-media publication about the musician Charlie Nothing, is forthcoming.
November 21, 2019
Xiaowei Wang, How to Cook a Tiger
Xiaowei Wang is a designer, engineer and researcher born in Tianjin, grew up outside of Boston, and now works between two Bay Areas in the US and China. Their work focuses on the centrality of landscape and ecology in the digital world, building inquiry and community through public art, data visualization and writing. They have co-founded a number of award-winning design projects including FLOAT Beijing, an air quality sensing kite initiative that was an INDEX Design to Improve Life Finalist. Their current research focus is rural technology use, Sinofuturism and the intersection between food systems and technology.
Jennifer Williams, The Glass Business
Jennifer Williams is a writer, musician, and MFT trainee specializing in Somatic Psychotherapy living in Oakland California. She received her MFA from Mills College in 2014 and was awarded the Ardella Mills Prize in Fiction for her thesis. She has been an artist-in-residence at Wolfman Books, Cabin-Time and Have Company and was a Fiction Finalist for Disquiet International. She has created and self-published several zines meant for reflection and leads regular workshops in the Bay Area. When she makes music, it is usually as Gossimer.
January 16, 2020
Lily Sloane, A Shelter for the Psyche
Lily Sloane is an audio artist, podcast producer, composer, radio host, and psychotherapist in San Francisco. She sees her work as an interweaving of science and art, and a chance to bridge self-expression with understanding of other and environment. She loves walking everywhere and getting lost in the woods -- both literally and metaphorically -- but she can't be in solitude for very long. The city is her home.
tamara suarez porras, eclipsis, or a line of totality: the solar eclipses of 1979, 2017, and 2024
tamara suarez porras is an artist, writer, and educator from (south) Brooklyn, NY and based in Berkeley, CA. tamara explores the fluid relationships of time, memory, and history through a photo-conceptual, research-centric practice. Her work spans across installation, writing, filmmaking, and performance, using archival material as a site of possibility for (re)imagination. She has exhibited nationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, School at the International Center of Photography, En Foco Touring Gallery, and Deitch Projects in New York City, as well as fusedspace, Root Division, The Growlery, and Embark Gallery in San Francisco, CA. Her writing has been published on Art Practical, The Brooklyn Rail, and contemptorary. She graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Photography & Imaging department, and from California College of the Arts with an MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies.
February 20, 2020
Alex Arzt, Cabbage, Coast, Concrete
Alex Arzt Alex Arzt is an Oakland based interdisciplinary artist interested in the environment whose current work involves making research based artist books and collaborative publications and activating them through organized meals, workshops, and group performances. In 2018, she was awarded grants from The Puffin Foundation and The East Bay Community Foundation, and she is an Affiliate Artist at The Headlands Center for the Arts. Her publishing projects have been stocked at Artbook @ MoMA PS1, Printed Matter, The Hammer Museum Store, and Motto Berlin. She earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she taught in the Art Foundations and Photography & Film Departments. She has attended residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, PLAYA Summer Lake, Hambidge Center, A-Z West, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mildred's Lane, and This Will Take Time.
Katy Burnett, Tales from the Dauerwald
Katy Burnett is a writer and translator living in Oakland. Some of her interests include film, trains, plants, and Central Europe.
March 14, 2019
The Burl Concentrate, Adventists and Armageddon: Dropping into Dogtown Pair-o-dice
The Burl Concentrate is the dialogic research project of the artists and writers Sarah-Dawn Albani and Connie Zheng, which is committed to developing new language for the effects of a changing climate. We see the critical significance of modeling this form of writing now, with a close focus on the material of place, and our project assumes the practice of close looking, developing research as a form of personal and cultural critique, and writing as an essentially collaborative creative pursuit between scholars, sites, histories, and the materials they encounter. Our current project is a collaborative book-length essay in response to the most lethal fire in our state history, the Camp Fire, which tore through Paradise, California, in November 2018. This project is currently slated for publication in 2020 through Wolfman Books and is supported by an Alternative Exposure grant.
Jonah Susskind, Focusing on the Fringe: A Reflection on the Wildland Urban Interface
Jonah Susskind is a lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and a research associate at the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. His research is driven by questions about coastal resilience, post-industrial urban recovery, and the role of live matter within regional metropolitan frameworks. Susskind holds a masters degree in landscape architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he was awarded a Penny White Prize to support his research on industrial urban timber management. He is a contributing author to the book, Designing With Nature Now (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, forthcoming).