Thursday, March 17, 7 pm ET
Free or suggested donation
Register here

Squeaky Wheel is pleased to present this virtual artist talk with our Spring 2022 artist residents, Carlos Castellanos (Rochester, NY) and Zain Alam (Brooklyn, NY). The two artists will be presenting and speaking to their previous and current projects, and engage in a Q&A moderated by curator Ekrem Serdar.

During their residency, Carlos Castellanos will be utilizing the facilities of Squeaky Wheel and our Workspace partner The Foundry to work on Beauty, a machine-microbial system featuring a bio-driven artificial intelligence system. The project remediates contaminated soil ecology while generating audio and visuals of the process in real-time. Zain Alam will be utilizing the space and resonance of Silo City to work on I Am Sitting in a Room, an audio-visual exercise in layering recitations of the azaan (the Islamic call to prayer) to distill them into tonal content.

The event will be available to register and view for 24 hours. SW members will have access to the event for 72 hours.

To find out more about the Workspace Residency, click here.

Biographies of the residents

Carlos Castellanos is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher with a wide array of interests such as cybernetics, ecology, embodiment, phenomenology, artificial intelligence and transdisciplinary collaboration. His work bridges science, technology, education and the arts, developing a network of creative interaction with living systems, the natural environment and emerging technologies. His artworks have been exhibited at local, national and international events such as the International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA), SIGGRAPH & ZERO1 San Jose. Castellanos is Assistant Professor at the School of Interactive Games & Media (IGM), Rochester Institute of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University and an MFA from the CADRE Laboratory for New Media, San Jose State University.

Zain Alam is an artist and musician of Indian-Pakistani origin based in Brooklyn, NY. Described as “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” his recording project Humeysha began during his year working as an oral historian for the 1947 Partition Archive. His work is a project of translation using contemporary pop forms, found sound, and oral history as means of investigating one’s position in an outside tradition or community. Alam’s practice extends his sonic vision into video, performance, and writing. His works are braided together by a passion for the borrowed voice, re/de-contextualization, and bricolage — for how a personal mosaic of sound can empower minority and marginalized to engage in self-creation on their own terms. His essays have been published in Miami Rail, Buzzfeed, and The New Yorker, and Humeysha has been covered by the New York Times, Vice, and Village Voice. His performances have been staged at venues including Public Arts, Webster Hall, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Alam has most recently completed fellowships with Bruce High Quality Foundation, Marble House, and South Asian American Digital Archive.

Workspace Residency is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Thank you to Hostel-Buffalo Niagara for sponsoring this session of the program.