Announcing “GLITCH/WANT: Conversations From the Palah Light Lab”

June 8, 2021
by Cody Mejeur

In our recent Palah Lab cohort meeting, Huan He and Sarah Sgro facilitated a reflective exercise based on W. J. T. Mitchell's What Do Pictures Want, prompting a reconsideration of our primary materials, anthmorphizing them, and imagining what do they want? What does the poem, video game, a film want? In doing so, He and Sgro assisted our research process and archives—digital. tactile, or otherwise—to become dynamic, become alive.

Later on in the meeting, Joan Nobile provided a short performative lecture and tutorial on Glitch Art using the platform Audacity, and glitched the image, the audio platform, and scholarly presentation into a performative space. Charlie Best then provided imaginative provocations on our daily use of conglomerate media platforms, asking us to reimagine media into magical speculative visions through the transimaginary. Together, the prompts, provocation, and collective facilitation best exemplify our hopes of a collective community deeply engaged in queer feminist practices and cross-conversations.

Every cohort meeting is facilitated by different lab members to help highlight diverse approaches, projects, and questions. Drawing from the meeting's provocations, we take up “GLITCH/WANT” as the informal theme of our upcoming showcase which celebrates the members’ work from the Palah Light Lab. As a queer feminist lab based out of the University at Buffalo Media Study Department, the lab hosts an invited annual cohort of graduate students and independent artists and scholars of queer feminist new media arts and digital cultures drawn nationally and internationally. In doing so, we aim to generate artistic, scholarly, and political conversations, community, and collective possibilities for social change inside and outside academic boundaries.

GLITCH/WANT: Conversations from the Palah Light Lab features the exciting work of the cohort lab members organized in impromptu/casual panels which asks questions across the diverse materials and projects. The lab members’ work GLITCH-ES hegemonic structures and ideologies, and demonstrates WANT. While organized for generative dialogue for the cohort members specifically, we offer a warm welcome to outside guests as interlocutors and allies and to engage with the work presented and join the conversations with us.

WHAT DO WE WANT? 

— Palah Light Lab 2021



View the event page for GLITCH/WANT: Conversations From the Palah Light Lab.