Worldline ⃝ Timeline
2019-04-05 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
With filmmaker Bryan Oliver Green in-person, and a live Skype performance by Dana McKnight
Friday, April 5, 7pm
$7 General / $5 Members / Free for ArtsAccess Pass holders
***A limited amount of free tickets for this screening will be set aside for members of the Black and indigenous community. Click here to claim your ticket.***

Squeaky Wheel presents an evening of films and performances that form a constellation of times and spaces outside of colonial thought. The screening features a live science-fiction Skype performance by artist Dana McKnight; Bryan Oliver Green’s Recurrence Plot: The Family Circle (2018), adapted from a short story by Black Quantum Futurism’s Rasheedah Phillips; Amanda Strong’s Mia’ (2015), a supernatural stop-motion film of a young Indigenous female street artist who finds ways to root herself within her ancestry; and concluding with John Akomfrah’s essential 1996 film, The Last Angel of History, which examines the relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, intergalactic travel, and rapidly progressing computer technology. Join us for a special evening traveling through space and time, with visiting filmmaker Bryan Oliver Green in person.
This event is presented as part of the public programming accompanying Black Quantum Futurism: ON THE EDGE OF THE BUSH / A LONG WALK INTO THE UNKNOWN, on view at Squeaky Wheel, Jan 25–April 20, 2019. Special thanks to Vtape and Icarus Films.
Program

Mia’ (Salmon)
Amanda Strong
8 min, digital, sound, 2015
A young Indigenous female street artist named Mia’ walks through the city streets painting scenes rooted in the supernatural history of her people. Lacking cultural resources and familial connection within the city, she paints these images from intuition and blood memory. She has not heard the stories from her Elders lips, but has found her own methods to re-discover them. The alleyways become her sanctuary and secret gallery, and her art comes to life. Mia’ is pulled into her own transformation via the vessel of a salmon. In the struggle to return home, she traverses through polluted waters and skies, witnessing various forms of industrial violence and imprint that have occurred upon the land.
Mia’ is a hybrid documentary using animation and sound as a vehicle to tell the story of transformation and re-connection. Indigenous people in Canada experienced displacement once commercial trade turned into settlement. Today the urban population of Native people now outnumbers those living on-reserve. Many struggle being disconnected from their land, rites, and protocol. This film is not an adaptation or a re-telling of a traditional story but is based in the circular time of, and passage of, oral history. Mia’ challenges the notions and format of conventional documentaries and presents Indigenous oral traditions as truth and not myth or legend. (Description courtesy of Vtape.)

Recurrence Plot: The Family Circle
Bryan Oliver Green, adapted from a short story by Rasheedah Phillips
16 min, digital, sound, 2018
A crystal, memory-storing bracelet transports a young mother back to the day of her own mother’s traumatic death and challenges the notion that time flows in only one direction…
Untitled live skype performance
Dana McKnight
~10 min, 2019

The Last Angel of History
John Akomfrah
45 min, digital, sound, 1996
John Akomfrah, director of Seven Songs of Malcolm X, returns with an engaging and searing examination of the hitherto unexplored relationships between Pan-African culture, science fiction, intergalactic travel, and rapidly progressing computer technology.
This cinematic essay posits science fiction (with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering) as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness.
Akomfrah’s analysis is rooted in an exploration of the cultural works of Pan-African artists, such as funkmaster George Clinton and his Mothership Connection, Sun Ra’s use of extraterrestrial iconography, and the very explicit connection drawn between these issues in the writings of black science fiction authors Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler.
Included are interviews with black cultural figures, from musicians DJ Spooky, Goldie, and Derek May, who discuss the importance of George Clinton to their own music, to George Clinton himself. Astronaut Dr. Bernard A. Harris Jr. describes his experiences as one of the first African-Americans in space, while Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols tells of her campaign for a greater role for African-Americans in NASA. Novelist Ismael Reed and cultural critics Greg Tate and Kodwo Eshun tease out the parallels between black life and science fiction, while Delaney and Butler discuss the motivations behind their choice of the genre to express ideas about the black experience.
In keeping with the futuristic tenor of the film, the interviews are intercut with images of Pan-African life from different periods of history, jumping between time and space from the past to the future to the present, not unlike the mode of many rock videos or surfing the Internet.
Banner image: John Akomfrah, The Last Angel of History,1996. Courtesy of Icarus Films.

Youth Workshop: A Children's Book with LIZN'BOW
2019-03-23 13:30 - 15:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
1:30–3pm
Open to youth ages 7-12
Free to participate.
Click here to register.
Squeaky Wheel invites youth ages 7-12 to participate in A CHILDREN’S BOOK with LIZN’BOW! In this new media youth workshop, the artists and youth will collaborate on a book that expands on ideas of identity, representation, power, and possibility. Participating young creatives will create drawings, portraits, and texts, exploring identity, gender, and feminism. The workshop will conclude with youth participating in a green screen recording/portrait session that will be remixed into the book.
Contact ekrem@squeaky.org with any questions.
This workshop is led by LIZN’BOW (Miami, FL), Squeaky Wheel’s Spring 2019 Workspace Residents. LIZN’BOW is a project in which Liz Ferrer and Bow Tie use media technology, digital tools, and community building exercises as vehicles to visualize, play, and explore different social and creative possibilities. The artists start most of their pieces in a workshop setting. Our workshops focus on providing space for people to form nuanced and expanded ideas of identity, representation, power, and possibility. They usually choose a mainstream cultural format as starting point then deconstruct and experiment from there. LIZN’BOW have worked with The Bass Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Breakthrough Miami, Hands to Help, La Sierra Artist Residency Columbia, Tempest Projects, Cunsthaus, Miami Lighthouse for the Blind, En Residencia at the Koubek Center, Borscht Film Festival, and Mana Contemporary Miami.
Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is supported by generous support by the County of Erie and County Executive Mark Poloncarz, the National Endowment for the Arts , New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, individual members, businesses, and supporters.

Workspace Presentations: Alison Nguyen and LIZN'BOW
2019-03-22 19:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Friday, March 22, 7pm
Free and open to the public
Join us for a night of artist talks by Squeaky Wheel’s Spring 2019 Workspace Residents Alison Nguyen and Liz Ferrer & Bow Tie. Nguyen will speak of her multimedia installation work which draws from home movies, social media, soft pornography, and videos created by religious cults/extremists and explores the porous visual relationships between domestic intimacy, terror and technology. Liz Ferrer and Bow Tie will be speaking on their project LIZN’BOW, often featuring youth and utilizing technology and community building exercises to visualize, play, and explore different social and creative possibilities.
Bios of the artists
Alison Nguyen is a New York-based artist working in video and installation. She received her B.A from Brown University, Providence, RI. Nguyen’s work has been screened at Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, Crossroads presented by SF Cinemateque/SF MoMA, San Diego Underground Film Festival, Microscope Gallery, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Leeds International Film Festival, Unseen Film Festival, L’Alternativa, Marfa Film Festival, San Francisco Art Book Fair at Minnesota Street Projects, Traverse Vidéo, Palace Film Festival, Outpost Artists, and Zumzeig Cine. Her work has been exhibited at Centre Des Arts Actuels Skol, The University of Oklahoma, BOSI Contemporary, and Satellite Art Show, Miami. She has participated in group performances at The Whitney Museum of Art: Dreamlands Expanded, The Parrish Museum, and Mana Contemporary (in collaboration with Optipus). Nguyen has received residencies and fellowships from the International Studio & Curatorial Program, The Institute of Electronic Arts, BRIC, Signal Culture, and Vermont Studio Center. She has been awarded grants from NYSCA and The New York Community Trust.
LIZN’BOW is a project in which Liz Ferrer and Bow Tie use media technology, digital tools, and community building exercises as vehicles to visualize, play, and explore different social and creative possibilities. The artists start most of their pieces in a workshop setting. Our workshops focus on providing space for people to form nuanced and expanded ideas of identity, representation, power, and possibility. They usually choose a mainstream cultural format as starting point then deconstruct and experiment from there. LIZN’BOW have worked with The Bass Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Breakthrough Miami, Hands to Help, La Sierra Artist Residency Columbia, Tempest Projects, Cunsthaus, Miami Lighthouse for the Blind, En Residencia at the Koubek Center, Borscht Film Festival, and Mana Contemporary Miami.

The Conflicted Image with Alison Nguyen
2019-03-20 18:00 - 20:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Wednesday, March 20 th, 6-8pm
$10 Non-Members / $7 Members
Contact kevin@squeaky.org for registration or complete the registration form here. SPACE IS LIMITED!

Join us for an experimental media workshop led by Workspace resident artist Alison Nguyen. The workshop will explore strategies of critique, homage, voyeurism, parody, deconstruction, and fragmentation in works that have appropriated found footage while also teaching participants how to make their own short works using found footage.

A beginners knowledge of video editing is required.

The workshop will be divided equally between screenings, discussion, and practical explorations. Each participant will be given a thumb drive of heterogeneous found footage as a starting point, and they will produce their own investigations through a variety of manipulations and interventions using editing, re-filming, and projection processes.

Space is limited please contact kevin@squeaky.org for registration.

Alison Nguyen’s work explores the ways in which images are produced, disseminated, and consumed within the current media landscape, exposing the socio-political conditions from which they arise. Creating strategies for dissent, she re-articulates mainstream cinematic language in unsettlingly seductive installation, video, and sculptural works.

Alison Nguyen received her B.A. from Brown University. She has presented work at Ann Arbor Film Festival; CROSSROADS by San Francisco Cinematheque and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, among others. She has received residencies and fellowships from The International Studio & Curatorial Program, Institute of Electronic Arts, BRIC, and Signal Culture. In 2018, Nguyen was featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon: Gender + The Non-Binary
2019-03-16 14:00 - 19:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Saturday, March 16, 2–7pm
Free and open to the public
Coffee, refreshments, research, and guidance provided. Email ekrem@squeaky.org for childcare requests.
RSVP Here
Join us for the global do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others campaign teaching people of all gender identities and expressions to edit Wikipedia.
As Art+Feminism enters its sixth year of worldwide activities, they announce an evolution of their project: Gender+ The Non-Binary. This focus breaks apart “the myth that people are only as valuable as their adherence to gendered stereotypes – only as honorable as their ability to fit into one of two categories: assigned girl at birth or assigned boy.”
Come to Squeaky Wheel for a day of learning, and bringing to light histories unknown while impacting the world’s dictionary. Research materials, coffee, and food will be provided. Onsite childcare is available by request for those who RSVP by March 13th.
Supported by Buffalo State University’s Women & Gender Studies Interdisciplinary Minor, UB Departments of Art and the Department of Media Study, and the Wikimedia Foundation.
Image credit: Detail of Wendy Red Star, Ashkaamne (matrilineal inheritance), 2019. This artwork was produced for the 2019 Art+Feminism Call to Action Art Commission.

Love & Sex Show: Play with Me
2019-02-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Friday, February 15, 7pm
General Admission: $10
*Limited Online only* Threesome Special: 3 Tickets for $25
Free with ArtsAccess Pass
Click here to buy your tickets
This event is for ages 18+

Squeaky Wheel’s annual erotica bash, the Love & Sex Show returns, with a special video game edition curated by Toronto-based Dames Making Games (DMG)! Featuring a lusty, critical line-up of independent video games that include dating simulators, coop play-a-longs, and more, DMG representatives Izzie Colpitts-Campbell and Jennie Faber will lead group playthroughs, and highlight works by milkymilkface, Maxwell Lander, Robert Yang, Spooklight games, and other games that explore how we navigate and understand intimacy. Come, play, and flirt!
Dress up in cosplay to enter a costume contest sponsored by Evergreen Health!
Banner image: Pretzel After Dark by milkymilkface

Futurism Now: Limitless Hope through Speculative Fiction
2019-02-09 14:00 - 17:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Futurism Now: Limitless Hope through Speculative Fiction
Black Magnolias x Black Quantum Futurism
Saturday, February 9, 2019, 2–5pm
Free and open to the public

What if your future dreams for society became the dominant narrative for hope in the present? How do we imagine a more liberated future for ourselves? This discussion group and creative workshop led by Black Magnolias will use speculative fiction–Afrofuturism, science fiction and fantasy–as a tool to create new worlds of hope and change. Participants will be engaged in using ideas of limitless technology, fantasy, and science to rewrite the world and walk away with a sci-fi story that replaces negative narratives with possibility and power.
Responding to a newly commissioned essay by Rasheedah Phillips written for the exhibition by Black Quantum Futurism, this three hour workshop will be accompanied by presentations, short films, and free coffee. Pens and writing materials will be provided.
Initiated by Marielle Smith and Richmond Wills, Black Magnolias was created as a creative space to share, build and develop a strong community of writers of color. This transient workshop series responds to a need for space for Black & Brown, Queer and LGBT+ writers of all platforms and extend the invitation to those that belong to this community. This event is open to participants ages 14 and up.
Marielle Smtih is a Buffalo native and mother of two, who enjoys writing and performing poetry, essays, and folklore that are reflective of her life experience and ancestry as a queer Black person. Marielle has been organizing with Just Resisting since 2016, a people of color community organization that focuses on social justice. She believes one of the greatest acts of resistance is finding healing through artistic expression. She currently co- facilitates Black Magnolias, a Black and people of color creative writing workshop with Richie Willis.
Richmond Wills (He/Him) is a poet, storyteller and cultural organizer currently based in Buffalo New York. He co-founded Black Magnolias, an ongoing creative workshop series targeting black/brown inner-city populations. He also coordinated outreach for Words on the Street, an initiative to make literary arts more accessible to disenfranchised communities. From being a social justice activist with Black Love Resist in the Rust, a not for profit grassroots organization currently involved in a lawsuit against the city of Buffalo over illegal checkpoints to being a sexual health advocate and tour de force for youth who identify as LGBT+, Richmond hopes to mobilize and grow with Black & Brown communities to work towards collective solidarity and liberation.
This event is presented as part of the public programming accompanying Black Quantum Futurism: ON THE EDGE OF THE BUSH / A LONG WALK INTO THE UNKNOWN, on view at Squeaky Wheel, Jan 25–April 20, 2019.
Banner image by Richmond Wills.

BLACK QUANTUM FUTURISM
2019-01-25 18:00 - 2019-04-20 17:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
ON THE EDGE OF THE BUSH / A LONG WALK INTO THE UNKNOWN
Opening January 25, 2019, 7–9pm
Conversation between Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother) and Ineil Quaran at 7:30pm
On view through April 20, 2019, Tue–Sat, 12–5pm
Free and open to the public
Click here to download the brochure, featuring Activating Retrocurrences and Reverse Time-Bindings in the Quantum Now(s), a new essay by Rasheedah Phillips.
How can one examine the unknown? How is this unknown shaped by its temporal realities? How does one resist, recover, when facing the erasure of memory? This may involve a reinvestigation and uncovering of hidden histories, and a hacking into future histories where they have already been erased.
Utilizing collage, video, text, and sound installations, this exhibition by Philadelphia-based Black Quantum Futurism (Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother, and Rasheedah Phillips aka The Afrofuturist Affair) draws from quantum physics, speculative fiction, and Black/Afro-diasporan cultural traditions of observing time and space. The works aim to break free into the unknown futures of past selves, and to honor the ritual casualties and philosophies of Black ancestry, culture, and spirit.
Join us at Squeaky Wheel on Friday, January 25th at 7pm for the opening reception of the exhibition and a conversation with Moor Mother at 7:30pm.
Public Programs
February 9, 2–5pm | Futurism Now: Limitless Hope through Speculative Fiction: Discussion and Creative Writing Workshop
April 5, 7pm | Worldline ⃝ Timeline: Screening of John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History, and work by Dana McKnight and Amanda Strong
Bios of the artists and contributors
Black Quantum Futurism is an interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips that weaves quantum physics, afrofuturism, and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, ritual, text, and sound to present innovative works and tools offering practical ways to escape negative temporal loops, oppression vortexes, and the digital matrix. BQF has created a number of community-based projects, performances, experimental music projects, installations, workshops, books, short films, zines, including the award-winning Community Futures Lab. BQF Collective is a 2018 Solitude x ZKM Web Resident, 2017 Center for Emerging Visual Artists Fellow, a 2017 Pew Fellow, 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow, and a 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange. The Collective has presented, exhibited, or performed at Red Bull Arts NY, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, Philadelphia Art Museum Perelman Building, MOMA PS1, Bergen Kunsthall, Le Gaite Lyrique, MOFO Festival, and more. BQF Collective frequently collaborates with other Black Futurists Joy KMT, Irreversible Entanglements, Thomas Stanley, and Metropolarity to produce literature, present workshops, lectures, and performances.
Ineil Quaran is an afro-futurist multidisciplinary artist and ghetto organizer born in Buffalo, NY and raised in the Kenfield/Langfield Projects. Through his fine art and multimedia collages he recreates memories and dreamscapes incorporating themes of self-preservation, Black celebration, imagination, and grief. He developed his skill by blocking-out neighborhood sidewalks with chalk drawings and studying digital tutorials. Institutionally he attended Buffalo Academy of Visual Performing Arts and briefly, Villa Maria College majoring in animation. Growing up Ineil indulged in: Walt Disney animations, climbing trees, the epics of ancient religions and folklore, anime, early 2000’s hip hop and R&B, science fiction adventure, and his gullah/geechee heritage.
In 2014 he co-owned, graphic design business and zine distributor, VENT. Soon after in 2015 he co-founded D.O.P.E. Collective (Dismantling Oppressive Patterns for Empowerment), a Black youth-led anti-oppressive arts organization that aims to strengthen local resources for creative and exploited communities which resists through art forms and arts movements considered: white-washed, extreme, stigmatized, political, and/or experimental.
Ineil Quaran is now developing work for his first solo art show and is continuing to cultivate resources supporting the East Side, melaninated creatives, and all the black and brown *QTs!
Banner image courtesy of Black Quantum Futurism.

POTHOLES / BACHES: An Evening in the Swamp
2018-12-15 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
POTHOLES/BACHES: An Evening in the Swamp
Saturday, December 15, 2018
7–10pm
Free and open to the public
Join us for an interactive program that celebrates the end of the residency and the continuity of the Swamp. We begin with POTHOLES/BACHES, a conversation between Buffalo’s East Side and Puerto Rico’s Panoramic Route that explores the possibilities between collective memory and history through film, karaoke and participatory storytelling. This is followed by reflection, communion, and dancing, as we usher the Swamp’s transition out of the physical space of Squeaky and into the lived experience of the community. – The North is a Lie
pothole: a depression or hollow in a road surface caused by wear or subsidence; a pond in a deep natural underground cavity
bache: pequeño desnivel en el suelo o en el pavimento, producido por la pérdida o hundimiento de la capa superficial;
A disruption in the man-made design, development or progress of something
Disminución o interrupción pasajera en el progreso o desarrollo de algo
A natural, hidden, sacred space
Un lugar natural sagrado, escondido
A reliquary
Un Relicario
there is no such thing / no hay tal cosa
as empty property / como una propiedad vacía
abandoned buildings / un edificio abandonado
or vacant land / o una tierra vacante
drive-by relics / reliquias de paso
that sit in silence / que se sientan en silencio
thunder with noise / son relámpagos
few choose to hear / que pocos decidieron oír
what is built on the land / lo que se construyó
defines how we live / nos define
but it does not own the / pero no es dueño(a)
stories of who we are / de nuestras historias
Through a swamp dream / a través de este sueño de pantano
of present-past / de presente-pasado
we will fill the silence / llenamos el silencio
of what was with the / de lo que fue
sounds of what lives on / con el sonido de lo que es
through conversation / conversando
song and dance / cantando y bailando
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On December 15, The North is a Lie invites our friends, families and community into the Swamp to explore the transcendent possibilities of solidarity and existence within our collective imagination, as we meditate on space, memory, and identity.
We ask that those attending bring something special from a place that’s defined you, but no longer exists in this current space and time. It can be a photograph, an item from a childhood home, a medicine or textile from where you are from, a recipe or heirloom, a memento or relic from an important period of time, a natural element, a sound, a smell, or anything else that feels right to you.
The items will be utilized during to ground the evening over the course of a three-part, interactive program that marks the end of our physical residency at Squeaky Wheel and makes way for new existences outside the gallery’s four walls.
El 15 de diciembre, El Norte es una Mentira invita a nuestra comunidad al Swamp a explorar las posibilidades trascendentes de la solidaridad y la existencia en nuestra imaginación colectiva, mientras meditando acerca del espacio, la memoria y la identidad.
Le pedimos a los visitantes que traigan algún objeto o *algo* de algún lugar que te haya definidio, pero que ya no existe en el espacio y tiempo presente. Puede ser una fotografía, un objeto de una casa de tu juventud o niñez, una medicina o un textil de tu pueblo o ciudad, una receta, una reliquia de algún periodo de tiempo, un elemento natural y org´nico, un sonido, un olor, o lo que crean que es lo correcto para contribuir al espacio.
Los objetos se utilizarán en una intalación a través de nuestro programa interactivo de tres partes que marca el fin de nuestra residencia en Squeaky Wheel y que da paso a nuevos trabajos y existencias fuera de esta galería.
//////////

***Part I.***
The legacies of deindustrialization in Buffalo and Puerto Rico come to life in the sights and sounds of Buffalo’s East Side and Puerto Rico’s Panoramic Route during screenings and installations of La Ruta by Natalia Lasalle-Morillo and Home by Elisa Peebles.
Food, beer, wine and coquito will be provided.
Durante las proyecciones e las instalaciones de La Ruta por Natalia Lasalle-Morillo y Home por Elisa Peebles, los legados de la desindustrialización en Buffalo y Puerto Rico cobran vida por las vistas y los sonidos del barrio East Side de Buffalo y la Ruta Panorámica de Puerto Rico.
Habrá comida, cerveza, vino y coquito.

***Part II.***
The artists and audience reflect on home and histories through karaoke-fueled storytelling. What’s made us, what heals us, what have we left, and what do we carry? Audience participation is requested and strongly encouraged.
Las artistas y el público reflexionan en casa y historias por medio de narración y karaoke. Qué nos formó ? Qué nos cura? Qué hemos dejado y qué llevamos? Se solicita la participación del público

***Part III.***
We take our collective energies and memories to celebrate the Swamp, Buffalo, and all the possibilities of the present, past and future through dance, with sounds curated by DJ Chauncey Tails.
Llevamos nuestras energías colectivas y recuerdos para celebrar el Swamp, Buffalo, y todas las posibilidades del presente, el pasado, y la futura a través bailando, con sonidos curados por DJ Chauncey Tails.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (b. 1991, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico ) is a theatre maker, filmmaker, performer and visual artist. Her work focuses on the convergence of autobiography and re-imagined history in live and permanent artistic mediums.
She received her BFA from the Experimental Theatre Wing at New York University. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Miami Light Project and the Miami Theatre Center in Miami, the Fonderie Darling in Montréal and Lake Studios in Berlin, Germany. Her work has been shown in galleries and venues in Miami, Berlin, Los Angeles, New York and Puerto Rico. She is currently based between Los Angeles, California and Bayamón, Puerto Rico.
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (b. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico) es una directora de teatro , cineasta, performer y artista visual. Su trabajo integra las la autobiografía y la historia re-imaginada en el teatro, performance y video. Recibió su BFA del Experimental Theatre Wing the New York University. Ha sido artista en residencia en el Miami Light Project y Miami Theatre Center en Miami; Fonderie Darling en Montréal y Lake Studios en Berlín, Alemania. Ha presentado su trabajo en galerías en Miami, Berlín, Nueva York, Canadá y Puerto Rico. Actualmente está radicada entre Los Ángeles y Bayamón, Puerto Rico.
Elisa Peebles is a Buffalo artist and activist currently a part of the North is a Lie residency at Squeaky Wheel.
Elisa Peebles es una artista y activista de Buffalo actualmente una parte del Norte es una Mentira residencia a Squeaky Wheel.
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This event is the closing event for The North is a Lie. On view through December 15.

The Big Picture: A Member Community Screening
2018-12-15 14:00 - 15:00 | NY
This event has been POSTPONED!!!!!!!!!
Screening date: December 15, 2018, 4 pm
Join the creative community on Saturday, December 15 at 4 pm for The Big Picture at Squeaky Wheel! Producer Fred Massey Jr. will be talking about his new project Breakin’ Legs, a video series showcasing overlooked music scenes incubating in equally overlooked cities. The first episode focuses on Benny the Butcher from Buffalo, NY. Come check out the project’s progress and, if you yourself are a maker, how you can get your own Big Picture event here at Squeaky Wheel!

The Big Picture is an access program initiative designed to provide local artists a platform to showcase their projects and to receive feedback; to impact and be impacted by the community of makers, viewers, critics & supporters and to grow from the experience. So join us on Saturday, December 15 at 4 pm and become part of The Big Picture!

If you have any questions please contact Mark Longolucco via mark@squeaky.org

Dysfunctional Holiday Party
2018-12-08 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
Squeaky Wheel’s Dysfunctional Holiday Party is back! This time it features holiday sweater karaoke with Central Park Grill’s own DJ J Love!, beer by 12 Gates Brewing Company, photo ops with Surveillance Santa and Elf on a Shelf (brought to you by the legendary Holly Johnson & Brian Milbrand), our famous themed basket raffle (including comedy, comic books & self care survival packages), delicious food (cooked by our wonderful board members), and much more!
Purchase Tickets: $10 | $7 members (email martina@squeaky.org for member discount code)
Funds raised at this event will support the free and low-cost media equipment access, education programs, and art exhibitions that Squeaky Wheel offers to Western New Yorkers every day.

Special thank you to Dysfunctional Holiday beer sponsor:

Additional thanks to Buffalo Barkery, Sasmita Batik, SUSC, Paradise Wine, and more!

Decolonizing Institutions
2018-12-02 14:00 - 16:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Sunday, December 2, 2018
2–4pm
Free and open to the public
Join members of Decolonize this Place, Amin Husain, Amy Weng and Marz Saffore, along with Jodi Lynn Maracle and Caitlin Blue, for an afternoon of discussion on the urgency of decolonization, and exploring strategies, tactics, and art-making in the struggle for freedom and liberation in Buffalo. Moderated by Nitasha Dhillon. This event is presented on the occasion of The North is a Lie, on view through December 15, 2018.

As a historian and researcher, Caitlin Blue is focused on making history accessible to the public. Her interests include the African Diaspora in Early Modern Europe, decolonization, and repatriation of historical artifacts. Studying through the lens of decolonization, Caitlin recognizes that it is an ongoing process because colonization continues to happen today. Caitlin currently works as a Visitor Specialist at the new Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center. In the fall of 2019, she hopes to be at the University at Buffalo pursuing her Master’s degree in History so she can eventually go on to get her PhD. Professionally, Caitlin wants to end up working in a university setting.
Amin Husain has a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science, a J.D. from Indiana University School of Law, and an LL.M. from Columbia Law School. He practiced law for five years before transitioning to art, studying at the School of the International Center of Photography and Whitney Independent Study Program. Nitasha Dhillon has a B.A. in Mathematics from St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and School of International Center of Photography. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Media Study – University of Buffalo in New York. Together, Amin and Nitasha are MTL Collective, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, organizing, and action in its art practice. MTL is a founder of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Direct Action Front for Palestine, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, and most recently MTL+, the collective facilitating Decolonize This Place, an action-oriented movement and decolonial formation around five strands of struggle: Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Free Palestine, Global Wage Worker, and De-Gentrification.
Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, Jodi Lynn Maracle is a Kanien’keha:ka mother, artist, scholar and activist currently pursuing her dreams of building her Kanien’keha language proficiency. She received her MA from the University of Buffalo while completing the first year of a Mohawk immersion program in Buffalo, NY. As an artist, Jodi has shown work throughout Dish with One Spoon territory working primarily in textile and earth based installations invoking Haudenosaunee material forms and language combined with modern forms of making to interrogate multiple experiential realities of specific locations and landscapes. She works as a consultant and presenter with many arts organizations and academic institutions to foster greater understanding of Haudenosaunee philosophies, languages, material culture and contemporary realities. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Buffalo. Of her many accomplishments, she is most proud of hearing her son excitedly speak his Mohawk language each day.
Marz Saffore is an artist, organizer, and educator born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. In 2015, she earned her B.A. in Studio Art and Film & Media Studies from University of Rochester, and she earned her M.F.A. in Studio Art from NYU in 2017. Her multimedia art practice blurs the line between that which is art/culture, political/personal, and private/public through video, performance, and installation. Marz is also a member of MTL+ Collective, a group of artists, writers, and educators who combine research and aesthetics in political action. MTL+ Collective founded and facilitates Decolonize This Place, a collaboration between cultural producers and political organizers across struggles and borders. This Fall, Marz returned to New York University (NYU) for her 4th semester of teaching and her first year as a PhD student in Media, Culture, and Communication.
Amy Weng has a B.A. in Art History and Visual Arts from SUNY Purchase College, and a M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University. While working in early childhood education, she participated in group art exhibitions and performances in Brooklyn and Berlin through Lucky Gallery, now known as De-Construkt Projekts. She has organized with A New World in Our Hearts, Occupy Sandy, Direct Action Front for Palestine, Asians for Black Lives – NYC and Justice for Akai Gurley Family. She is also a member of MTL+ Collective, a f She is also a member of MTL+ Collective, a facilitating group of Decolonize This Place, a decolonial, action-oriented movement that centers Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, wage workers and de-gentrification.
Banner image: Decolonize This Place, Anti-Columbus Day Tour: Decolonize This Museum, digital video, 2016

SHAKEDOWN
2018-12-01 19:00 - 22:00 | NY
Saturday, December 1, 7pm
@ Varsity Theatre (3165 Bailey Ave)
$10 Screening
$20 Screening + After-party benefitting Dreamland
Click here to buy tickets.
As Buffalo’s LGBTQ+ spaces face closings and erasure, Squeaky Wheel presents Leilah Weinraub’s SHAKEDOWN (2017). Documenting a series of Black lesbian dance and strip parties in the 2000s, Weinraub’s film is a tender, hilarious, and utopic portrait of a space and community. Join us at Varsity Theatre for the screening of this vital film with director and Hood by Air co-founder Leilah Weinraub in person, followed by a benefit party for Dreamland at Sweets Lounge featuring a performance by burlesque troupe Femme Noire.
As a director, Weinraub resists operating as a liaison between viewer and subject; she seems more interested in the play between voyeurism and fantasy. Shakedown is neither an experimental art film nor an anthropology of gay, black femme performance in L.A. Rather, Weinraub sought to capture a moment and turn it into cinema. – Cassie da Costa, New Yorker
It’s a dreamy glimpse into a scene subjected to outrageous pressures — from the spectral cop of homophobia and even more from the real cops — that was a wellspring of fun, love, desire and good times regardless. – Hannah Black, Dazed
Leilah Weinraub’s bold, immersive documentary, SHAKEDOWN (2017), both enthralls and makes us question how we think about sex and its presentation on camera. A tribute to Weinraub’s talent, the film takes us into the eye of the spectacle — the dance club floor with dynamic, erotic figures of Black female dancers who strip for women — and then elegantly pulls us back. Weinraub finds a place of distance and subtle re-calibration where nothing is what it at first appears. This is a fitting approach for a film that celebrates a communal physical and symbolic space in which one can create a perfectly fluid, slippery identity to be desired and worshipped for — a state of grace, as we come to understand, that still rarely exists outside subaltern club culture. – Ela Bittencourt, Hyperallergic
SHAKEDOWN presented in collaboration with Dreamland, Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project. Thanks to our sponsors at the Varsity Theatre, and Sweet Lounge.
Banner image: Leilah Weinraub, Shakedown. 2017. Still courtesy Leilah Weinraub.

Symposium | Punctures: Textiles in Digital and Material Time
2018-11-16 19:00 - 2018-11-17 21:00 | Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, 341 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY, 14202, United States
Friday, November 16, 7–9pm | Screening & Performance
Saturday, November 17, 11am–7pm | Artist Presentations + Discussions
@ Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (341 Delaware Ave)
Free and open to the public.
Click here to RSVP (limited seating available. RSVP by 11:59pm on Thursday, November 15.)
Squeaky Wheel presents a convening of artists and scholars from several nations from North America for a convening exploring the interwoven histories of textile arts and media arts from early cinema to the current digital age. Topics include: a participatory media arts project focusing on the lives of Chinese immigrant garment workers; how Lakota hair weaving practices point towards alternative interfaces; and a “biomythography” of Black life through an epic project about a seamstress.
Taking place in the theatre of Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Punctures functions as a public platform that will inform Squeaky Wheel’s large-scale, multi-site exhibition of the same name, opening in late 2019. Using the concept of needlework—sewing, stitching, weaving and other textile practices—as a material and metaphorical underpinning, the symposium and eventual exhibition of Punctures will explore questions regarding gendered labor in domestic, industrial, and artistic fields, along with the material and immaterial threads of 20th and 21st century art and industry.
The symposium opens on the evening of November 16th with a screening of films by Jodie Mack, Laura Huertas Millán, Abraham Ravett, and a multi-media performance by Kite followed by presentations and panel discussions on November 17th. Contributors include: Terri Francis, Kyla Gordon, Kite, Beryl Korot, Chris Lee, Jodi Lynn Maracle, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Stephen Monteiro, Tina Rivers Ryan, Ekrem Serdar, Jasmina Tumbas, Kelly Walters, the WASH Project, and Betty Yu.
Seating is limited and RSVP is required. Click here to RSVP and confirm your attendance.

Schedule
Friday, November 16, 2018
7pm | Digital and Material Time
Films and performance, including Point de Gaze (2012) by Jodie Mack, La Libertad (2018) by Laura Huertas Millán, Tziporah (2007) by Abraham Ravett, and a multi-media performance titled Listener by Kite.
The opening of the symposium features a screening of works meant to ground us in the histories and images around the connections between textiles and media art, while also looking at how textile practices have formed political, material, and epistemological points of departure for media artists.
Point de Gaze
Jodie Mack
5min, 16mm film, silent, 2012
Named after a type of Belgian lace, this spectral study investigates intricate illusion and optical arrest. – Jodie Mack
Tziporah
Abraham Ravett
7min, 16mm film, silent, 2008
Tziporah is the Hebrew word for “bird.” This is another cinematic response to grief and loss. – Abraham Ravett
La Libertad
Laura Huertas Millán
29 mins, HD video, Spanish with English subtitles, 2017
Produced out of Harvard´s Sensory Ethnography Lab, Laura Huertas Millán´s masterful La Libertad follows a group of matriarchal weavers in Mexico, whose backstrap loom – a pre-Hispanic technique preserved for centuries by Indigenous women in Mesoamerica – provides the formal structure for the film´s exploration of handicrafts and their ties to freedom. With echoes of the influential ethnographic work of Chick Strand, La Libertad combines astute observation, testimony, subtle transfers in scale, space and texture, as it weaves its own singular study of labour, creativity, and the mysterious traces that circulate between them. – Andréa Picard
Listener
Kite
Lakota-Sys (L-Sys), 2018
Listener is a science fiction story told through a performance artwork. The story is about a woman wandering alone in the future, receiving transmissions from the Far Place on her Listening devices. During the live performance, Kite uses a hair-braid with sensors to control sound and video. The hair-braid changes a synthesizer, which sends sound to machine learning software, which manipulates the video. This image is a still from the ‘Lakota-System (L-Sys)’ visual interface. The artist asks, “How can Lakota understandings of hair effect the design of technology? What does a Lakota data-visualizing interface look like?” – Kite
Saturday, November 17, 2018
11am | Registration
Coffee and light refreshments.
11:30am | Underpinnings
Ekrem Serdar & Kelly Walters. Moderated by Chris Lee.
The history of media arts, of film and electronic arts, is interwoven with influences, material, sociological, and metaphorical with textile arts. Mirroring the gendered reception of craft in art contexts through the 20th century, the debt of media arts to textiles remains under-acknowledged. How can a focus on textile arts help us think differently about how we practice media arts? In the opening panel, curator Ekrem Serdar will chart the research that’s leading to Squeaky Wheel’s exhibition opening in 2019, while Kelly Walters, the designer of Punctures, will speak of her design and textile practice.
12:30pm | Quilted Americana
Terri Francis & Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Moderated by Kyla Gordon.
Textiles are embodied knowledge: their fabrics and patterns, represent an accumulation of practices through history, and mark their moment. The way we engage with them are not dissimilar to how we engage with home movies: we watch the flickering images of our families, studying the bonds between our generations. The following panel features an artist project that aims to mythologize biography, and a research project that finds the myths in daily life. Dr. Terri Francis will present on her upcoming book Quilted Films: African American Home Movies and Historical Memory, 1924–1975, which reframes personal family films as both art and historical artifact. Tiona Nekkia McClodden will speak about her upcoming work The Seamstress, which forms the second part of her project Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic.
1:30pm | Break
3pm | Weaving an Interface
Kite & Stephen Monteiro. Moderated by Jodi Lynn Maracle.
The influence of textile practices expands into the current day, from how Jacquard looms influenced early computing to the very way our fingers interact with our smartphones. What is often forgotten in how these practices are implemented are the histories embedded within them. Bringing together two guests both based in Montreal, scholar Stephen Monteiro will speak of how textile practices have influenced modern interface designs, while artist Kite will be talking about Listener, performed as part of the symposium the night before.
4pm | Garment Workers
Betty Yu & the WASH Project. Moderated by Jasmina Tumbas.
Any discussion on art has the potential for a romanticization of women’s labor, ignoring the sweatshops and gross exploitation of workers, displacement, and other factors inherent in global capitalism. Artist and activist Betty Yu will present on her interactive installation work The Garment Worker (2014) that focuses on the daily life of a garment worker and the hardships they encounter working in a sweatshop, providing a rare look into garment working conditions that Chinese immigrants face in New York City through the personal story of the artist. Yu is joined by representatives from Buffalo’s The WASH Project, who will present on how their organization establishes an outlet for simple, open & free practice of creativity, play, and human engagement, while serving as a human services hub for the immediate Burmese community & beyond.
5pm | Binding History
Beryl Korot in conversation with Tina Rivers Ryan.
Made thirty years after the Holocaust, Beryl Korot’s haunting Dachau, 1974 owes its rigorous formalism to the visual structure of woven cloth. Documenting tourists visiting Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp, the work aims to grapple with both what is there, and what was. Korot’s life and pioneering practice has been dedicated to finding the material and immaterial threads binding the practice of textiles and media art practice, elucidating how this relationship can bind histories. The artist is joined in this panel by Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan for a conversation on her life and work.

Biographies of the presenters, moderators, and filmmakers

Terri Francis directs the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, Bloomington. She guest edited a close-up on Afrosurrealism in film and video for the 2013 fall issue of Black Camera: A International Film Journal. She published her path breaking study of Jamaican non-theatrical films in “Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit, 1951-1961” in Film History in 2011. Her book Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism, a study of how the entertainer used humor to master her conundrums, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
Kyla Gordon is a scholar and curator. She is the Curatorial Research Assistant at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Arts Centre. She received her MA in Visual Culture from New York University, has studied Modern Art at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, and has BAs in Art History and English from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She has a background in curatorial work, archives, and arts administration. She has worked in galleries and cultural institutions around the world, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Interview Magazine, Hallwalls, 80WSE, Shakespeare and Company, and Re:Voir Film Gallery. Her scholarly interests include textiles, costume studies, film, kitsch, and British history.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD student at Concordia University and Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records.
Beryl Korot is a pioneer of video art. By applying specific structures inherent to loom programming to the programming of multiple channels of video she brought the ancient and modern worlds of technology into conversation. This extended to a body of work on handwoven canvas in an original language based on the grid structure of woven cloth, as well as to works on paper that combine ink, pencil and digitized threads. Two early multiple channel works, Dachau 1974 and Text and Commentary works have been seen at the Whitney Museum (1980,1993, 2000, 2002); the Kitchen, New York, NY (1975); Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, NY (1977); Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977); The Köln and Düsseldorf Kunstvereins (1989 and 1994); the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (1990); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2010); bitforms gallery, New York, NY (2012/2018); the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, England (2013); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2013); Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2014), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2014); Tate Modern, London, England (2014); Center for Media Art (ZKM), Karlruhe Germany (2008/2017); The San Francisco MOMA (2016), and The Museum of Modern Art, NYC (2017/18) amongst others. Two video/music collaborations with Steve Reich, The Cave (1993) and Three Tales (2002) brought video installation art into a theatrical context, and have been performed worldwide since 1993. Korot’s work is in both private and public collections including MoMA, NYC, the Kramlich collection’s New Art Trust shared with the Tate Modern, MoMA NYC and SF MoMA, the Sol LeWitt Collection, and the Thoma Art Foundation.
Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based Buffalo, NY, and Toronto, ON. He is a graduate of OCADU (Toronto) and the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), and has worked for The Walrus Magazine, Metahaven and Bruce Mau Design. He was also the designer and an editorial board member of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy. Clients, primarily in the cultural sector, have included cmagazine, Art Museum, grunt gallery, the Aga Khan Museum, and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, among others. Chris collaborates with designer/developer Seungyong Moon, under the banner of MuyongJiyong 무용지용 (無用之用). Chris’ research explores graphic design’s entanglement with power, standards, and legitimacy. He has contributed projects and writing to the Decolonising Design, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, The Copyist, Graphic, Volume, and Counter Signals. Chris is the guest-co-editor of the “Graphic Design” issue of cmagazine along with Ali Shamas Qadeer. He has facilitated workshops in the US, Canada, Scotland, the Netherlands and Croatia, and has been invited to lecture at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, ArtEZ, The Sandberg Instituut, The Design Academy Eindhoven, CalArts and OCADU. Chris is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY, and a member of the programming committee of Gendai Gallery and Squeaky Wheel. He is a graphic design research fellow of Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (2017/18), participant of the fifth edition of the Summer University of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Cairolexicon.com
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life. Mack’s 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Projections at the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. She is an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College and a 2018/19 Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University.
Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, Jodi Lynn Maracle is a Kanien’keha:ka mother, artist, scholar and activist currently pursuing her dreams of building her Kanien’keha language proficiency. She received her MA from the University of Buffalo while completing the first year of a Mohawk immersion program in Buffalo, NY. As an artist, Jodi has shown work throughout Dish with One Spoon territory working primarily in textile and earth based installations invoking Haudenosaunee material forms and language combined with modern forms of making to interrogate multiple experiential realities of specific locations and landscapes. She works as a consultant and presenter with many arts organizations and academic institutions to foster greater understanding of Haudenosaunee philosophies, languages, material culture and contemporary realities. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Buffalo. Of her many accomplishments, she is most proud of hearing her son excitedly speak his Mohawk language each day.
Laura Huertas Millán is a French-Colombian artist and filmmaker. Entwining ethnography, ecology, fiction and historical enquiries, her moving image work engages with strategies of survival, resistance and resilience against violence. Building complex visual and sonic worlds infused by the real, her cinematographic practice circulates between contemporary art venues and international film festivals. Part of the official selections of the Viennale (Vienna), the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, La Habana or Cinéma du Réel (Paris), her films have earned prizes in Locarno, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. She has participated in screenings and exhibitions in institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris), Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Les Laboratories d ́Aubervilliers, Western Front (Vancouver) and Instituto de Visión (Bogotá). Retrospectives of her films have been held at the ICA (London), Mar del Plata Film festival, Toronto ́s Cinematheque (TIFF Lightbox) and the Flaherty Seminar. Her works are part of public and private collections as the Kadist Foundation (Paris-San Francisco), the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami). She is currently preparing her first feature film, after completing in 2017 a PhD between PSL University (SACRe program) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab (Harvard University).
Stephen Monteiro is the author of The Fabric of Interface: Mobile Media, Design, and Gender (MIT Press, 2017) and editor of The Screen Media Reader (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is an affiliate assistant professor of communication studies at Concordia University, Montreal.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden, an artist and curator, has looked critically at intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary through an interdisciplinary practice that includes documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installation. McClodden is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them the 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and the 2016 Pew Fellowship in the Arts in Philadelphia. She has exhibited her work at many venues internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, MOCA LA, MCA Chicago, MOMA PS1, the Kansai Queer Film Festival in Osaka and Kyoto, Japan, and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
Abraham Ravett holds a B.F.A and M.F.A in filmmaking and photography and has been an independent filmmaker for the past thirty-five years. He was born in Polandand raised in Israel and the U.S.A. Mr. Ravett received grants for his work from the Massachusetts Cultural Council; National Foundation for Jewish Culture: Fund for Documentary Filmmaking; National Endowment for the Arts; The Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities; The Japan Foundation; The LEF Foundation; The Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation; and a 1994 filmmaking fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His films have been screened internationally, including at several one-person shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His work has won “Top Prize” at the Viennale 2000, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Onion City Film/Video Festival. In 1999, he collaborated with dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones on his solo performance “The Breathing Show.” A retrospective of Ravett’s films was shown at the 2014 Festival Film Dokumenter Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is Assistant Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. As a curator, scholar, and critic, her work focuses on the histories of art and technology from the 1960s to the present. Her writing has been commissioned by museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Albright-Knox, and regularly appears in Artforum.
Ekrem Serdar is the curator at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center, where he is responsible for the organization’s exhibitions, public programming, and artist residencies. He is the recipient of a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2017). His writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Millennium Film Journal, 5harfliler, among other publications.
Jasmina Tumbas (PhD, Art History, Duke University) is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History & Performance Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. Her teaching and research fields focus on modern and contemporary art history and theory, histories and theories of performance, body and conceptual art, art and activism, feminist art, critical theory, and contemporary East European art history. She is currently finishing her first book, The Erotics of Dictatorship: A Visual Exegesis of Gender & Sexuality under Yugoslav Socialism, and her second, Media Violence, Ethnic Roma, and Gender: Feminist Resistance Beyond Citizenship, and serves as co-editor for the anthology Radical Art in Transition: Counter-Culture, Protest, Resistance and Contemporary Art in the Balkans since 1968. Her research has appeared in ArtMargins, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, ASAP Journal, and Art and Documentation/Sztuka i Dokumentacja, and in the anthologies Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance and Performing Arts in the Second Public Sphere.
Kelly Walters is a designer and educator whose work investigates the intersection of black cultural vernacular in mainstream media. She feels her role as a designer is to understand how socio-political frameworks and shifting technology influence the sounds, symbols and style of black people. She has worked as a designer for SFMOMA, the RISD Museum, Alexander Isley, and Blue State Digital. She has produced websites, digital social campaigns, books and other printed matter for clients such as: Google Fiber, Google for Entrepreneurs, FairTrade USA, Hillel International, and PayPal. From 2015–2016, she was awarded an Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design (AICAD) Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship in the Graphic Design program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Kelly received dual degrees at the University of Connecticut, earning a BFA in Communication Design and a BA in Communication Sciences. She completed her MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. Kelly was most recently an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Connecticut.
Using the arts as a common denominator, the WASH Project establishes an outlet for the simple, open & free practice of creativity, play, and human engagement. WASH also serves as a human services hub for the immediate Burmese community & beyond: a neighborhood access point for information regarding a wide range of community services & cultural opportunities. From this effort, we continue to cultivate the development of a small, yet dynamic center of local community life, a place that people of all ages & walks of life come to; a place, that by the way it is designed & the way it is operated, strengthens its neighborhood, collaboratively, via a model of creativity & open engagement.
Betty Yu is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, educator and activist born and raised in NYC to Chinese immigrant parents. Ms. Yu’s documentary “Resilience” about her garment worker mother fighting sweatshop conditions, screened at national and international film festivals including the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Yu’s multi-media installation, The Garment Worker was featured at Tribeca Film Institute’s Interactive. She worked with housing activists and artists to co-create Monument to Anti-Displacement Organizing that was featured in the Agitprop! show at Brooklyn Museum. Betty was a 2012 Public Artist-in-Resident and received the 2016 SOAPBOX Artist Award from Laundromat Project. In 2017, Ms. Yu has been awarded several artist residences from institutions such as the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Skidmore College’s Documentary Studies Collaborative and SPACE at Ryder Farm. In 2015, Betty co-founded Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing. Betty won the 2017 Aronson Journalism for Social Justice Documentary Award for her film, Three Tours. Ms. Yu is currently 2017-18 fellow of the Intercultural Leadership Institute. Betty is also an adjunct assistant professor teaching new media, film theory, art and video production at various colleges in NYC which include The New School, John Jay College, Marymount Manhattan College and Hunter College. In addition Betty Yu sits on the boards of Third World Newsreel and Working Films, two progressive documentary film organizations. Ms. Yu holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College.

Punctures logo design by Kelly Walters.

Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon!
2018-11-11 12:00 - 17:00 | NY
***Please note the new date!***
Sunday, November 11, 12–5pm
@ Frank E. Merriweather Jr. Library
Free and open to the public
Click here to RSVP.
For the 5th Art+Feminism Wikipedia campaign, we will host an Edit-a-Thon to improve coverage of cis and trans feminist artists on Wikipedia. Art+Feminism teaches all genders to edit Wikipedia. The Fall event will take place at Frank E. Merriweather Jr. Library. Childcare and refreshments provided. Instructions and exercises will be released periodically preceding the Edit-a-thon starting in early October; RSVP now!
Presented in partnership with Just Buffalo Literary Center & The Public, and supported by Buffalo State University’s Women & Gender Studies Interdisciplinary Minor, UB Departments of Art and the Department of Media Study, and funds from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Buffalo International Film Festival
2018-10-06 11:00 - 17:00 | NY
Saturday, October 6, 10am–7pm
Purchase Tickets Here
Buffalo International Film Festival returns to Squeaky Wheel for its twelfth year with a special showcase of films by students in our youth education initiatives. BIFF presents a juried selection of films with regional and global perspectives.
10am: BIFF Shorts: Youth by Squeaky Wheel (1hr) FREE!
11am: Panel: Make Your Movie in WNY (1hr)
12:15pm: Panel: Women in Film (1hr)
1:30pm: Panel: What Kind of Producer are You?(1hr)
3pm: Geometry of Desire (1:31hr), with The Girls Were Doing Nothing Wrong (17min)
5:15pm Playing Frisby in North Korea (1:20hr) with, The Pledge (7min), Black (4min), and Unforgivable (30min)
More information on the films can be found at the festival website

Super/Quick! Presentations by UB Grads
2018-09-26 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Wednesday, September 26, 7pm
Free and open to the public
Welcome back Super/Quick!, organized by University at Buffalo grad students in the Department of Art and Department of Media Study. Presenters speak for 5-7 minutes on their current research in a variety of arts-related topics. Join us for stimulating talks with local scholars.
Speakers include:
Lee Cannarozzo
Martin Chittum
Patrick Facemire
Brandon Giessmann
Bob Jones
Benjamin Kersten
James Pollard
Darya Warner
Image: Van Tran Nguyen, Super/Quick presenter 2016.

The North is a Lie
2018-09-14 19:00 - 2018-12-08 21:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Opening Friday, September 14, 7–9pm
On view through December 8, 2018, Tue–Sat, 12–5pm
Free and open to the public
This exhibition is accompanied by public programs featuring guests announced throughout the season. Follow Squeaky Wheel on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, @squeakybuffalo for updates!

The North is a Lie is a claiming of space against the myth of a tolerant and more equitable “North.” Thinking about the futures and histories of communities who have suffered most at the hands of this myth, The North is a Lie present a series of performances, installations, screenings, and potlucks, with the participation of guest artists. This collaboration between Nitasha Dhillon, Rhys Hall, and Elisa Peebles will utilize Squeaky Wheel to gather and provoke questions towards liberation and the possibility of a decolonial existence. This exhibition is accompanied by a brochure featuring newly commissioned writing by Dana McKnight.

—
The North is a Lie. We know it because we live it. Your grandmother knew it. Latin American refugees separated from their children know it. Marooners running away from plantations into swamps and mountains knew it.
There is no North. If you know, you know.
If there were, racism would stop at the Mason Dixon line.
If there were, fascism would not be on the rise again.
If there were, there’d be no:
Stolen land
Police lynchings
Gentrification
Forced eviction
Red lining
Deportations
The North is a Lie is not a conclusion, it is a starting point. During the course of this three month residency, we seek to overcome the growing desire to escape and begin answering the questions of “where to?” and “what’s next?” by examining the truth of what’s been, rethinking the possibilities of what can be, and empowering the imaginary. The North is a lie celebrates the histories, present and futures of people and communities that have suffered the most at the hands of the Northern myth. It brings these narratives together in hopes of building structures that are imagined and tangible, for the nourishment and survival of these communities. We begin by acknowledging the land we stand on is stolen land, this was and is haudenosaunee territory. We base the residency at Squeaky Wheel, and open the space as a commons for the movements of Buffalo. We will create relations with each other through a series of events that include but are not limited to performances, parties, potlucks, screenings, conversations, actions and experiences. The attempt is to create conversations that give us better questions to challenge the Northern myth, and to create a compass that directs us towards better answers for liberation and decolonial existences. – Nitasha Dhillon, Rhys Hall, Elisa Peebles

About the Artists and Contributors
Nitasha Dhillon has a B.A. in Mathematics from St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and School of International Center of Photography. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Media Study – University of Buffalo in New York. Nitasha’s practice joins research, aesthetics, organizing, and action as part of MTL Collective with Amin Husain. As MTL, they are co-founders of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy magazine, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, the direct action arm of Gulf Labor Artists Coalition, Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee, Direct Action Front for Palestine, Decolonial Cultural Front, and most recently, Decolonize This Place, a movement space and formations in New York City that combine cultural events with organizing, art, and action around five strands of struggle: Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Free Palestine, Global Wage Worker, and De-Gentrification.
Rhys Hall is an aspiring medicine man from various parts of Bailey and East Ferry, in Buffalo NY. Between making ends meet, he raps, sings and makes films. This has been a pattern for 18 years now, which is probably why he doesn’t have kids. He tried to escape Buffalo for the military, but The Universe wasn’t having it. Fortunately, the B.A. he received in African American studies from SUNY at Buffalo helped him survive as an Assistant Dean in Queens and an emcee and singer with Grand Phee as the Hip Hop duo, We Stole The Show. 5 years and 5 grams of mushrooms later, he returned to Buffalo and helped start the artist collective, The United Melanin Society, with several other accomplished vocal and visual artists. An avid meditator, you might see Mr. Hall walking at a snails pace through Delaware Park, or finishing his Masters degree in Film and Media Studies at the University at Buffalo.
Dana McKnight is a multidisciplinary Black/Queer artist and writer. She is the founder of Dreamland Arts in Buffalo, NY. She lives in Austin, TX.
Elisa Peebles is an artist, activist and producer originally from the East Side of Buffalo, NY. After receiving a B.S. in Media, Culture and Communication Studies from New York University, Elisa has spent the past several years living, working and creating in Buffalo and New York City. Her most recent exhibition, Bodies of Light: Exit Strategy, at the gallery pop up Decolonize This Place, brought artists of color from both cities together around the themes of resistance and perseverance. Prior to this, Elisa created and co-directed the Buffalo Myth Project, and was a producer on the Sundance and SXSW – selected short Actresses, as well as several other independent and commercial short films. A hip-hop performer, Elisa was selected to perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2015 Everybooty Pride Festival. She uses music, film, audio and other methods of storytelling to contemplate issues around collective memory, urban development, social justice, and the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. Currently, Elisa is a producer of the satirical web-series Dark Justice.

Squeaky Wheel's Excellent Adventure
2018-09-08 09:00 - 20:00 | NY
Squeaky Wheel’s Excellent Adventure is a family-friendly social media scavenger hunt taking place city-wide on September 8th, 2018. This exciting day-long event offers our community a chance to participate in a fun and media infused social activity and win prizes! Encouraging media literacy and cultural awareness, participants will use social media to practice their creativity and interact with Buffalo’s many treasures.
Funds raised at this event will support the free and low-cost media equipment access, education programs, and art exhibitions that Squeaky Wheel offers to Western New Yorker’s of all ages and backgrounds every day.
Fact Sheet: Squeaky Wheel’s Excellent Adventure
What: City-wide social media scavenger hunt
When: Saturday September 8, 2018
8-11am: Team sign-in at Squeaky Wheel
9am: Head Start @ Squeaky Wheel; List of tasks unveiled
9am–5:30pm: Embark on your adventure!
5:30-8pm: Photo Finish Event @ EXPO Market
6:30pm: Winners announced!
Where: Head Start at Squeaky Wheel, 617 Main St. #107, Buffalo, NY 14203; Photo Finish at Expo Market, 617 Main St. #200, Buffalo, NY 14203
Who: Individuals and teams of up to 4
Prizes: Weekend extravaganza package including access to unique activities in the city (to be announced!)
Why: To enjoy a fun-filled day of adventure and raise funds to support media literacy, arts, and education in Western NY
How: Assemble your team and sign up by clicking the PURCHASE TICKET button on this page.

Register by Friday September 7th and save!
Purchase your tickets by September 7th at 5pm for $25/person; $25/person for groups up to 3; and $20/person for groups of 4. After that, all ticket prices (including tickets for teams of 4) are raised to $30/person.

How the Excellent Adventure works:
Traveling by foot, bicycle, vehicle or assistive device, participants will race to document the tasks in photos or videos, and upload them with the hashtag #squeakyadventure. Thanks to Reddy Bikeshare, participants will also have access to 50% off bicycle share passes for the day. For those new to Instagram or are in need of technical support, a tech-help desk will be available at Squeaky Wheel for the duration of the event.
Excellent Adventure tasks will be revealed in-person at Squeaky Wheel (617 Main St. #107) at 9 a.m. at the “Head Start” event, where coffee and energizing breakfast snacks will be on hand. Rack up bonus points with special Head Start task opportunities. Late risers can still play by picking up the task list until 11:00 a.m.
A panel of judges will review the uploaded imagery in real-time, assigning points for completion of tasks, with bonus points for creativity. Teams who make it to the finish line by 5:30 p.m. will collect bonus points at the spectacular “Photo Finish” after-party at the Expo Market (617 Main Street, #200), where they can view all teams’ media submissions, enjoy delicious platters (courtesy of Expo Market) and find out who the winners are!
The Grand Prize winning team will be announced with additional prizes awarded to those completing tasks with humor, innovation, media savvy, and other special categories. Top prizes include a weekend entertainment extravaganza package that contains accommodations, special event tickets, meals and access to fun and unique activities in the city that can be used individually, in pairs, or groups of four!
Be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @SqueakyBuffalo for updates.

Prize Packages
Grand Prize Package – Weekend Adventure on the Town Value $1000 +
1 Night at Hotel Henry (2 double beds in room)
1 Night at The Mansion on Delaware (2 double beds in room)
$150 gift card for 100 Acres at Hotel Henry
4 tickets to the Kavinoky Theater
Buffalo Audubon Owl Prowl for 10 at Buffalo Audubon Preserve
(or Owl Outreach Program for 20 people at location of choice)
1 Year Membership to Reddy Bike Share
4 tickets to Yelp Elite Events
2nd Prize – Not Your Ordinary Weekend – $500 Value
$100 Dinosaur BBQ
4 tickets to Torn Space Theater
1 Hello Buffalo Urban Hikes and Bikes Gift Certificate for Private Hike for 8 People for a hike and/or bike tour of choice
3rd Prize – Cozy Weekend – $200
$50 gift card to Daddio’s Pizza
4 Tickets to Torn Space Theater
$50 Delta Sonic
Spa Gift Card
Team Spirit Prize
4 tickets to Darien Lake
Most Creative
$100 gift card to Pineapple Company
$40 gift card + 4 x Memberships at El Museo
Merchandise + Membership to Western New York Book Arts Center
Media Savvy
4 $50 gift cards at B&H Photo Video
4 Squeaky Wheel Memberships

Sponsors and Support
Funds raised at this event will support Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center’s programs in access, education, and exhibition. The event could not be possible without the generous support of our event sponsors: Catholic Health, Eleven Twenty Projects, Rigidized Metals, Buffalo Spree, The Challenger, Allen Street Consulting, Hodgson Russ, Larkin Square, Putman Insurance Agency, Lumiflux Media, Buffalo Copy, Expo Market, Reddy Bikeshare, Inspired Buffalo, and John McKendry. A big thank you to our prize sponsors to date: Hotel Henry, 100 Acres at Hotel Henry, The Mansion on Delaware, B&H Photo Video, Buffalo Audubon Society, Pine Apple Company, Reddy Bikeshare, Hello Buffalo! Urban Hikes & Bikes, Torn Space Theater, Kavinoky Theater, Daddio’s Pizza, El Museo, Western New York Book Art Center, Yelp Buffalo, and others!

Premiere Screening: A Long, Long Now
2018-08-30 13:00 - 14:00 | Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo, 14222, United States
Brought to you by: Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center, Buffalo Center for Art & Technology
Powered by AT&T

Join us at The Burchfield Penney on Thursday, August 30th at 1 pm for the premiere screening of our Buffalo Youth Media Institute’s film, A Long, Long Now. The film will be presented with the students and a Q&A with the young filmmakers after the screening.
Description

In this hybrid documentary/narrative film, students of the Buffalo Youth Media Institute explored different possibilities of future and technology and how they relate to current uses and equity of those technologies. The film is a combination of interviews with future thinking artists and elected officials mixed with fantastical skits offering up machines that can cure social, economic, or cultural ills of our communities. The film’s premise is that this project exploring hopes and fears about the future of technology is found 300 years in the future by the people who exist then. The film then is put back together by the people of that time and presented to the best of their understanding of our culture is at that time. This film is part fiction and part truth-seeking meant to leave us all thinking of what our role is when it comes to the future and equitable technologies that can benefit us all.

-Zaire Goodman
2nd year Buffalo Youth Media Institute Student

Interviews with

American Artist: Interdisciplinary Artist whose work extends dialectics formalized in Black radicalism and organized labor into a context of networked virtual life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing to reveal historical dynamics embedded within contemporary culture and technology.
Stacey Robinson: Designer, Illustrator and Professor of Art at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His art speculates futures where Black people are free from colonial influences. Along with John Jennings, he is part of the collaborative duo ‘Black Kirby,’ which explores Afro Speculative existence via the aesthetic of Jack Kirby. Robinson’s work is rooted in traditional comic illustration and is calm and beautiful. Subtly expressing a desire for an equitable future for bodies and identities of color.
Devin Hentz: is a researcher and writer based in Dakar, Senegal. She recently participated in the second session of the RAW Academie, directed by Chimurenga, at RAW Material Company before working there as a librarian and researcher. She is the founder of the B/Look Club which meets once per month to activate the archive of RAW Base (RAW’s Library). Her writings have been published in LESS Magazine and the upcoming issue of Something We Africans Got. Her areas of interests include, Afro/African futures, development narratives in Africa, dress practices, and radical pedagogy.
Phillip Stearns: is the creator of the Year of the Glitch, a yearlong glitch-a-day project, and Glitch Textiles, a project exploring the intersection of digital art and textile design. Stearns’ work is concerned with our relationships with technologies. Through deconstruction and reconfiguration the technologically mediated environment is approached as an assemblage, where human activity plays a role of equivalent importance to environmental agency. From this perspective, the development and application of our technologies, machines and tools reveals our perceptual biases, desires, dreams and fears—both conscious and unconscious. Cultural values and meaning, then, can be viewed as derivative, shaped by the particular conditions facilitating the distribution of agency through cascading exchanges of mediated interactions.

Crystal People-Stokes: Assemblymember Crystal D. Peoples-Stokes has faithfully served New York State’s 141st Assembly district since 2003. An advocate with clear and principled service, she has always put people and policy before politics. She was appointed as Chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Governmental Operations in 2015. This committee maintains oversight on ethics reform and FOIL requests, state police, homeland security, disaster and emergency preparedness, MWBE, crime victims, human rights, and military and naval affairs. In June 2017, she was voted by her colleagues to be Chair of the New York State Legislative Women’s Caucus which is a bi-partisan and bi-cameral group.

Sean Ryan: Assemblymember Sean Ryan serves the people of the 149th District in Buffalo, NY. Sean’s broad legal experience includes work for Neighborhood Legal Services, private law practice collaboration with the Learning Disabilities Association of WNY, concentrating on the rights of disabled students, and the Legal Aide Bureau of Buffalo. His legal career highlights include a record award for a victim of housing discrimination, a successful challenge to a school district’s denial of special education services to children enrolled in parochial schools, and an action to compel enforcement of Buffalo’s Living Wage Ordinance.

This event is free and open to the public

Silo City: The Average Attendee Live in Person
2018-08-24 20:00 - 21:00 | Silo City, 85 Silo City Row, Buffalo, NY, 14203, United States
Friday, August 24, 2018
@ Marine A, Silo City (Silo City Row, Buffalo, NY 14203)
8pm
Free and open to the public
Squeaky Wheel returns to the legendary halls of Silo City for the premiere of The Average Attendee Live in Person! An absurdist take on housing market educationals, The Average Attendee Live in Person features projections, live and virtual performance, costumes, resounding in Silo City’s famous space. Interactive art works in Silo A and a structured, improvised performance converge for a transformational evening on how anyone, even you, could be a master the real estate market. Join us at Silo City for this exciting 40 minute performance by Avye Alexandres, our Summer 2018 Silo City Workspace Resident!
Avye Alexandres was born in Athens, Greece, and moved to the United States at the age of six. Her multidisciplinary art practice, which investigates the psychosocial ramifications of structures and space, stems from her background in photography and theatre. Evolving from site-based performances her work now encompasses immersive sculpture, locative media, experimental digital narratives, conceptual works, photography and video, as well as participatory experiences and installations. In 2015, she received her MFA in Art and Emerging Practices from the University at Buffalo, and has exhibited at venues such as the Burchfield Penney Art Center, The Soap Factory, IFP-MN Center for Media Arts, and the Weismann Art Museum.
About the program
Workspace Residency is a unique artist residency which supports local, regional and national media artists and researchers who are working on projects in film, video, audio, interactive media and emerging technologies in any stage of production. Founded in 2016 by Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center in Buffalo, New York, in collaboration with local partners Buffalo Game Space, The Foundry, and Silo City, the residency provides support through equipment, facilities, and technical support for artists experimenting across a range of old and new technologies, such as video, sound, digital platforms, interactivity, virtual reality, and 3D printing. Community outreach and public engagement components include presentation and education activities.

DIY Chrome Extensions for Artists with Emily Martinez
2018-08-15 18:00 - 20:00 | 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
How to Tactically Misuse Your Web Browser: DIY Chrome Extensions and Bookmarklets for Artists with Emily Martinez.
The focus of this two-hour workshop by artist and Workspace resident Emily Martinez will be on using the web browser to make internet art and other strange, un-user-friendly, or subversive things. Participants will see and test examples of Chrome extensions and Bookmarklets made by artists. They will be guided through the process of creating their own extensions and publishing them to the Chrome Web Store. Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript is best, though not required. Templates with all of the Javascript code necessary to make at least two extensions will be provided. Recommended age: Adults, 18+
Emily Martinez is a new media artist, front-end developer, digital strategist, educator, and serial collaborator. She believes in the tactical misuse of technology, and makes artworks that take on the sharing economy, digital labor struggles, algorithmic bias, surveillance capitalism, crypto colonialism, tech bros, and tech culture at large. Emily’s art and research has been published in Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), Entreprecariat (Institute of Network Cultures), Temporary Art Review, and Filmmaker Magazine. She has exhibited at The Wrong Biennale, Transmediale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, MoMA PS1, V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, WRO Media Art Biennale, and The Luminary.
About the program
Workspace Residency is a unique artist residency which supports local, regional and national media artists and researchers who are working on projects in film, video, audio, interactive media and emerging technologies in any stage of production. Founded in 2016 by Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center in Buffalo, New York, in collaboration with local partners Buffalo Game Space, The Foundry, and Silo City, the residency provides support through equipment, facilities, and technical support for artists experimenting across a range of old and new technologies, such as video, sound, digital platforms, interactivity, virtual reality, and 3D printing. Community outreach and public engagement components include presentation and education activities.
Workspace Residency is made possible with generous support from the County of Erie and County Executive Mark Poloncarz, the National Endowment for the Arts, the The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, individual members, businesses, and supporters.

SILENT/SOUND: Variations on Napoleon
2018-08-10 16:30 - 17:30 | Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo, 14222, United States
Friday, August 10 , 2018
8:30pm
@ Front Yard at the Burchfield Penney Art Center
Free and open to the general public
Join us at the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s Front Yard for the 2017 edition of SILENT/SOUND. Artist and filmmaker Brian Milbrand will be live remixing footage from films throughout history featuring the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, including Abel Gance’s 1927 epic, famous for its climactic three screen coda. Set to a live performance of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Sinfonia Eroica (Heroic Symphony aka Symphony No. 3 in E♭ major), originally dedicated to Napoleon, this viscerally arresting evening of sight and sound explores what it is about grandiose, even dictatorial figures that continues to attract humanities love and admiration. Bring your blankets and lawn chairs, and prepare for the return of Squeaky Wheel and the Burchfield Penney’s signature summer event.

Workspace Residency: Public Presentations
2018-08-08 19:00 - 20:30 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
6:30pm door | 7pm Start
Free and open to the public
Join us for an evening with our Summer 2018 Workspace residents, Avye Alexandres (Buffalo, NY), Devin Hentz (Dakar, Senegal), and Emily Martinez (Glendale, CA), at the first public event as part of their residency. The artists and researchers will be delivering ~20 minute presentations on their work and projects. This free event is an excellent opportunity to get to know the residents and their projects as they begin their three-week time at Squeaky Wheel!
Research resident Devin Hentz will be investigating the linguistic implications of the vocabulary that develops around second-hand clothing in African countries. She will also design and construct new textiles that play or refer to these local names and their literal meanings / translations through the use of 3D models in Blender. Artist Resident Emily Martinez will be working on a series of videos for an escape room that builds towards a live-action multimedia escape room game Eternal Boy Playground. The game explores cultural tropes and trends that spring up around cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as they relate to the utopian ideals of a group of self-proclaimed “Puertopians” who are flocking to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Finally, Silo City Resident Avye Alexandres will be utilizing Buffalo’s most well-known public landmark, Silo City, to present an absurdist performance sparked by the manipulative tactics and rhetoric used in housing market investment education workshops.
Bios of the residents
Avye Alexandres was born in Athens, Greece, and moved to the United States at the age of six. Her multidisciplinary art practice, which investigates the psychosocial ramifications of structures and space, stems from her background in photography and theatre. Evolving from site-based performances her work now encompasses immersive sculpture, locative media, experimental digital narratives, conceptual works, photography and video, as well as participatory experiences and installations. In 2015, she received her MFA in Art and Emerging Practices from the University at Buffalo, and has exhibited at venues such as the Burchfield Penney Art Center, The Soap Factory, IFP-MN Center for Media Arts, and the Weismann Art Museum.
Devin Hentz is a researcher and writer based in Dakar, Senegal. She recently participated in the second session of the RAW Academie, directed by Chimurenga, at RAW Material Company before working there as a librarian and researcher. She is the founder of the B/Look Club which meets once per month to activate the archive of RAW Base (RAW’s Library). Her writings have been published in LESS Magazine and the upcoming issue of Something We Africans Got. Her areas of interests include, Afro/African futures, development narratives in Africa, dress practices, and radical pedagogy.
Emily Martinez is a new media artist, front-end developer, digital strategist, educator, and serial collaborator. She believes in the tactical misuse of technology, and makes artworks that take on the sharing economy, digital labor struggles, algorithmic bias, surveillance capitalism, crypto colonialism, tech bros, and tech culture at large. Emily’s art and research has been published in Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), Entreprecariat (Institute of Network Cultures), Temporary Art Review, and Filmmaker Magazine. She has exhibited at The Wrong Biennale, Transmediale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, MoMA PS1, V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, WRO Media Art Biennale, and The Luminary.
About the program
Workspace Residency is a unique artist residency which supports local, regional and national media artists and researchers who are working on projects in film, video, audio, interactive media and emerging technologies in any stage of production. Founded in 2016 by Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center in Buffalo, New York, in collaboration with local partners Buffalo Game Space, The Foundry, and Silo City, the residency provides support through equipment, facilities, and technical support for artists experimenting across a range of old and new technologies, such as video, sound, digital platforms, interactivity, virtual reality, and 3D printing. Community outreach and public engagement components include presentation and education activities.

Squeaky Wheel's 15th Animation Fest!
2018-08-04 - 2018-09-07 | NY
Screening 1
Saturday, August 4, 12pm
at the Frank E. Merriweather Library

Screening 2
Friday, September 7, 7:30pm
at the Albright Knox Art Gallery
All screenings are free and open to the public!
Squeaky Wheel is proud to announce our 15th Animation Festival! This free, all-ages, family-friendly affair with the famous Squeaky edge is a showcase of short animated film, featuring a variety of techniques, from hand-made film to 3D animation. Guest curated by Savion “Ineil Quaran” Mingo (D.O.P.E. Collective), we are proud to present the biggest animation fest yet. Make sure to attend all screenings to see all the films!
Among the works featured in the festival are Orisha’s Journey, an African tale of a girl named Orisha who journeys into the spirit world; Two Spirit, a reflection on the term indicating someone of native descent who possesses both male and female spirits; Mahogany Too, an experimental Nollywood sequel to the lustrous 1975 Diana Ross drama. Other works visualize the snapping boasts of Muhammad Ali; elegantly explore Brazillian dance and Yoruba spirituality through hand-painted animation; and showcase the trials of a black queer youth who tries to find acceptance. Foregrounding artists of African and Indigenous/Native descent, the screening features works from around the world, and the possibilities of science fiction courses through the veins of all three screenings.
With films by Adrian Baker, Donovan Vim Crony, Sergio Di Bitetto, Hannah R.W. Hamalian, Carrie Hawks, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil & Jackson Polys, Elizabeth LaPensée, Laura Marguiles, Lucas Martell, Everard McBain, Teouria Morris, Abdul Ndadi, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ibrahim Waziri, Don Jonathan Webb, and Jin Woo.

Orisha’s Journey by Abdul Ndadi

Hepa! by Laura Margulies

Plugin by Sergio Di Bitetto

Beautiful, by Jin Woo
Screening 1 Program
Hepa! by Laura Margulies
6:30min, 16mm on digital, 1998
Award winning (NYFA and Dance Films Association), Hepa! played at the Sundance film festival. It is a hand painted, animated exploration into Brazilian Capoeira, dance, Orishas and drum. Live action footage blended with animation. Featuring Marivaldo Dos Santos of Stomp.
Celflux Reluctant Heroes Trailer by Everard McBain
1:45min, digital, 2017
The trailer for the upcoming animated series Celflux.
Plugin by Sergio Di Bitetto
4:29min, digital, 2014
Plugin is the story of a mechanical city in which every citizen is a part of the city itself, responsible for generating lights by connecting the male and female parts of the mechanism. Everyone seems to fit into this perfect puzzle except the main character, G-O, a man who does not match the rest of his world. G-O finally finds his perfect match – another man – but the City Authority try to stop this uncommon union. It is up to G-O and Ico to show their city that every connection is after all part of the same energy – love.
Muhammad Ali – “How Great I Am” (Animated) by Don Jonathan David Webb
1min, digital, closed captioned, 2017
Muhammad Ali was so much more than a professional boxer, he was a global icon, civil-rights activist, and an American hero.
The audio used in this animation was from a 1974 event promoting the upcoming Ali-Foreman fight (aka “The Rumble in the Jungle”).
Ali’s use of poetry, language and humor was a tool he utilized to build momentum, and in a sense, to proclaim victory in his upcoming fights.
This animated video is dedicated to him. The Greatest!
The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys
10min, digital, 2017
An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the “Kennewick Man,” a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.
Annie & Dave by Teouria Morris
2:50min, digital, 2018
Within a classroom at North Ridge High sits Annie, a girl with a big appetite and Dave, a quiet misunderstood boy. Over the course of the class Annie’s eating gets Dave in trouble repeatedly with their strict teacher, who tolerates no disobedience from her students. In the end a truce is formed, a new friendship is beginning and sharing food is tolerated.
Orisha’s Journey by Abdul Ndadi
5:20, digital, 2014
Based on African folklore; “Orisha’s Journey” is the fantasy tale of a girl called Orisha, who ventures into the spirit world and must learn the importance of remembering her roots.
emptying, to make room for overflowing by Hannah R.W. Hamalian
5min, digital, 2017
What if there are really gleaming cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? A girl contends with her fate by taking on a var hiiety of forms. A cube becomes a vessel, a site of transformation, a container of the universe.
Mahogany Too by Akosua Adoma Owusu
3min, Super-8mm on digital, 2018
Inspired by Nollywood’s distinct re-imagining in the form of sequels, Mahogany Too, interprets the 1975 cult classic, Mahogany, a fashion-infused romantic drama. Starring Nigerian actress Esosa E., Mahogany Too, examines and revives Diana Ross’ iconic portrayal of Tracy Chambers, a determined and energetic African-American woman enduring racial disparities while pursuing her dreams. Mahogany Too uses analog film to achieve its vintage tones which emphasizes the essence of the character, re-creating Tracy’s qualities through fashion, modeling, and styling.
Aquarium by Hannah R.W. Hamalian
4:46min, digital, 2018
The composition of the human body is interpreted through fractal geometric shapes, which are released into pulsating movements. A monochromatic visual world pairs with a fragmented soundtrack to speculate about the possibility of cohesion. Limbs and pieces assemble and disassemble within a red pool, as desire for unity is mediated.
NOISE GATE by Donovan Vim Crony
8min, digital, 2013
NOISE GATE is an experimental sci-fi short film about a dimensional traveling Scientist who is in search of the ultimate reality. His only passage into that realm is something called the NOISE GATE.
Screening 2 Program
Hepa! by Laura Margulies
6:30min, 16mm on digital, 1998
Award winning (NYFA and Dance Films Association), Hepa! played at the Sundance film festival. It is a hand painted, animated exploration into Brazilian Capoeira, dance, Orishas and drum. Live action footage blended with animation. Featuring Marivaldo Dos Santos of Stomp.
Beautiful, by Jin Woo
7:40min, digital, 2014
This picture portrays the society’s heavy influence on the unification of individual characters in this world.
Plugin by Sergio Di Bitetto
4:29min, 2014, digital
Plugin is the story of a mechanical city in which every citizen is a part of the city itself, responsible for generating lights by connecting the male and female parts of the mechanism. Everyone seems to fit into this perfect puzzle except the main character, G-O, a man who does not match the rest of his world. G-O finally finds his perfect match – another man – but the City Authority try to stop this uncommon union. It is up to G-O and Ico to show their city that every connection is after all part of the same energy – love.
Orisha’s Journey by Abdul Ndadi
5:20min, digital, 2014
Based on African folklore; “Orisha’s Journey” is the fantasy tale of a girl called Orisha, who ventures into the spirit world and must learn the importance of remembering her roots.
Muhammad Ali – “How Great I Am” (Animated) by Don Jonathan David Webb
1min, digital, closed captioned, 2017
Muhammad Ali was so much more than a professional boxer, he was a global icon, civil-rights activist, and an American hero.
The audio used in this animation was from a 1974 event promoting the upcoming Ali-Foreman fight (aka “The Rumble in the Jungle”).
Ali’s use of poetry, language and humor was a tool he utilized to build momentum, and in a sense, to proclaim victory in his upcoming fights.
This animated video is dedicated to him. The Greatest!
Celflux Reluctant Heroes Trailer by Everard McBain
1:45min, digital, 2017
The trailer for the upcoming animated series Celflux.
Buried by Adrian Baker
3:10min, digital, 2013
Buried: Ohlone activist and educator Corinna Gould talks about the destruction of sacred sites, with a focus on the shellmounds in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.
The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys
10min, digital, 2017
An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the “Kennewick Man,” a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.
black enuf* by Carrie Hawks
22:16min, digital, closed-captioned, 2016
A queer oddball seeks approval from black peers despite a serious lack of hip-hop credentials. This short animated documentary takes you on a quest for belonging.
Bio of the curator
Savion “Ineil Quaran” Mingo is an afro-futurist multidisciplinary artist and ghetto organizer born in Buffalo, NY and raised in the Kenfield/Langfield Projects. Through his fine art and multimedia collages he recreates memories and dreamscapes incorporating themes of self-preservation, Black celebration, imagination, and grief. He developed his skill by blocking-out neighborhood sidewalks with chalk drawings and studying digital tutorials. Institutionally he attended Buffalo Academy of Visual Performing Arts and briefly, Villa Maria College majoring in animation. Growing up Ineil indulged in: Walt Disney animations, climbing trees, the epics of ancient religions and folklore, anime, early 2000’s hip hop and R&B, science fiction adventure, and his gullah/geechee heritage.
In 2014 he co-owned, graphic design business and zine distributor, VENT. Soon after in 2015 he co-founded D.O.P.E. Collective (Dismantling Oppressive Patterns for Empowerment), a Black youth-led anti-oppressive arts organization that aims to strengthen local resources for creative and exploited communities which resists through art forms and arts movements considered: white-washed, extreme, stigmatized, political, and/or experimental.
Ineil Quaran is now developing work for his first solo art show and is continuing to cultivate resources supporting the East Side, melaninated creatives, and all the black and brown *QTs!
*QT = queer and trans people
Bios of the artists
Over the past two decades Adrian Baker has produced, written and directed numerous projects for television and the web, including the award-winning animated poetry series SlamBox, which was produced in partnership with Youth Speaks. As Creative Director for MadLab Creative his client list included DreamWorks Records, Sony Screenblast, and Wild Brain Animation. Adrian’s current project is Injunuity, an episodic documentary using a unique mix of animation, music and real audio to explore modern American life from a contemporary Native American perspective, which aired nationally on PBS in November, 2013 and has been seen (in part or whole) in numerous film festivals worldwide. Injunuity 2.0 is now in production. The project also includes an educational portal and is being produced in partnership with the Independent Television Service (ITVS) and Vision Maker Media. In addition to his animation, Adrian has also worked extensively in the education field as a teacher, mentor and coach, has published several pieces of short fiction and has optioned a feature length screenplay. Currently Adrian lives in Oakland, California with his wife and daughter.”
Donovan Vim Crony is a film/TV Producer and visual artist living and working in Los Angeles. His work focuses on fusing themes of rock & roll and speculative fiction (sci-fi, horror, fantasy) in contemporary and dystopian societies. His visual art style is highly influenced by comic book and anime culture as seen through the lens of the African diaspora. For more information on Donovan Vim Crony, visit www.vimcrony.com. IG: @VimCrony
Sergio Di Bitetto is an Italian animator and designer born in a small town of the south of Italy who has always dreamed to work in the Cartoons industry. Grew up with Disney’s classical feature films and Japanese anime, he developed his skills attending an artistic high school, then moving to Milan where he obtained his degree in Media design and Multimedia Arts. After graduating he had the chance to enter in the business as motion graphic designer and compositor, working for many Italian and international brands in the TV and video commercial industry. After three years of work experience in this field, he decided to go back to his passion for animation, moving to Canada where he attended the Classical Animation program at Vancouver Film School. He’s now currently working the animation industry in Canada, while trying to pursuing his childhood dream to tell story that will inspire the world.
Hannah R.W. Hamalian is a filmmaker engaged in demonstrating complexity in order to point to the richness of life. Through animation, live action, and appropriated video, she asks questions of herself and her viewers in order to untangle the forces that shape people into who they are. Interpreting being as a daily process of renewal rather than a static mode, her work often centers the body as a site of transformation. She is drawn to motion and immersive soundscapes as tools to create experiences of expanded possibility. She is currently based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where she is an instructor in the Film department at UW-Milwaukee.
Carrie Hawks harnesses the magic of animation to tell stories. The artist works in a variety of medium including drawing, doll-making, and performance. Their work addresses gender, sexuality, and race. They have shown in New York, Atlanta, Kansas City, Toronto, and Tokyo. They hold a BA in Art History & Visual Arts from Barnard College and a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University. Their first film, Delilah, won the Best Experimental Award at the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival (2012). Their films have screened at BlackStar Film Festival (Philadelphia), CinemAfrica (Stockholm, Sweden), and MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival (New York). black enuf* won the ‘Best Animation’ at Reel Sisters of the Diaspora, and ‘Best Women’s Short Film-Audience Award’ at the 30th Annual Out on Film Festival in Atlanta, Georgia.
Adam Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist. He attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. His and his brother Zack’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, UnionDocs, e-flux, and the Walker Art Center.
Zack Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist. His work centers on indigenous narratives in the present—and looks towards the future—through the use of innovative nonfiction forms. Along with his brother Adam, he is a Gates Millennium Scholar, UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow, and current Sundance Native Film Fellow.
Elizabeth LaPensée, Ph.D. is an award-winning designer, writer, artist, and researcher who creates and studies Indigenous-led media such as games and comics. She is an Assistant Professor of Media & Information and Writing, Rhetoric & American Cultures at Michigan State University. Most recently, she designed and created art for Thunderbird Strike (2017), a lightning-searing side-scroller game which won Best Digital Media at imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival.
Laura Marguiles began animating in 1988 as a means to combine her love of dance and art. Animation has continued to inspire Laura, who has spent over twenty five years exploring paint in motion. Her personal films have been screened worldwide in film festivals (Sundance, Ann Arbor, Margaret Mead, Anima Munde, Asifa, New York Children’s Film Festival, and Cardiff International Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival, Honolulu Museum of Art, etc) and her commissioned work has aired nationwide (PBS, CBS, MTV, VH1, Sundance Channel etc.). She has received awards and grants from Cinedance Film Festival, Broadcast Design, Asifa East, Ann Arbor, and Creativity Magazine, New York University, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Dance Films Association, Te PEW Charitable Funds. Besides creating her own flms, Laura has worked as a designer and colorist at MTV Animation on the classics Te Head, Beavis and Butthead and Daria and as a freelance illustrator, animator and artist. Laura has taught animation at Pratt, New York Film Academy, School of Visual Arts, Punahou School, I’olani School, Hawaii Women in Filmmaking and at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she was on the faculty and taught for thirteen years. She has been teaching animation at the Academy of Creative Media at the University of Hawaii since 2015. She continues to work on freelance jobs. Most recently she supervised the animation as well as creating animation for a collaborative event Symphony of Birds at Blaisdell Cancert Hall in Honolulu. “
Lucas Martell’s first short film Pigeon: Impossible has been shown in over 250 festivals in 43 countries, and won more than 20 awards including Best Short at the Montreal World Film Festival and Best in Show at ArtFutura in Spain. The film was also a viral hit online, having passed 11 million views on YouTube alone. Since Pigeon: Impossible, Lucas has developed several feature animation projects and runs Mighty Coconut, a full- service animation studio in Austin, Texas. The OceanMaker is his second 3D animated film.
Everard McBain is the Creative Director and CEO of GemGfx. GemGfx is a multidisciplinary design consultancy based in Trinidad and Tobago. He has been involved in the field of Graphic Design for over 14 years. He is also the art director and co-author of the graphic novel Celflux which he created along with his wife Dixie Ann Archer-McBain.
Born in Buffalo, NY, Teouria Morris’s ultimate goal would be to live in a world filled with free Hamilton tickets, swarms of puppies, and lakes full of chocolate. A senior at Villa Maria College, Teouria, is an artist, animator, and a visual development artist. Originally wanting to pursue only Animation, she was eventually won over by the beauty of environments such as Tarzan and Big Hero 6. When shes not drawing or creating interesting characters, she can be found eating or dancing around the classroom, usually on a sugar-rush.
Abdul Ndadi is an independent animator of Ghanaian descent living in New York City. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2013. His animated short Orisha’s Journey (based on African folklore) premiered in Japan at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival and screened at over 50 film festivals across the globe. A believer in the strength of the human spirit to overcome all adversities, with his work he’d like to give a platform for those who feel voiceless and help build a bridge of common understanding for all people. Abdul works as a freelance artist for film and commercial productions.
Akosua Adoma Owusu (born January 1, 1984) is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer and cinematographer whose films address the collision of identities, where the African immigrant located in the United States has a “triple consciousness.” Owusu interprets Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness and creates a third cinematic space or consciousness, representing diverse identities including feminism, queerness and African immigrants interacting in African, white American, and black American culture. Her films have screened internationally including Rotterdam, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Toronto, New Directors/New Films, BFI London Film Festival and San Francisco International Film Festival among others. She was a featured artist at the 56th Robert Flaherty Seminar programmed by renowned film critic Dennis Lim. In 2015, she was named by Indiewire as one of 6 preeminent Avant-Garde Female Filmmakers Who Redefined Cinema. Currently, she divides her time between Ghana and New York, where she works as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Jackson Polys is a visual artist who seeks to dissolve artificial boundaries between perceptions of traditional Native art forms, practices, and contemporary life. He holds an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University. He is the recipient of a 2017 NACF Mentor Artist Fellowship and is advisor to Indigenous New York at the Vera List Center.
Ibrahim Waziri Teaching Children About Africa & The World: There’s always something new going on as the world around them hurtles on and changes. With Bino and Fino’s curiosity and thirst for learning there is always something new to discover. It could be an African dish, an animal, a heavy tropical lightning storm, a country,a fruit, a word in an African language, a musical instrument, African geography, a folktale… Featured in ​Huffington Post​ , ​Blavity​ and ​CNN​. With over 2 million ​Youtube​ Views, public screenings in over 7 countries, customers in over 10 countries Bino and Fino opens up a fantastic world of learning for children. The show has been embraced by parents and educators in countries like the USA as a genuine way to teach about diversity, Africa and more.
Don Jonathan Webb uses his passion for history to tell stories that highlight and honor the richness of the African-American experience. Using 2D animation he creates short vignettes that seek to educate, inspire and entertain viewers.
Jin Woo is an independent short animation director since 2012. VJ. Went to Krakow ASP 2016 dropped off in 2017. Graduate from Kaywon Art School 2012. Born and grew up in S.Korea but also lived in the different countries as an outsider.

Let's Start the Conversation: Hues of Humanity
2018-06-30 15:30 - 17:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Saturday, June 30, 2018
3:30pm
Free and open to the public
As part of Squeaky Wheel’s Community Screenings, we are pleased to present Hues of Humanity, a film produced by Rachel and Dianna Henderson, co-founders of Colorfully Beautiful. Addressing topics such as empathy and emotional awareness the film attempts to build permanent bridges through authentic conversation. Join us for an audience/filmmaker talk back on how we can all contribute something in order to help positively co-create our existing realities.
Member Profile: Rachel Henderson

If you walked into our media lab at any given time this Spring you probably would have come across Squeaky Wheel member, Rachel Henderson editing her latest film on one of our lab stations. This season we are pleased to introduce Rachel here in our special Members Spotlight.
Born and raised in Buffalo, Rachel joined Squeaky Wheel as an Artist Member in July of 2017. After a move back home from Los Angeles, California, she found that Squeaky Wheel answered all her technical questions! Rachel began her journey in film after receiving her B.A. in Communication from Roberts Wesleyan College where she was also awarded title of Alum of the Year. From the workshops provided to equipment rental, Squeaky Wheel has given her both the access and the freedom to create her own work. Currently she is assisting on productions for both the Albright Knox and Buffalo Public Schools and is working on her own independent mini-doc.
On her latest film Henderson states:
“I’m extremely invested in creating a story that the audience feels like it’s something they’ve never seen before or creating a perspective they’ve never thought of. Illuminating new ideas, concepts, realities.”

XENOYOGA((I REALLY WANT SOME)) by DJ xenoyoga
2018-06-29 19:00 | NY
Friday, June 29, 2018
6:30pm door | 7pm show
$7 General | $5 members | Free for ArtsAccess pass holders
Toronto based DJ xenoyoga presents a live audiovisual remix of her audiovisual live improvisation set, XENOYOGA((I REALLY WANT SOME)). Employing the common techniques of DJ as a trope, utilizing web installations, roombas, and sampling and assembling audio and visual from found materials online, the artist aims to alienate political discourses and popular culture into the cyborgian spell of machine and human.
As the artist states: “(━+ ﾟ｡☆*｡｡ meet asian-pop-mannequin-vocaloid *:♪･ﾟ’☆ when xenofeminist-alienation meets trumpian-shock-and-awe :･ﾟ｡･’★,｡･,An entropic chant of discursive mashup. Get in the groove .o｡*｡ .｡<)ﾉ :｡･:*:*XENOYOGA((I REALLY WANT SOME)).
Discover more about the artist on their website. Presented as part of the public programs for the exhibition, Yvette Granata | #d8e0ea: post-cyberfeminist datum.

All images by Kristel Jax.

Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon!
2018-06-23 14:00 - 19:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Saturday, June 23, 2018
2–7pm
Free and open to the public
RSVP here
Squeaky Wheel will host an Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon to take place 2-7pm on Saturday, June 23, 2018 at 617 Main St, Buffalo, NY. This all-day event is designed to improve coverage of women, gender, feminism, and the arts on Wikipedia.
Why we edit? Less than 10% of editors on Wikipedia are women. Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on the internet with more than 40 million articles in more than 250 different languages. The fact is when we don’t tell our stories or participate in the ways our history is preserved, it gets erased. Let’s build our local contribution to the movement!
We provide tutorials for the beginner Wikipedian, ongoing editing support, reference materials, childcare, and refreshments. People of all gender identities and expressions are invited to participate, particularly transgender and cisgender women.
Squeaky Wheel invites back Toronto artist and Wikipedian extraordinaire Zeesy Powers to facilitate tutorials and discussions. This summer, we are also excited to host Heather Gring, archivist at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, who will be speaking about the woman artists in their collection.
If you require childcare, please email caitcoder@gmail.com with the first names of children requiring care, their ages, and what time you plan on attending.
Please create a Wikipedia account before the event, click here to learn how! And remember during the event to hashtag and post online so everyone around the world can see what you’re working on: #artandfeminism #noweditingaf @squeakybuffalo .
About the instructor
Zeesy Powers is an interdisciplinary artist. She teaches programs for digital illustration, animation and video through community groups in Toronto, and facilitates workshops on contributing to Wikipedia as part of the Art+Feminism edit-a-thons. During her 2017 National Artist-in-Residence at the Toronto Animated Image Society, she produced This Could be You, an interactive piece exploring practices of confinement in VR. She has performed and exhibited internationally, and has been artist-in-residence at CCA Kitakyushu (Japan), Palomar5 (Berlin), the Banff New Media Institute, and Studio XX (Montreal). In Toronto, Powers has worked on several community-based project with children and youth in partnership with organizations like UrbanArts, Axis Music and the Toronto Public Library. Currently, she is working on a Canada Council and Chalmers Fellowship funded project on how consumer surveillance impacts how we relate to ourselves and others. She lives in Toronto.

Yvette Granata | #d8e0ea: post-cyberfeminist datum
2018-06-15 08:00 - 2018-08-25 17:00 | Squeaky Wheel, 2495 Main Street, Suite 310, Buffalo, NY, 14214, United States
Opening Friday, June 15, 7–9pm
Conversation with Yvette Granata and Maiko Tanaka at 7:30pm.
On view through August 25, 2018, Tue–Sat, 12–5pm
Free and open to the public

See a review of the exhibition in Canadian Art magazine here.
See a review of the exhibition in Buffalo Rising here.
Squeaky Wheel is proud to present the first solo exhibition of media theorist/artist Yvette Granata. The exhibition poses the concept of a ‘post-cyberfeminist datum’ as a type of data that has been banned in the future. Works in the show include performance video works, immersive 360 videos, AI devices in conversation with each other, and more.
Join us on Friday, June 15th for the opening reception of the exhibition at Squeaky Wheel at 7pm. A newly commissioned essay on Granata’s work by scholar Bogna M. Konior accompanies the exhibition.
Public programs presented as part of this exhibition
June 15, 7–9pm: Opening reception, with conversation between Yvette Granata and Maiko Tanaka at 7:30pm.
June 29, 7pm: Performance: XENOYOGA((I REALLY WANT SOME)) by DJ xenoyoga
July 6, 9pm: Locative Media Tour with Yvette Granata at secret site. RSVP here.
August 18, 3pm: Curator’s Tour with Ekrem Serdar of d8e0ea

There is no freedom celebrated here. Everything is deliberate, made to function within the same constraints evoked by the materials: disease, depression, fear, fever, bondage, torture, addiction, the life of “a one-legged glowingly beautiful ex-whore. . .” It’s a far cry from the corporate dream of a cheerful interactivity which lets users choose, not lose control. . . She isn’t making pictures: these are diagrams. She isn’t an artist, but a software engineer. —Sadie Plant (Zeros and Ones)
Can we exploit the fact that our techno-social systems suck? Or is the future already prescribed by the obsessive intrusion of social media platforms, machine recognition bias, and the AI arms race to come?
Data is no longer just captured; it is used to predict a particular slice of the future, to move beyond the 180 degree limit of human linear space-time. Social intelligence is now energy intelligence. Everyone is a data farm. Machine learning systems consume vasts amount of data in order to learn the decisional arc of human-mindsteps. But are we building data walls that make intel-silos? Are we building AI assistant gender-tyrants? Are recognition systems making us into boring products for a shelf? What can we do with the empty silos of this data wasteland?
The show thinks through these questions by positing (and depositing) a cyberfeminist data form. It imagines electronic torture chambers in the future used for the policing of data-bodies and poses the concept of a post-cyberfeminist datum as a type of data that has already been banned in the future. From the age of technological reproduction to the age of data reduction, the topology of cyber-feminist data bytes are an endless VR day, confined and trapped already.
Works include: a webVR essay that explores Google’s Machine Vision API in a fictional cyberfeminist design office, a series of dead drops that contain intersectional cryptographic syn-sets for machine learning models for training future non-targets (human-bots and/or creatures-fems and/or slime-minds), a cyberfem sound sculpture of an AI named ‘Evie’ in conversation with Siri and Alexa (broadcast on the sidewalk), and a secret exploration of a possible factory.
#D8e8ea thinks through a possible fall-out shelter for social intelligence, a new information ontology that re-spins humans and data, and performs an interface of zero a user-experience. – Yvette Granata
Yvette Granata. XDDDDDDD, 3 minutes, HD video, 2017-2018

Yvette Granata. Womxn with a Google API (mobile version), webVR, 3-D prints, 2018

Yvette Granata. Hello Evie, AI assistant sound sculpture, Alexa, Siri, HD video, 2018

Ancestral Cyberspace: On the Technics of Secrecy
By Bogna M. Konior
‘Hiding the self through a faithful mapping of the universe is the only path to eternity.’ – Liu Cixin
It was women’s fingers that enfolded the data-corpse into the fabric of the world. Sadie Plant tells us that these fingers are like a spider’s spinnerets, extruding digital silk, weaving the history of networked technology, which at its core is a cunning practice of emasculation: ‘cyberspace is out of man’s control, [it] destroys his identity…at the peak of his triumph, the culmination of his machinic erections, man confronts the system he built for his own protection and finds it female and dangerous.’ For Plant, man sentenced himself to annihilation when he let the feminine hydra of digital technology out of its black box. Now, it is everywhere, slyly completing its task.

Cyberfeminism is an occult form of warfare. It understands about ‘cyberspace’ what Liu Cixin’s ‘dark forest’ theory understands about the cosmos: all existence is determined by hostility and so the highest form of intelligence lies in occluding one’s coordinates. The hypothesis explains why the universe, statistically full of life, is dead silent. It is not because, as is commonly thought, life has not found a way to communicate, but because it understands that silence is the most advanced form of intelligence. Our physical and virtual spaces, which are increasingly inseparable, are alike a dark forest, where every step must be taken with care, as revealing one’s existence portends annihilation. The most desirable skill, the most coveted trick, and the most longed for disposition can only be this – a fluency in the trading of secrets. The skills we need to strategically deploy concealment, de-concealment and re-concealment.
In this secrecy lies a genealogy of a post-cyberfeminism that always has been: an ancestral politics of cyberspace. Any feminism is a practice of genealogy but also of desecration – so much technical knowledge has been buried and its practitioners eliminated that a post-cyberfeminist must engage in the excavation, encoding and decoding of data-corpses, buried in wet soil of the earth and in the knots of submarine communication cables.
Decrypting ancestral secrecy trade and a cyberfeminist ancestry, one might find the corpse of Caterina Sforza, the progenitrix of the Medici family and one of the women who defined the burgeoning scientific culture of the Italian Renaissance. Remembered for her military genius and personal bravado (in response to an enemy threatening her with the death of her children, she grabbed her crotch and retorted that she could easily make more), she held a keen interest in the trading of secrets, especially pertaining to natural philosophy, medicine and alchemy. In Daughters of Alchemy, Meredith Ray describes the specular economy of secrecy in the early modern Italy, where secrets circulated in letters, manuscripts – libri di segreti – and through word of mouth. Secrets were a valued gift and a fitting expression of loyalty.
This arcane internet was a networked web of secrets, where the exchange of occult data between women formed a clandestine practice of science. From beauty recipes to alchemical attempts at the transmutation of matter into gold (believed to mirror the forming of a fetus in the womb), Sforza’s research into concealed knowledge served her in military, intellectual and political endeavors. In her notebooks, never intended for publication, she recorded recipes for poisons distilled from scorpion venom as well as instructions for concealing written text with slowly disappearing, ‘invisible’ ink. This non-formal practice of science was a way of interacting with the unknown not for its presupposed sanctity but its pragmatic utility.
Secrets, Ray writes, were synonymous with experimentation, ‘referring not to something unknown but rather to something that was proven.’ The most prized secrets were those that, when deployed, produced the desired results. A post-cyberfeminist secret is the proven unknown that loses none of its stealth: a secret is the instruction built for calculated obfuscation, a mechanism of encryption. Books of secrets, Ray tells us, could be deciphered according to a ‘generic code,’ meant for distinguishing valuable information from mere noise. Reading, writing, and circulating libri di segreti was a form of data analysis, a structural technique of (de)classifying information, contingent on maintaining the balance between obfuscation and analysis.
This cryptic practice of science was also an alternate economy. Secrets were a non-monetary currency used to establish debt and political influence. This specular economy of occluded knowledge built extended social, technical and publishing networks between women during the Scientific Revolution. Camilla Erculiani, an apothecary from Padua, attracted the attention of the Inquisition for her visibly public contribution to the scientific community and her heretical interpretation of theology. She later found protection with Anna Jagiellon, the queen of Poland, herself an intellectual and a potion mistress. Women’s work is a priori heretical by the very fact of its existence. Secrecy thus becomes a necessary form, both in the web of political life and in the approach to technology and knowledge. Post-cyberfeminist data is a priori banned in the future and exists in a banished land. Predicting its own illegality, it nevertheless codes a possibility: une autre fin du monde est possible (another end of the world is possible), as an anonymous French graffiti recently proclaimed. What post-cyberfeminist data has been already imprisoned in the future?
Erculiani’s interest was in the material fabric of the world: ‘the causes of the universal deluge, the composition of rainbows.’
Among Caterina’s medicinal recipes [were] a number of distilled waters, unguents, and elixirs produced through alchemical procedures such as multiplication, a kind of progressive distillation whereby a substance assumes greater and more diverse powers during the course of preparation.
Encrypting data could be for a post-cyberfeminism a pata-political model. Just like pata-physics is a science of the imaginary realm beyond philosophical metaphysics, pata-politics is a political science of the coming data-wasteland, beyond current political practices. Treated as non-existent and excluded from history, women’s technology endures both in its erased past and its banned future. These technologies do not promise liberation – they instead assure our survival. Post-cyberfeminist data is a type of camouflage: an ancestral practice now augmented and automated with algorithmic technologies. From its genealogy of secrecy into the future, it mutates and updates itself: what once was a book of secrets now becomes machine vision, a camera for algorithmic secrecy.♦
Bibliography
Evans, Claire L. Broad Band: The Untold Story of Women Who Made the Internet. Portfolio, 2018.
Cixin, Liu. The Dark Forest. Translated by Joel Martinsen. Tor Books, 2015.
Ray, Meredith. Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Harvard University Press, 2015.
Plant, Sadie. On The Matrix: The Cyberculture Reader. Edited by David Bell and Barbara Kennedy. Psychology Press, 2000.

About the artist and the contributors
Yvette Granata is a media artist and Phd Candidate at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Media Study. Her work intersects new media art-research, design, theory, and philosophy. She explores techno-philosophical and socio-political technology, non-philosophy, cyberfeminism and feminist media tech art practice. She has presented her work at the Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, The Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam, The Kunsthalle in Detroit, Papy Gyro Nights in Norway and Hong Kong, and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center in Buffalo, among others. Her film design work has appeared on screens at the Sundance film festival, Tribeca film festival, Rotterdam, Cannes, Berlinale, the Rome International Film Fest, SXSW, and CPH:PIX. She has published in Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy Journal, TRACE: Journal of Writing, Media, and Ecology, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and the International Journal of Cultural Studies. She received a NYS Council of the Arts Grant in 2017 and was a visiting researcher at the Senselab at Concordia, where she developed some of the work included in the current exhibit. See more at yvettegranata.com
Bogna M. Konior is the Media and Technology editor at the Hong Kong Review of Books and the director of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, Asia. She holds a Research Masters in Media Studies, a PhD in Cultural Analysis and was a visiting researcher in Media and Culture at the ICON Center for the Humanities at the University of Utrecht. Her recent work in media cultures and the Anthropocene is published in Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture and forthcoming in PostMemes from Punctum Press. She is the Polish translator of the Xenofeminist Manifesto. Her curatorial and collaborative work exploring theory in the Anthropocene has been exhibited internationally and can be viewed at http://www.bognamk.com.
Maiko Tanaka is the Executive Director of Squeaky Wheel. She holds a BFA from OCADU and a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. For over ten years Maiko has curated projects with prestigious and widely recognized arts institutions in Canada and abroad, including Trinity Square Video, Nuit Blanche at OCAD University, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (now Art Museum – University of Toronto), InterAccess, all in Toronto, as well as Casco – Office for Art, Design, and Theory in Utrecht, NL. Maiko also currently serves on programming committee of Gendai Gallery and editorial advisory of C Magazine. She is the co-editor of several catalogue publications including, The Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook published by Casco and Valiz, and Model Minority, published by Gendai Gallery and Publication Studio.
Banner image: Yvette Granata. Hello Evie, AI assistant sound sculpture, Alexa, Siri, HD video, 2018

Bring Your Own Tony
2018-05-11 19:00 - 21:00 | NY
Friday, May 11
6:30pm door | 7pm show
Free and open to the public
Tony as hypnotist, Tony as magician, Tony as naturalist, Tony on a bike, Tony on skype! As we near the end of Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective, and the multi-institutional celebrations that took place throughout early 2018, we are excited to celebrate with an evening of films and videos featuring the late polymath, made by his friends, colleagues, and students. We remember our founder fondly, and hope to offer a fun and warm gathering for our community, with a couple of surprises thrown in.
Featuring work from 1984–2016, originating in Super 8mm to cellphone snaps, by Alice Alexandrescu, Martha Colburn, Stephen Gallagher, David Gracon, Tyler Hubby, David McCreery, Zeljko McMullen, and Lara Odell.
Program
p0st-it t0ny
Alice Alexandrescu
2min, 2010
Impromptu performance. Tony Conrad asked for my input on a superbly complex topic in media analysis. I gave him my best answer to fit the time constraints of a graduate level course and left the room.
Wilderness Theater
Anya Lewin & Lara Odell
11min, digital, 2006
“Wilderness Theater is a collaborative video by Anya Lewin and Lara Odell, with Tony Conrad as The Naturalist. Two bears, one brown and one white (played by Lewin and Odell), somnambulate through multiple split-screen spaces: a desert, a snowscape, a post-industrial ruin, a forest, and an interior dreamscape. The white bear, or ghost bear, is maybe the brown bear’s unwanted thought. Meanwhile, a naturalist logs his visions of the bears with a camera and notebook.”
Women in Jail Doc
David McCreery
10min, 2010
A “documentary” of Tony Conrad at work in his studio, in preparation for filming his film “women in jail” w/ Tony Conrad, Anna Brantwood and George Sherer.
Tony as my violin priest
Martha Colburn
2:30min, 2014
This is one of the last rolls of sound super 8mm ever processed. I made it one afternoon in tonys studio. He dressed up and we made a little set and he played violin.
Tangible Man
Stephen Gallagher
15min, 1984
Tangible Man (TM, also for trademark or transcendental meditation) is a critique of artist’s ability to render their interior world tangible in the form of an artwork.
We Are Fools – Scene 1 : The Magician
Zeljko McMullen
5min, 2013
Over the course of 7 years, I made an experimental feature film based off of different artists invoking archetypes from the Major Arcana of the Tarot. I set the stage for each of the 22 scenes, and had different artists improvise within it.
Tony Conrad: Bryant Park (excerpt)
Tyler Hubby
6:53min, 2016
Tony Skypes his media class while discussing his the installation of ‘Bryant Park Moratorium’ and later visits contemporary Bryant Park.
We Ride Bikes!
David Gracon
10:30min, 2000
This is a short lo-fi documentary about Buffalo’s first Critical Mass bike ride. Critical Mass is a celebration of community, public space and bike culture. The Buffalo Police shut down this ride and a debate ensued regarding bicycle rights.
Banner image: Tony Conrad with a video camera, c. mid-1990s. Image courtesy Tony Conrad Archives
