GLITCH/WANT: Conversations From the Palah Light Lab

Friday, June 11, 2021
1–8 pm EST

We warmly invite you to GLITCH/WANT: CONVERSATIONS FROM THE PALAH LIGHT LAB held this Friday, June 11th.

GLITCH/WANT features the exciting work of the Palah Light Lab cohort members in impromptu/informal panels. These panel conversations aim to ask and prompt questions across the diverse materials and projects as lab members’ work GLITCH-ES hegemonic ideologies and demonstrates WANT. While organized for generative dialogue with cohort members, we warmly welcome outside guests as interlocutors and allies to engage with the presentations and join the conversations with us.

As a queer feminist media 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 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. Please see the detailed program and fliers for further information and the framing context of our conversations this Friday.

Registration link
https://tinyurl.com/4ukmtypm

Program and schedule
1 pm EST
Brief welcome
by Margaret Rhee, Cody Mejeur, and Blair Johnson

1–3 pm EST
Panel One
“Queer and Trans Songs, Readers, Memories, and Poetry”
Moderated by Margaret Rhee

3:30–5:30 pm EST
Panel Two
“Personalities, Affect, and Games”
Moderated by Cody Mejeur

6:30–8 pm EST
Panel Three and Final Reception 
“Digital Memories, Mars, and AI Afterlives”
Moderated by Blair Johnson

Azalia Muchransyah
Attention at Tension, 2020, 8 min 52 sec
Tamu, 2018, 14 min 51 sec
Hybrid documentary films

Azalia Muchransyah is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar from Indonesia. She received her Ph.D. in Media Study from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (SUNY) in 2021. Her research interests revolve around the intersections of media study, film study, film production, documentary and its hybrid forms, HIV study, feminist study, and activism, specifically in Indonesia. Her films have been officially selected and screened in international film festivals and academic conferences.

Charlie Best
Video, media, drawing, and fabric mediums, expressing the nonbinary imagination+more

Charlie Best (they/he) is an artist, sometimes teacher, and sometimes sewist still figuring things out. They are from the Western New York region and currently reside in Providence, RI.

Rachid Benharrousse
E-literature, the reader, and the literary possibilities    

Rachid Benharrousse is a doctoral candidate of Cultural Studies at the Mohammed V University of Rabat, a Research Fellow of New Media and Digital Studies at the University at Buffalo, Research Fellow at War, Conflict & Global Migration at Global Research Network, an Early Career Researcher at AMEWS, and a Research Collaborator at the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. He was recently a researcher in the Digital Self-Determination Research Sprint at Berkman Klein Center & Digital Asia Hub, Harvard University. His research interests encompass New Media Studies, Game Studies, Postcolonialism, Cultural Studies, Digital Studies, and Diasporic Literature.

Huan He Poetry

Huan He (he/him/his) is a queer Asian/American writer and gamer based in Los Angeles. He is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His research engages Asian/American studies, media and technology studies, visual culture, digital game studies, and poetics. He also writes poetry that explores race, sexuality, intimacy, and belonging from the perspective of a queer Chinese American raised by the prairies. His critical writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in American Quarterly, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, and Media-N. His poetry is forthcoming in wildness, Alaska Quarterly Review, and DIALOGIST.

Jess Erion Rhubarb Roastery trailer (and maybe a bonus surprise)

Jess Erion (any pronouns) is a writer and game designer with an academic background in literature and anticolonialism. They are a recent alum of the NYU Game Center’s MFA program, and they studied at Harvard during undergrad. Currently, Jess is working as an editor at Red Thread Games while also developing the upcoming indie mobile game Rhubarb Roastery.

Jordan Clapper Twine game and Indigenous games research

Jordan Clapper is a doctoral student in English at Brandeis University. They study Indigenous literature and video games and the queering effects these media have on the narratives they tell and the spaces they inhabit. They are looking to make games from an intersection of queerness and indigeneity as a way to promote Indigenous futurity. They are also studying the complicated ways that Indigenous identities manifest off the reservation.

Joan Nobile
No Lone Wolves, 14 sec 15 min
Short documentary

Joan Nobile, as an emerging artist, has explored feminism, harassment, marginalized representation in media, media literacy & critique, and mental illness through her body of work. Her mediums include video games, glitch art, documentary, audio production, live video production, and video essays. She is pursuing a Master’s Degree in Media Art Production at University at Buffalo. She lives and works in Buffalo, NY with her partner and lots of books.

Sarah Sgro Poetry, introducing future collaborative multimedia project

Sarah Sgro is a PhD Candidate in English at the University at Buffalo and received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Mississippi. She is the author of If the Future is a Fetish (YesYes Books 2019) and has published work in Peach Mag, Cosmonauts Avenue, BOAAT, and other journals. Her research interests include queer theory, the non/human, and digital and electronic waste.

Hanyu Liao
Intro presentation + video

Hanyu Liao is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. Liao received her BA in Information Design, Tsinghua University, China; MFA in Digital+Media, Rhode Island School of Design; and Interdisciplinary MA in Humanities with a concentration in Film and Media Study and a secondary academic area in Art at University at Buffalo. With the bicultural and multi-disciplinary background, her artistic practice is diverse in medium and context, while unmistakably keeping its concept-driven quality.

Evan Moritz Poetry, a live performance of a poem about the Martian Soli Sanus Project

Evan Moritz (he/him) recently received his MA in theatre and performance at University at Buffalo and is an incoming PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Center for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. He is interested in the outer limits of science-fiction and fact with research focused on performance in Martian settlements of the near future. This work explores the relationship between colonization of planetary bodies, historic settler epistemes, the loss of liveness in the communication gaps between planets, global catastrophe on Earth and off, and more broadly, the sad or depressing aspects of the future.

Morgan Sammut
Interactive fiction piece on Twine based on Galatea, sff

Morgan Sammut is an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College, pursuing a degree in English with a minor in Computer Science. Her interests include electronic literature, video games, and hybrid writing. She is working on two projects currently, a Twine piece and a digital reimagining of Frankenstein.