\nProgram duration: ~53 minutes. Descriptions courtesy of the filmmakers and distributors. \nTony Nash\, Where Was I?\n1:37 minutes\, open captions\, 2024\nThis work was inspired by friendship and nostalgia. \nDelia Hess\, On Hold\n7:11 minutes\, 2024\nA young woman is stuck in the hold queue of a telephone hotline. A surreal episodic short film about the absurdities of urban life and the frustration of a paralysing standstill. \nMiranda Javid\, What Humans Do\n6:40 minutes\, open captions\, 2023\nA macro view of human-actions\, as told from within a singular body. Animated frame by frame with biodegradable ink + paper. \nMarina Santana De la Torre\, La Estación de las Rosas (The Season of the Roses)\n2:45 minutes\, Spanish with English subtitles\, 2024\nChronicle about freedom and sexual diversity. The film centres on the gay relationship between two university students who discover what life is like when they graduate. \nJ. Ramos\, Eldritch Kiss\n2:53 minutes\, open captions\, digital video\, 2024\nA workplace romance sparks up at a small convenience store. Claire is a shy\, awkward girl with a secret. Addie is a nice girl who is unaware of Claire’s truth. Will their newfound love survive Claire’s reveal? \nCalvin Hardick\, Silo\n1:17 minutes\, 2024\nA very personal and specific representation of universal creative energy manifested as a character. Inside of an impossible structure somewhere in the cosmos\, seen through the impenetrable safety of a viewing portal\, we get to witness the moment of ascension into the material plane. We\, the viewers\, our hoppy two dimensional friend\, and the being born in the silo are all segments of an infinite accordion\, seeing\, feeling\, sharing\, and expressing. \nS4RA\, bot3quim\n4:45 minutes\, Spanish with English subtitles\, 2023\nstage for intellectuals\, artists & freethinkers 2 meet\, a cultural institution that has become the sanctuary for creative expression & a symbol of resistance during the portugese dictatorship \nAlisi Telengut\, Baigal Nuur (Lake Baikal)\n8:56 min\, Buryat-Mongolian with English subtitles\, 2023\nThe formation and history of Lake Baikal in Siberia are re-imagined with hand-made animation\, featuring the voice of a Buryat woman who can still recall some words in her endangered Buryat-Mongolian language. \nEva Davidova\, Vinson And Flying Dancers Over A Lush Garden With Animals\n2:46 minutes\, 2024\nVinson and Flying Dancers Over a Lush Garden with Animals is an experimental animation investigating through hundreds of prompts the biases in the dataset of Runway’s LLM about dancers of color\, and the frustrating attempts at feeding concepts like Flying (we ended up writing Falling to achieve Flying)\, Bare Feet\, or Dancing with Animals. The sound is a mix by Eva Davidova\, based on Matthew D. Gantt experiments with Artificial Intelligence in sound. \nKolya Kishinsky and Geneva Huffman\, Red Thumb\n5:52 min\, 2024\nA stop motion short about a gardener who tries to control his environment as he discovers a pulsing red plant. As it physically grows so does their connection\, becoming his prized blooming obsession. \nSuncana Brkulj\, Butterfly\n8:07 minutes\, 2024\nA community of garden creatures all contribute to the flow of life\, using water from a fountain. When a butterfly gets stuck in the fountain\, they’re faced with an unfamiliar situation. \n
\n\nAlisi Telengut is a Canadian artist of Mongolian origin\, living between Berlin and Tiohti:áke/Montréal. Her work received multiple awards and nominations and has been screened and exhibited internationally\, including at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures\, Sundance Film Festival\, TIFF\, Videonale\, among others. \nCalvin Hardick is a multi-disciplinary illustrator and animator from Buffalo\, NY. \nDelia Hess studied animation at the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland. Since her graduation in 2012 she has been working independently on her own short film projects as well as on commissioned films and illustrations. She lives and works in Lucerne.\nFilmography: On Hold (2024)\, Emmen by the Lake (2021)\, Circuit (2018)\, Around the Stairway (2018)\, Morning Train (2012\, student film)\, Partition (2011\, student film)\, In the City (2011\, student film) \nEva Davidova explores behavior\, ecological disaster\, and the social implications of technology through performative works rooted in the absurd. Challenging a singular narrative\, she combines ancient mythology with current technologies to address the impending ecological catastrophe. Her practice involves research\, performance\, 360 video and 3D animation\, game engines\, participatory Virtual Reality\, and interactive\, site-specific immersive installations. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum\, the UVP at Everson Museum\, Buffalo AKG Museum\, MACBA\, CAAC Sevilla\, La Regenta\, ISSUE Project Room\, Harvestworks\, Instituto Cervantes\, and the Museum of Moving Image (MoMI) in New York. \nJ. Ramos is someone inspired by their own experiences with sexuality and mental health. They’re pursuing a BFA in Animation at Villa Maria College\, going into their senior year in 2024. They love animation and working on new projects as they come. \nKolya Kishinsky is a recent RISD graduate and Bay Area born animator where in the foggy hills one’s hand disappears if it’s too far from the body. As in the fog\, his work focuses on searching\, autonomy and creating personal identity. He works in both stop motion and 2D animated mediums as well as holding a printmaking and illustration practice focused on telling surreal yet personal stories.\nGeneva Huffman is a recent graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design\, working in both 2D and 3D aspects of illustration. She particularly enjoys fabrication in the world of stop motion and is constantly tinkering. Geneva is probably making something creepy and macabre this very moment. Be afraid\, be very afraid. \nMarina Santana is a Mexican Director\, cinematographer\, animator and sound designer. Her work explores dreams and eerie circumstances as well as fear of the unknown. She has screened at Ann Arbor\, Shorts México\, Festival Internacional de Cine de Hidalgo\, Austin Arthouse\, ICDOCS\, Pantalla de Cristal\, New York City International Film Festival and Trinidad y Tobago Film Festival. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and is an alumni of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. \nMiranda Javid (she/her) is an animator\, curator\, and art-educator. Her animations describe cognitive experience\, human bias\, and the relationship between individuals and their communities. \nS4RA is an < non-binary && genderqueer > interdisciplinary artist that feeds on con*sensual power dynamics & gender role play through a /non/ linear looping hybrid process between digital animation & ( immersive : ) environments. also spends endless hours strolling through post-capitalism mazes & it’s influence on libidinal pleasure. \nSuncana Brkulj (1997) earned her MA in animation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Her student films have been selected for screenings at prestigious festivals in Annecy\, Ottawa\, Zagreb\, Stuttgart\, and elsewhere\, winning several awards. After graduating\, Suncana undertook a residency at Open Workshop in Viborg\, where she made her first professional film\, Butterfly. \nTony Nash: I began painting about 50 years ago and now also enjoy making video artwork. \nSponsors\nThank you to Villa Maria College for being the Reel Sponsor of Squeaky Wheel’s Animation Fest. Thank you to our sponsors Buffalo Spree\, Rigidized Metals\, Rose Jade Consulting Co-op\, Delaware Council Member Joel Feroleto\, Tri-Main Center\, Harlequin Pet Services\, Buffalo State College Communication Dept\, Rich Products Corporation\, Legislator April Baskin\, 26 Allen\, Lumpy Buttons\, Niagara Council Member David Rivera\, PUSH Buffalo\, Buffalo AKG Art Museum Altreuter & Berlin\, If Music Be. \n \nBanner image: A still from Suncana Brkulj’s Butterfly (2024). A colorful\, unrealistic. and dense landscape of cute creatures smiling or looking sad. Some are sitting next to each other\, some are dancing\, some have their hands up in joy. Two circles that could be the sun and moon overlook them. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/squeaky-wheels-21st-animation-fest/ LOCATION:Buffalo AKG Art Museum\, 1285 Elmwood Avenue\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14222\, United States CATEGORIES:Hybrid,Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Butterfly.jpg GEO:42.9324531;-78.87566 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Buffalo AKG Art Museum 1285 Elmwood Avenue Buffalo NY 14222 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=1285 Elmwood Avenue:geo:-78.87566,42.9324531 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240906T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240906T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191600Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191600Z UID:10001176-1725649200-1725652800@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Silo City | Kathryn Ramey's SILVER & earth: Marine A DESCRIPTION:Friday\, September 6\, 7 pm\n@ Silo City (85 Silo City Row\, Buffalo\, NY 14203)\nFree or suggested donation; register below\nJoin us at Silo City for a projection performance by artist and filmmaker Kathryn Ramey! Made in collaboration with Noam Ramey-Winikur\, SILVER & earth: Marine A is a three projector 16mm performance which will highlight environmentally conscious artistic practices within reclaimed post industrial sites such as Silo City. The work is a holistic portrait of the site\, featuring both the site of Marine A\, and developed\, not with traditionally toxic photographic formulas\, but with Ramey’s ecological processes and plants from the grounds of Marine A. Working with the habitat-restorative approach of Silo City’s staff\, the work showcases how artists can approach the complicated legacies of 20th century industry. \nThe ~20 minute long projector performance will be preceded by an introduction by Kathryn Ramey speaking to her practice and process. Audiences will have the opportunity to closely inspect the films on a light table following the event. \nPart of a larger suite of work\, SILVER & earth: Marine A\, focuses on analogue film\, using outdated material that would otherwise find its way to a landfill through a variety of experimental gestures. These include: phytograms in which Vitamin C\, plant material and soda or wood ash is used to print onto film; burying film in compost; among other methods. Ramey’s project marks a deepening of Squeaky Wheel’s partnership with Silo City to also support ecological media arts practices. \nThe event will take place at Silo City. Entrance will be through the garden of Duende (85 Silo City Row\, Buffalo\, NY 14203) at 7 pm. This event marks the final event with our summer residents. Special thank you to Carl Lee and our partners at Silo City. \nAbout the artist and our partner\nKathryn Ramey (1967)\, Vancouver\, WA / USA. A Guggenheim and Creative Capital fellow with an MFA in film and a PhD in anthropology who has made over a dozen films and installations\, contributed numerous articles to anthologies and journals and written the essential text Experimental Filmmaking: BREAK THE MACHINE (2015). Her films operate at the intersection of experimental analogue processes and ethnographic research and are characterized by hand-processing\, optical printing\, and animation. She has screened at several festivals such as Toronto\, Ann Arbor\, TriBeca\, Ji.hlava\, and 25fps\, among others. \n \nSilo City is a unique post-industrial landscape comprised of the world’s largest collection of historical grain elevators. We create and host happenings on site through our 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that operates under the legal name Friends of Silo City. Click here to learn more. \nBanner image courtesy of Kathryn Ramey. Several strips of 16 mm film overlaid with plant clippings at Silo City. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/silo-city-kathryn-rameys-silver-earth-marine-a/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Performance,Residencies ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/IMG_6481-scaled.jpeg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240827T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240827T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191600Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191600Z UID:10001173-1724781600-1724788800@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Essay Filmmaking with Ahmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb DESCRIPTION:Tuesday\, August 27\, 6–8 pm\n$10 general | $7 members\nRegister below\nIn this one-time workshop by visiting filmmakers and Workspace Residents Ahmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb\, the filmmakers will introduce and provide a space for participants to workshop their own essay films. The pair will provide a brief introduction to essay filmmaking\, with examples of their own work and films by Chantal Akerman\, among others. The filmmakers will then facilitate a workshop space for participants to write their own treatments and loglines for their own essay films. Participants will then discuss and workshop their ideas as a group. \nThe event will take place at Squeaky Wheel. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. Squeaky Wheel members can email ekrem@squeaky.org for their discount code ahead of checking out. \nBiographies of the residents\nAhmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb are a married experimental filmmaking duo based in Pittsburgh. Lily – American\, Russian and Armenian – grew up between Washington\, D.C.\, and Cairo\, Egypt. Ahmed – Egyptian\, Dutch and American – was born and raised in Cairo. Their films emphasize identity\, place\, feminism\, cultural dislocation and domestic relationships and are noted for their use of voiceover and mixed media. Their work has screened at Oscar-qualifying festivals including Uppsala Short Film Festival (Nominated\, Ingmar Bergman Award)\, Athens Int’l Film & Video Festival and RiverRun\, as well as the Arab American National Museum\, Pittsburgh Shorts\, and the Arab Film and Media Institute’s Arab Film Festival. Together they founded the independent production company Studio Ragheb. \nThis workshop is presented as part of the Workspace Residency program. Learn more here. \nBanner image: Studio Ragheb\, She Sings (2024). A woman\, lit in red\, holding her hand up to the lens. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/essay-filmmaking-with-ahmed-t-ragheb-lily-ekimian-ragheb/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Residencies,Skill Share ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Ragheb-Workshop-She-Sings.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240823T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240823T203000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191612Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191612Z UID:10001172-1724439600-1724445000@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Meet the Residents: Ahmed T. Ragheb\, Lily Ekimian Ragheb\, and Kathryn Ramey DESCRIPTION:Friday\, August 23\, 2024\, 7 pm ET\nOnline and in-person @ Squeaky Wheel\nFree or suggested donation. Catering from AliBaba Kebab provided for in-person attendees.\nASL interpretation available; request by Tuesday\, August 20.\nRegister below\nSqueaky Wheel is pleased to present this hybrid artist talk with our Summer 2024 Workspace Residents! Ahmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb (Pittsburgh\, PA) and Kathryn Ramey (Roslindale\, MA) will be presenting on their previous and current projects\, along with a Q&A with the residents moderated by curator Ekrem Serdar. \nFor in-person attendees: The event will take place at Squeaky Wheel. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. \nFor online attendees: A private link will be sent to you; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. \nAhmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb will be working on Visitor\, a short experimental essay film about an Egyptian vampire who travels to America in search of family. The film will pair a fictional voiceover narrative with docu-style video footage of the post-industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh and Buffalo. Consisting of hand-held\, point-of-view shots with no on-screen actors\, the observational style of Visitor will facilitate an exploration of Arab and Arab-American cultural identity\, immigration\, family and the changing landscape of the American Rust Belt. \nDuring her residency\, Kathryn Ramey will be working on SILVER & earth: Marina A which will be presented to the public on Friday\, September 6 at Silo City. The multi-channel digital and 16mm projection performance will highlight environmentally conscious artistic practices within reclaimed post industrial sites such as Silo City. Part of a larger suite of work\, SILVER & earth: Marina A\, focuses on analogue film\, using outdated material that would otherwise find its way to a landfill through a variety of experimental gestures. These include: phytograms in which Vitamin C\, plant material and soda or wood ash is used to print onto film; burying film in compost; among other methods. Ramey’s project marks a deepening of Squeaky Wheel’s partnership with Silo City to also support ecological media arts practices. \nBiographies of the residents\nAhmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb are a married experimental filmmaking duo based in Pittsburgh. Lily – American\, Russian and Armenian – grew up between Washington\, D.C.\, and Cairo\, Egypt. Ahmed – Egyptian\, Dutch and American – was born and raised in Cairo. Their films emphasize identity\, place\, feminism\, cultural dislocation and domestic relationships and are noted for their use of voiceover and mixed media. Their work has screened at Oscar-qualifying festivals including Uppsala Short Film Festival (Nominated\, Ingmar Bergman Award)\, Athens Int’l Film & Video Festival and RiverRun\, as well as the Arab American National Museum\, Pittsburgh Shorts\, and the Arab Film and Media Institute’s Arab Film Festival. Together they founded the independent production company Studio Ragheb. \nKathryn Ramey (1967)\, Vancouver\, WA / USA. A Guggenheim and Creative Capital fellow with an MFA in film and a PhD in anthropology who has made over a dozen films and installations\, contributed numerous articles to anthologies and journals and written the essential text Experimental Filmmaking: BREAK THE MACHINE (2015). Her films operate at the intersection of experimental analogue processes and ethnographic research and are characterized by hand-processing\, optical printing\, and animation. She has screened at several festivals such as Toronto\, Ann Arbor\, TriBeca\, Ji.hlava\, and 25fps\, among others. \nBanner photo: Two photographs side by side: Ahmed Ragheb and Lily Ekimian Ragheb sitting side by side in a black and white photograph. Kathryn Ramey\, a white woman in her 50’s with long gray blond hair in a bun wearing a black and white plaid mock turtle-neck blouse and a black cotton blazer and pink glasses sits smiling facing the camera in front of a white picket fence with green trees and blue sky in the background. This photo was taken at Camden Film Festival. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/meet-the-residents-ahmed-ragheb-lily-ekimian-ragheb-and-kathryn-ramey/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Artist Talk,Hybrid,Residencies ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Ahmed-Lily-Kathrynjpg.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240821T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240821T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191612Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191612Z UID:10001174-1724263200-1724270400@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Plant Cinema Workshop at Silo City with Kathryn Ramey DESCRIPTION:Wednesday\, August 21\, 6–8 pm\n@ Silo City (85 Silo City Row\, Buffalo\, NY 14203)\n$10 general | $7 members\nOpen to ages 16+\nRegister below\nIn this one-time workshop by visiting filmmaker and Workspace Resident Kathryn Ramey at Silo City\, the filmmaker will show participants how to expose and process 16mm film with plants. Participants will use plant materials from Silo City’s environment\, that they will develop and expose with a sodium carbonate and vitamin C mixture. Ramey will then show participants how to fix their films\, upon which they’ll let them dry and project them on site. \nThe event will take place at Silo City; please gather promptly at Duende (85 Silo City Row\, Buffalo\, NY 14203) at 6 pm. Squeaky Wheel members can email ekrem@squeaky.org for their discount code ahead of checking out. Special thank you to Olivia McCarthy and Silo City. \nAbout the artist and our partner\nKathryn Ramey (1967)\, Vancouver\, WA / USA. A Guggenheim and Creative Capital fellow with an MFA in film and a PhD in anthropology who has made over a dozen films and installations\, contributed numerous articles to anthologies and journals and written the essential text Experimental Filmmaking: BREAK THE MACHINE (2015). Her films operate at the intersection of experimental analogue processes and ethnographic research and are characterized by hand-processing\, optical printing\, and animation. She has screened at several festivals such as Toronto\, Ann Arbor\, TriBeca\, Ji.hlava\, and 25fps\, among others. \n \nSilo City is a unique post-industrial landscape comprised of the world’s largest collection of historical grain elevators. We create and host happenings on site through our 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that operates under the legal name Friends of Silo City. Click here to learn more. \nThis workshop is presented as part of the Workspace Residency program. Learn more here. \nBanner image provided by Kathryn Ramey. Sage leaves from a volunteer plant in the artists garden are harvested\, soaked in vitamin C and sodium carbonate\, placed on undeveloped black and white film and left in the sun. The leaves print themselves onto the film which is revealed when the film is run through a weak fixer. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/plant-cinema-at-silo-city-with-kathryn-ramey/ LOCATION:Silo City\, 85 Silo City Row\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14203\, United States CATEGORIES:Residencies,Skill Share ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/sageflowers-scaled.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240522T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240522T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191558Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191558Z UID:10001164-1716400800-1716408000@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Football Practice: Speculative Football Players with Kristin McWharter DESCRIPTION:Wednesday\, May 22\, 2024\, 6–8 pm ET\nOnline over Zoom\nFree or suggested donation; register below\nJoin us for this workshop intensive in which participants explore the cultural impact of American football and collectively contribute to a new simulation of the sport. Part performance lecture\, part interactive imagining\, participants will be given prompts to write and craft new players for the artists Football Practice simulation software. Each workshop designs and “drafts” two players into the scrimmage of the software\, directly shaping the speculative imaging of the game. Inspired by the surrealist game Exquisite Corpses and video game sports simulations such as Madden\, this workshop discusses the importance of consent\, aggression\, and competitive drive as participants playfully imagine speculative football futures in real time. \nThe workshop is open to anyone regardless of their knowledge or interest in football. A Zoom link will be shared with your email address near the event date. \nThis workshop is presented as part of an ongoing project by Kristin McWharter. To learn more\, click here. \nBiography of the artist\nKristin McWharter uses performance and play to interrogate the relationship between competition and intimacy. Her work conjoins viewers within immersive sculptural installations and viewer- inclusive performances that critically fuse folk games within virtual and augmented worlds. Her software installations and performative objects incorporate experimental technologies and playful interaction to produce performances that speculate upon alternative forms of social behavior. Inspired by 20th century sports narrative\, collective decision making\, and technology as a contemporary spiritual authority\, her work blurs the boundaries of intimacy and hype culture to challenge viewer relationships to affection and competitive drive. Her work has been exhibited at The Hammer Museum\, Walt Disney Concert Hall\, Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center\, Ars Electronica\, Museo Altillo Beni\, and FILE Festival among others. McWharter received her MFA from UCLA in Design Media Arts and is currently an Assistant Professor in Art & Technology Studies at SAIC. \nImage description: Two digital avatars on a digital grassy field. The figures are wearing American football outfits. Both the outfits and the grassy field look like they were crocheted. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/football-practice-speculative-football-players-with-kristin-mcwharter/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Residencies,Skill Share ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Kristin-McWharter-Hero-scaled.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20240514 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20240615 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191539Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191539Z UID:10001165-1715644800-1718409599@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Call for submissions: Squeaky Wheel's 21st Animation Fest! DESCRIPTION:Deadline: June 14\, 2024\, 11:59 PM\nNotification Date: August 15\, 2024\nSqueaky Wheel announces the call for submissions for our annual Animation Fest! Celebrating its 21st year\, we are proud to continue a festival showcasing artworks made in a diverse variety of animation techniques such as stop-motion\, claymation\, 3D animation\, hand-painted film\, special effects\, and motion graphics. Past festivals have showcased work from both rising artists as well as established artists. \nThe 21st Animation Fest will be held online and in-person on Friday\, October 4\, 2024\, an in-person screening at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and a virtual screening through Squeaky Wheel. Films in the virtual program will be accessible for 24 hours thereafter for general audiences\, and 72 hours for Squeaky Wheel members. If selected\, you will be asked for a downloadable copy of your film. \n\nEach individual submission should not exceed ~10 minutes.\nThere is no submission fee.\nAll selected artists will receive a screening fee of $100 per selected film. (International applicants must have a Paypal account to receive their screening fee).\nAll selected artists will receive a one year membership to Squeaky Wheel.\nMultiple submissions per artist are accepted.\n\nArtists who are African/Black\, Indigenous / Native / Aboriginal\, POC\, creatives with disabilities\, women\, 2SLGBTQIA+\, and artists who face systemic and structural barriers are encouraged to apply. Please direct any questions about the application process and your submissions to Ekrem Serdar at ekrem@squeaky.org \nClick here to apply\nImage description: Documentation from the 20th Animation Fest retrospective at North Park Theater. A projection in a darkened movie theater. On the screen is the word “Filmmakers!”\, which is from Helen Hill’s 2004 short film Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/call-for-submissions-squeaky-wheels-21st-animation-fest/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Open Call,Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/North-Park-Helen-Hill.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240507T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240507T210000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191539Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191539Z UID:10001163-1715108400-1715115600@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Rushes: Films and actions by Jason Livingston DESCRIPTION:Tuesday\, May 7\, 7 pm ET\n@ Journey’s End Refugee Services (2495 Main St #530\, Buffalo\, NY 14214) and online\nFree or suggested donation\nTickets available below\nSqueaky Wheel presents an evening of films\, actions\, and conversation with artist Jason Livingston. This evening of films showcases Livingston’s long-standing work on the climate crises and protest movements through visual and linguistic play. Featuring his celebrated film Ancient Sunshine (2020)\, the screening features work made by the filmmaker from 2012 to the present day. This event is organized on the occasion of his exhibition with Phoebe A. Cohen\, In the Sun’s Absence. The artist will be present to deliver an artist talk ahead of the screening\, and the exhibition will be open after the screening at Squeaky Wheel. \nFor in-person attendees: JERS is located on the fifth floor of Tri-Main Center; head left after you exit the elevator. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. \nFor online attendees: Upon check-out\, you will receive an email titled “Your Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center order has been received!”. A private link will be included in that email; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. Please note that the artist talk will not be available online. \n Program (click to expand) \nTotal program time approximately 65 minutes. \nIntroduction and artist talk by Jason Livingston \n#RUSHES/URL\n11:52 min\, silent\, 16mm on digital video\, 2015 \nAn in-camera 16mm edit of the 1st anniversary/birthday/funeral of OWS in New York City\, as seen from an embedded role in the Jellyfish Brigade\, an ad hoc affinity group formed to participate in the day’s event. Bold impact fonts compliment and countervail the images toward a warm antagonism. \n“Experimental filmmakers with no obligation to spoon feed the public fared better in documenting Occupy in a manner that proved more meditative and avoided reducing the movement to a list of talking points. Jason Livingston’s short film\, #Rushes\, provides an alternative to what the filmmaker himself labels “populist agitprop.” The two versions of the film deploy contrasting reflexive strategies designed to challenge standard representations of dissent and on-the-spot reportage of street activism. Offering a glimpse of a festive protest cum celebration commemorating the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in 2012\, Livingston juxtaposes the culture-jamming antics of the Jellyfish Brigade with familiar scenes of police intimidation and use of force. Demonstrators dressed in whimsical costumes holding signs such as “No Fossil Fuels…Frack Wall Street\, Not Water” highlight the march’s blend of earnestness and carnivalesque glee; the differences in tone are reinforced by\, on the one hand\, the satirist Reverend Billy’s comic spiel and\, on the other\, the unironic politicking of perennial presidential candidate Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala\, her 2012 vice-presidential candidate. \nForsaking digital for 16mm with in-camera edits\, the initial version of #Rushes was projected silently to live audiences. Refusing to bombard the audience with riot porn clichés\, talking heads\, voice over—or even the ambient sounds of a demonstration—Livingston instead solicited a running commentary from the audience at various screenings and encourage a participatory ethic and aesthetic. His decision to shoot in 16mm and move away from the more au courant DSLR aesthetic evolved from his revulsion towards consumerist pressure to abandon “technologies deemed obsolescent.” \nAlthough Livingston’s regarded his stripped-down aesthetic—and his promotion of audience participation—as “Occupy poetics\,” a screening at Union Docs in Brooklyn convinced him to launch an extended auto-critique of his own neo-Brechtian assumptions concerning “active spectatorship.” Despite the fact that #Rushes inspired some impassioned responses from audiences (particularly a frenetic screening at Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo which Livingston loved because it engendered a “lot of talking” over the silent images)\, he feared “that by encouraging ‘participation’ (i.e. talking) without sufficient direction on my part\, I was inadvertently disavowing my role as the maker (not that it’s much power in the end…)\, and actually promoting a very\, very vague participatory democracy that felt all too much like upper management’s penchant for doodlepolls\, or asking workers for ‘input’.” \nLivingston’s ambivalence towards his own attempt to emulate Occupy-style egalitarianism one microcinema at a time convinced him to accompany the film with narration\, later transformed into a series of memes embedded in a second version of the film\, that undercuts the celebration of a participatory ethos with what he terms a “warm antagonism.” Warm antagonism might be defined as playful self-laceration\, almost a parody of the type of self-criticism that was once de rigueur among authoritarian leftists. In the self-détourned version of #Rushes\, Livingston proclaims:: “Against participation\, not because participation denies the primary role of the artist in any given work and thus projects an anti-hierarchical fantasy…but because participation itself is a bureaucratic imagination.” While there’s a tongue-in-cheek aspect to Livingston’s self-indictment\, the cadences of his manifesto also undermine the pieties of “active spectatorship” and the hallowed entity known as the “emancipated spectator.” In certain respects\, the alternative film world’s penchant for participatory events might constitute a farcical equivalent of the pseudo-participation that anarchists discerned as integral components of Yugoslavian experiments in self-management. From another perspective\, the film’s dialogue with its audience\, and with itself\, is close to the kind of “auto-ethnography” that David Graeber proposes as a riposte to the vanguardist sensibility.” – Richard Porton\, author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination\, 2nd edition \n7.24.14\n4.5 mins\, silent\, 16mm film on digital video\, 2014 \nDemonstration in support of Gaza and against Operation Protective Edge on July 24\, 2014 in Ithaca\, NY. \nShale Raga\n4.5 min\, sound\, digital video\, 2015 \nSet to an excerpt of Don Cherry’s Malkauns from his border-erasing 1975 album\, Brown Rice\, Shale Raga extracts a mining industry in-house video to put pressure on carbon-based capitalist sorcery\, in this case EcoShale technology\, which is patented by Alberta-based Red Leaf Resources\, Inc. and promises to “revolutionize” oil shale production in the Book Cliffs of eastern Utah by accelerating geological time. The video is a counter-spell to ward off venture capital’s appetite for ancient life forms baked into rock. \nACID REIGN\n4.5 min\, sound\, digital video\, 2012 \nCombining archival/found footage\, treated images and diaristic Hi-8 video\, ACID REIGN explores the ongoing battle between human beings’ technologies of control and other life forms. In this case\, animals re-inhabit a post-human urban landscape. \nAncient Sunshine\n19.5 mins\, sound\, 16mm film on digital video\, 2021 \nA fossil cast in plastic\, an artificial plateau\, classic cars running on the fumes of the nation. Ancient Sunshine marks a path through fossil fuel extraction and climate defense in the American West. The film proposes solidarity against the violence by which “earth” becomes “resource.” \nUtah Tar Sands Resistance has been fighting experimental mining in the Tavaputs Plateau for almost a decade\, setting up camp every summer in sight of heavy equipment and construction crews. The film asks\, how might the concept of horizontalism be applied to the physical horizon\, its decimation\, and to capital’s propensity for vertical extrication? Ancient Sunshine interweaves the endless remaking of the Western landscape with labor history\, reflections on anarchist organization\, and interspecies economies. \nAncient Sunshine consists of interviews with the Utah Tar Sands Resistance primary organizers and other Utah land protectors\, and sets their voices in and against an industrialized landscape. The film presents an array of voices\, drawing attention to the role of resistance and kinship during times of threat and extinction. \nToward a poetic solidarity\, toward a formal politics. \n \nBiography of the artist\nJason Livingston is a media artist\, filmmaker\, and educator. His award-winning films have been widely exhibited at festivals and museums\, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington\, D.C.\, the International Film Festival Rotterdam\, and Media City in Canada. He is currently researching histories of extractive cinema and abolitionist re-imaginings of our shared world as a Presidential Fellow in the Department of Media Study\, University at Buffalo. \nBanner image: A still from Jason Livingston’s film #Rushes/URL (2012). Two policemen on scoooters on a sunny day in New York City. On top and on the bottom of the image are superimposed words like a mid-2000s meme in Impact font: “AGAINST THE ACTIVATED SPECTATOR.” URL:https://squeaky.org/event/rushes-films-and-actions-by-jason-livingston/ LOCATION:Journey’s End Refugee Services\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite #530\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Hybrid,Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Livingston-Rushes-scaled.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240423T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240423T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191539Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191539Z UID:10001160-1713895200-1713902400@squeaky.org SUMMARY:The Fuzzy Edges of Character Encoding with Everest Pipkin DESCRIPTION:Tuesday\, April 23\, 2024\, 6–8pm\nFree or suggested donation\nOpen to ages 16+.\nBring your own laptops or computational device. Students will need a basic text editor installed. Details will be given in registration email.\nWorkspace Resident Everest Pipkin will lead a workshop on the history\, politics and computational basics of text-based character encoding. Discussions will cover morse code\, ASCII\, Unicode (including emoji)\, and alternative text encoding schemes\, as well as their social\, ethical\, and emotional stories. The second part of the workshop will be a laptops-open play along exploration through software demos and creative exercises. What “is” a character on a computer? How can we play around with the foundational building blocks of digital materials in ways that lets us understand files as materials? How can we think about language as a type of logical encoding that makes computers work? \nBiography of the artist\nEverest Pipkin is a game developer\, writer\, and artist from central Texas who lives and works on a sheep farm in southern New Mexico. Their work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology\, tool making\, and collective care during collapse. They hold a BFA from University of Texas at Austin\, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University\, and have shown and spoken at The Design Museum of London\, The Texas Biennial\, The XXI Triennale of Milan\, The Photographers Gallery of London\, Center for Land Use Interpretation\, and other spaces. When not at the computer in the heat of the day\, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human. \nWorkspace Residency is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. \nImage description: An image from The Barnacle Goose Experiment (2022) by Everest Pipkin. An old-school text-based interface is open\, with various lists of items\, verbs\, experiments\, locations and actions available to you\, like “cry” or “eat [honey]”. Each one is a link. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/the-fuzzy-edges-of-character-encoding-with-everest-pipkin/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Residencies,Skill Share ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Everest-Text.png GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240422T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240422T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191540Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191540Z UID:10001159-1713808800-1713816000@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Artifacts of Identity: Crafting Meaningful Narratives with Personal Objects by Léwuga Benson DESCRIPTION:Monday\, April 22\, 2024\, 6–8 pm\nFree or suggested donation\nOpen to ages 16+. All materials provided. Please bring a meaningful personal object you wish to explore!\nWorkspace Resident Lewuga Benson will facilitate conversations with participants on the transformative powers of personal artifacts and the ways they can shape personal and community narratives. This workshop will be both structured and flexible\, and participants will be encouraged to share and explore in depth the meanings of their own personal objects. Lewuga will then guide students through creative exercises in different mediums around their chosen artifact. The workshop encourages collaboration\, reflection\, and meaningful dialogue among participants\, fostering a sense of community and creative exploration. \nBiography of the instructor\nLéwuga Tata Benson: As an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker\, my work bridges cultures and explores the dynamic interplay between identity\, environmental sustainability\, and human connection. Rooted in my Ogoni heritage in Nigeria\, I draw inspiration from our tradition of repurposing to prevent waste. This ethos infuses my art\, as seen in installations like “The Land Gives Until It No Longer Can\, 2022\,” “Hang in There\, 2022\,” “Traces of Displacement\, 2023\,” “Carrying Identity\, Carrying The Weight\, 2023\,” and “Fueling Change\, 2024.” In Ogoni storytelling\, we engage all the senses\, integrating songs\, dance\, and props for a holistic experience. My artistic practice seamlessly incorporates these traditions to create immersive narratives that provoke thought\, foster empathy\, and celebrate cultural richness. My journey has been marked by awards and accolades\, including the NYSCA 2024 Grant and the Gregory Capasso scholarship for outstanding work in film\, underscoring my commitment to the arts. \nWorkspace Residency is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. \nImage description: Léwuga Tata Benson’s installation The Land Gives Until It No Longer Can (2022) at the University at Buffalo. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/artifacts-of-identity-crafting-meaningful-narratives-with-personal-objects-by-lewuga-benson/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Residencies,Skill Share ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Benson-Installation.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240419T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240419T203000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191540Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191540Z UID:10001149-1713553200-1713558600@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Meet the Residents: Everest Pipkin\, Kristin McWharter\, Jaehoon Choi\, Léwuga Tata Benson DESCRIPTION:Friday\, April 19\, 2024\, 7 pm ET\nOnline and in-person @ Squeaky Wheel\nFree or suggested donation. ASL interpretation provided. Catering from AliBaba Kebab provided for in-person attendees.\nRegister below\nSqueaky Wheel is pleased to present this hybrid artist talk with our Spring 2024 Workspace Residents! Everest Pipkin (Truth or Consequences\, NM)\, Kristin McWharter (Chicago\, IL)\, Jaehoon Choi (Troy\, NY)\, and Léwuga Tata Benson (Buffalo\, NY) will be presenting on their previous and current projects\, including essays on video games\, and media art installations that explore notions of language and translation\, historic children’s games and locative sound\, and the devastating effects of oil extraction. Their event will conclude with a Q&A with the residents moderated by curator Ekrem Serdar. \nFor in-person attendees: The event will take place at Squeaky Wheel. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. \nFor online attendees: A private link will be sent to you; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. \nDuring their residency\, researcher resident Everest Pipkin will be working on The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds\, Walled Gardens\, and the games that are played there\, a speculative essay about the edges of space within video games. Based on a talk Pipkin gave at the 2023 Roguelike Celebration\, the essay will focus on the concept of the walled garden\, expanding it to include games and games spaces. It looks at ornamental gardens\, cloisters\, isolate spaces\, and even mythological or utopian fantasies of worlds\, and goes beyond to where the garden stops and a wildness of bugs\, errors\, logical failures and edge cases begin. The essay seeks to connect the logic of potent isolation to the games we make and play. \nJaehoon Choi will be working on an untitled media art installation on the intermingling of translation and language through light and sound. Influenced by the work of Karen Barad\, the artist will be working with mylar film\, projection\, and audio from speech recordings in various languages. The work is latest in a series of installations that delve into the artists concern\, the first of which\, “Hello. hEllo! heLLo? hellO” was created and showcased at EMPAC in May 2023. \nKristin McWharter will be working on Marco Polo\, an interactive sound installation\, based on the children’s game where one player\, with eye’s closed\, calls out “Marco” and listens for the location of other players who call out “Polo” in response. McWharter will be adapting the children’s game in a new work that incorporates megaphones\, RF transmissions\, and a series of sculptural beacons for audiences to engage with locative sound. Noting the Italian explorer’s role in shaping racist notions of Western superiority\, the project reflects on the history of trade route landscapes and the consequences of western culture’s history of continuous evasion and pursuit. \nLéwuga Tata Benson will be working towards their exhibition Fueling Change: A Multimedia Exploration of Niger Delta’s Oil Crisis that will open at Buffalo Arts Studio on July 26\, 2024. Utilizing oil drums\, video\, and audio\, the project focuses on the oil industry’s effects upon the people of the Niger Delta in Western Nigeria and the social\, economic\, and environmental consequences of unregulated oil extraction practices. \n Biographies of the residents \nEverest Pipkin is a game developer\, writer\, and artist from central Texas who lives and works on a sheep farm in southern New Mexico. Their work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology\, tool making\, and collective care during collapse. They hold a BFA from University of Texas at Austin\, an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University\, and have shown and spoken at The Design Museum of London\, The Texas Biennial\, The XXI Triennale of Milan\, The Photographers Gallery of London\, Center for Land Use Interpretation\, and other spaces. When not at the computer in the heat of the day\, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human. \nJaehoon Choi is a computer musician / sound artist / researcher based in New York and Seoul. His practice involves embodied experimentation through a technical medium\, which involves both the process of making and bodily engagement. As a researcher\, he is interested in how a creative practice that involves embodied experimentation with a technical medium can suggest a different form of techne and contribute to technodiversity. His works have been presented at Venice Biennale\, MATA Festival\, NEW INC\, San Francisco Tape Music Festival\, NIME\, ICMC\, CeReNeM\, ECHO Journal\, ZER01NE\, Dunkunsthalle\, EIDF\, Visions Du Reel\, CEMEC\, and etc. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and graduated from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) as a Masters. \nKristin McWharter uses performance and play to interrogate the relationship between competition and intimacy. Her work conjoins viewers within immersive sculptural installations and viewer- inclusive performances that critically fuse folk games within virtual and augmented worlds. Her software installations and performative objects incorporate experimental technologies and playful interaction to produce performances that speculate upon alternative forms of social behavior. Inspired by 20th century sports narrative\, collective decision making\, and technology as a contemporary spiritual authority\, her work blurs the boundaries of intimacy and hype culture to challenge viewer relationships to affection and competitive drive. Her work has been exhibited at The Hammer Museum\, Walt Disney Concert Hall\, Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center\, Ars Electronica\, Museo Altillo Beni\, and FILE Festival among others. McWharter received her MFA from UCLA in Design Media Arts and is currently an Assistant Professor in Art & Technology Studies at SAIC. \nLéwuga Tata Benson: As an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker\, my work bridges cultures and explores the dynamic interplay between identity\, environmental sustainability\, and human connection. Rooted in my Ogoni heritage in Nigeria\, I draw inspiration from our tradition of repurposing to prevent waste. This ethos infuses my art\, as seen in installations like “The Land Gives Until It No Longer Can\, 2022\,” “Hang in There\, 2022\,” “Traces of Displacement\, 2023\,” “Carrying Identity\, Carrying The Weight\, 2023\,” and “Fueling Change\, 2024.” In Ogoni storytelling\, we engage all the senses\, integrating songs\, dance\, and props for a holistic experience. My artistic practice seamlessly incorporates these traditions to create immersive narratives that provoke thought\, foster empathy\, and celebrate cultural richness. My journey has been marked by awards and accolades\, including the NYSCA 2024 Grant and the Gregory Capasso scholarship for outstanding work in film\, underscoring my commitment to the arts. \n \nImage descriptions: Four photographs in a grid\, left to right\, top to bottom: Everest Pipkin\, a white nonbinary artist\, stands in front of a cottonwood tree in a field. They have short brown hair\, glasses\, and are wearing a striped sweater. It is a sunny day. A photograph of Jaehoon Choi by Steven Pisano; a portrait of artist Kristin McWharter sitting in her studio; and Léwuga Tata Benson\, a Nigerian-born artist from Buffalo\, New York. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/meet-the-residents-everest-pipkin-kristin-mcwharter-jaehoon-choi-lewuga-tata-benson/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Artist Talk,Hybrid,Residencies ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Spring24-Residents.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240418T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240418T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191540Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191540Z UID:10001158-1713463200-1713470400@squeaky.org SUMMARY:How to make a DIY Force-Sensitive Resistor (FSR) Sensor with Jaehoon Choi DESCRIPTION:Thursday\, April 18\, 2024\, 6–8 pm\nFree or suggested donation\nOpen to ages 16+.\nParticipants are encouraged to bring their own laptops\nIn this lecture and demonstration\, Workspace Resident Jaehoon Choi will lead participants through the steps to make a FSR Sensor that can be used to create a range of sound production for sonic and other art performances. Jaehoon will begin the workshop by talking about what an FSR Sensor is and demonstrate to participants through the process of making and using basic materials and wiring and soldering. Students will see how to to begin to make their own interactive physical interfaces. \nBiography of the artist\nJaehoon Choi is a computer musician / sound artist / researcher based in New York and Seoul. His practice involves embodied experimentation through a technical medium\, which involves both the process of making and bodily engagement. As a researcher\, he is interested in how a creative practice that involves embodied experimentation with a technical medium can suggest a different form of techne and contribute to technodiversity. His works have been presented at Venice Biennale\, MATA Festival\, NEW INC\, San Francisco Tape Music Festival\, NIME\, ICMC\, CeReNeM\, ECHO Journal\, ZER01NE\, Dunkunsthalle\, EIDF\, Visions Du Reel\, CEMEC\, and etc. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and graduated from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) as a Masters. \nWorkspace Residency is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. \nImage description: Jaehoon Choi performing Brushing Improvisation – N°2\, 2023 at the La Biennale di Venezia in 2023. Photo Credit : Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia / ph. Andrea Avezzù. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/how-to-make-a-diy-force-sensitive-resistor-fsr-sensor-with-jaehoon-choi/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Residencies,Skill Share ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/brushing-improv-2.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240416T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240416T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191538Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191538Z UID:10001161-1713290400-1713297600@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Postponed - How to be a Good Sport with Kristin McWharter DESCRIPTION:Postponed – Stay tuned for the new date!\nTuesday\, April 16\, 2024\, 6–8 pm\nFree or suggested donation\nOpen to ages 16+. All materials provided.\nIn this interactive workshop\, Workspace Resident Kristin McWharter will coach participants as they design a new sport that responds to the unique skills\, attributes\, fears and desires of the collective participants. Kristin will first provide an introduction to different competitive game structures and discuss how aspects of these structures can act as metaphors for our behavior. Students will then collaboratively design their own sport and the workshop will conclude by playing the game and crowning the created sport’s first champion! \nBiography of the instructor\nKristin McWharter uses performance and play to interrogate the relationship between competition and intimacy. Her work conjoins viewers within immersive sculptural installations and viewer- inclusive performances that critically fuse folk games within virtual and augmented worlds. Her software installations and performative objects incorporate experimental technologies and playful interaction to produce performances that speculate upon alternative forms of social behavior. Inspired by 20th century sports narrative\, collective decision making\, and technology as a contemporary spiritual authority\, her work blurs the boundaries of intimacy and hype culture to challenge viewer relationships to affection and competitive drive. Her work has been exhibited at The Hammer Museum\, Walt Disney Concert Hall\, Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center\, Ars Electronica\, Museo Altillo Beni\, and FILE Festival among others. McWharter received her MFA from UCLA in Design Media Arts and is currently an Assistant Professor in Art & Technology Studies at SAIC. \nWorkspace Residency is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. \nImage description: Screen capture of software performance RARA by Kristin McWharter. A cheerleader avatar stands in an abandoned and overgrown football field. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/how-to-be-a-good-sport-with-kristin-mcwharter/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Residencies,Skill Share ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Kristin-McWharter-Rara.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240322T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240614T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191538Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191538Z UID:10001141-1711130400-1718395200@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Jason Livingston\, with Phoebe A. Cohen: In the Sun’s Absence DESCRIPTION:Opening Friday\, March 22\, 2024\, 6–8 pm\nBrief remarks by the artists at 7 pm\nOn view Tuesdays–Fridays\, 12–5 pm and by appointment through June 14\, 2024.\nSqueaky Wheel is pleased to announce In the Sun’s Absence\, a public art project and exhibition led by artist Jason Livingston in collaboration with Phoebe A. Cohen (Chair and Associate Professor of Geosciences\, Williams College). Timed with the 2024 Solar Eclipse\, and featuring haiku installed on public signage\, sound art\, video\, print work\, and sculptural projects. Livingston and Cohen state: \nThe upcoming eclipse affords a chance to consider the sun’s significance. For us\, this means reckoning with fossils\, fossil fuels\, deep time\, and deep futures which imagine worlds beyond the violence of capital\, colony and climate crisis. The exhibit puts into motion these cosmic\, molecular and human temporalities in a polyvocal constellation which crosses from gallery space to city streets\, from wall to screen\, from ink to sedimentary rock. \nWe love the materiality of objects. We think light is a material. The eclipse is material\, as is our collective desire for multiple\, just solarity. And we promise you\, dear moon\, we haven’t forgotten about you. \nThe project draws from Livingston’s public and environmental art practices and Cohen’s research into deep time. Livingston and Cohen have a shared interest in the Earth’s systems and the fact that the fossil fuels that run our economy are the preserved products of ancient photosynthesis. Through Livingston’s art works\, audiences will reflect upon the foundational importance of our sun and its encompassing impact on the history of the Earth and humankind. This project was selected and has been generously supported by the Simons Foundation as part of their In the Path of Totality project. \nHaiku in Buffalo\nAlong with the works in the exhibition\, Cohen and Livingston presented workshops for Squeaky Wheel’s youth and adult education programs\, where participants learned about the relationship of the sun to the creation of fossil fuels\, and wrote haiku. Haiku were selected both as they are an accessible and popular form\, but also as they traditionally feature seasons\, cycles and nature. \nSelected haiku can be seen installed on ten public billboards around Buffalo through April 9. See the map below or click here to see locations\, participants\, and their haiku. \nYou can listen to recordings of the haiku by participants here: \nhttp://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Haiku-In-the-Suns-Absence.wav\n \nDocumentation of the exhibition\n\nPublic programs\nWednesday\, January 31\, 6–8 pm\nEclipse Haiku workshop for youth and adults with Jason Livingston and Phoebe A. Cohen. Click here to learn more and register. \nFriday\, March 22\, 6–8 pm\nOpening of In the Sun’s Absence\, with brief remarks by Livingston and Cohen at 7 pm. Catering by Southern Junction provided. \nFriday\, April 5\, 12–2 pm\nTour of the exhibition with artist Jason Livingston and curator Ekrem Serdar \nWednesday\, April 11\, 2–4 pm\nOpen hours of the exhibition with artist Jason Livingston present \nTuesday\, May 7\, 7 pm\, in-person and online\nScreening | Rushes: Films and actions by Jason Livingston \nFriday\, June 12\, 5–8 pm\nExtended hours for exhibition closing \n
\n\nJason Livingston\nAncient Sunshine\, 10:26 min\, 16mm film and iPhone video presented on digital video\, sound on headphones\, open captions\, 2020 \n“A fossil cast in plastic\, an artificial plateau\, classic cars running on the fumes of the nation. Ancient Sunshine marks a path through fossil fuel extraction and climate defense in the American West. The film proposes solidarity against the violence by which “earth” becomes ‘resource.’ \nUtah Tar Sands Resistance has been fighting experimental mining in the Tavaputs Plateau for almost a decade\, setting up camp every summer in sight of heavy equipment and construction crews. The film asks\, how might the concept of horizontalism be applied to the physical horizon\, its decimation\, and to capital’s propensity for vertical extrication? Ancient Sunshine interweaves the endless remaking of the Western landscape with labor history\, reflections on anarchist organization\, and interspecies economies. \nAncient Sunshine consists of interviews with the Utah Tar Sands Resistance primary organizers and other Utah land protectors\, and sets their voices in and against an industrialized landscape. The film presents an array of voices\, drawing attention to the role of resistance and kinship during times of threat and extinction. Toward a poetic solidarity\, toward a formal politics. – Jason Livingston \nJason Livingston\nNOT ALL FOSSILS ARE GRAVES (positive) and NOT ALL FOSSILS ARE GRAVES (ghost)\, two pressure prints\, 22 x 30”\, 2024 \nNOT ALL FOSSILS ARE GRAVES is named after a remark Livingston made as Cohen explained to him that not all fossils are formed from the dead bodies of living things – some are instead the imprints and marks of still-living creatures. This began a conversation on the relationship between the indexical relationship between fossils and image making processes such as photography\, and here\, pressure printing. \nThe work also directly references what fossils – and by extension – fossil fuels are. Phoebe Cohen states: “…we often think of fossils as being associated with death. This framework that not all fossils are graves\, to me\, spoke of a sense of hope\, and of\, again\, of a sort of resiliency. Also\, in the sense of thinking about fossils as fossil fuels and that right now fossil fuels are leading us to our grave as a society\, as a species. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Like fossil fuels\, coal is not inherently bad. It is preserved ancient sunshine. It’s what we’re doing with it. It’s the choices that we’re making that are having a negative impact.” \nThe two prints – a positive and a ghost – were printed by Rachel Shelton at Mirabo Press and framed by Dennis Wisniewski at Buffalo Canvas. \nJason Livingston and Phoebe A. Cohen\nNO ONE NOON (paper)\, butcher paper\, ink\, 2024\nNO ONE NOON (neon)\, neon sign\, 2024\nNO ONE NOON (video)\, looped\, digital video\, sound\, 2024. Audio description: A low rumbling sound throughout. \nThe centerpiece of In the Sun’s Absence\, the suite of works encompassing NO ONE NOON contemplate the nature of time. Emerging from an exercise that Cohen regularly assigns to her students to understand the vast nature of deep time\, Livingston and Cohen plotted events across millenia on a long piece of butcher paper. Playfully\, the timeline intertwines specific moments within the earth’s history such as the moment carbon is fixed with poetic\, human ones\, such as “gossip bonds.” \nUnderpinning the work is an essential discussion of the nature of time\, and a debate between cyclical and linear interpretations of time. As Cohen stated: “We see an arrow moving forward and we think\, what are we moving towards? ….evolution isn’t moving towards anything. It’s moving away from something. It never goes back. It does not have a direction in mind. Organisms respond to their environment in the moment and then the environment changes. They are not intending to go anywhere or do anything or be anything\, except what they are in the moment. Timelines can be dangerous\, and they have been used to promote a worldview that humans are the pinnacle of evolution\, that we are the top of the mountain\, as it were. That’s the danger of timelines. One of the things that we were interested in playing with was creating a view\, a timeline where the moment that we are in right now was not legible\, to basically pull the viewer away from that sense of progress or inevitability.” \nThis cyclical nature is iterated on in NO ONE NOON (video). The title of the work – repeated in Livingston’s haiku installed outside Tri-Main Center – is a palindrome. \nJason Livingston \n7.24.14\, 4:15 min\, 16mm film presented on digital video\, silent\, 2014 \n7.24.14 documents protesters gathered in Ithaca\, NY for the National Day of Action for Gaza on July 24\, 2014. The action was called by over 100 social justice organizations around the country. That year\, the Israeli military killed over 2000 Gazans through its “Operation Protective Edge”; the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs noted that 551 of those killed were children. Livingston’s silent film documents people gathering and hanging pieces of paper on a clothesline. On the paper are the names of child victims\, the dates they were killed\, and their ages\, ranging from 5 months to 18 years old\, with one referred to simply as “child.” \nThe film sharpens the intertwined nature of climate\, capital\, and colonialism that grounds In the Sun’s Absence. Speaking at the UN COP28 in late 2023 regarding the Israeli military’s current assault on Gaza\, Gustavo Petro\, the president of Colombia\, noted: “I invite all of you to imagine a combination of facts — the projection of the climate crisis in five or ten years and the current genocide of the Palestinian people. Are these facts disconnected? Or can we look at there [Gaza] as a mirror of the immediate future? The unleashing of genocide and barbarism on the Palestinian people is what awaits the exodus of the peoples of the South unleashed by the climate crisis.” \nPlaced next to the millenia charting timeline of NO ONE NOON (paper)\, the clothesline of 7.24.14 brings much shorter spans into view\, violently cut short by colonial power. With Ancient Sunshine\, showcases Livingston’s long-standing work in charting social justice movements and tracing shared solidarities. \nJason Livingston \nTHE TOTALITY (pieces)\, mixed media\, black light\, 2024\nTHE TOTALITY (assembly)\, 5 hours\, digital video\, sound\, 2024. Audio description: The majority of the video features ambient sounds from a city neighborhood: birds\, cars on a street. During the total eclipse section\, there are sounds of an oil pumpjack and a donkey braying. \nTHE TOTALITY (assembly)\, a five hour long video\, features a 3 minute 45 second interpretation of the April 8\, 2024 total solar eclipse daily at 3:18pm. The video directly takes on Livingston’s and Cohen’s focus on climate\, colony\, and capital\, threading abstraction and representational elements as a durational experience. \nDuring the majority of the film\, it features contemplative 20 minute long shots of the sky\, with slow-moving images floating across the screen of the infrastructures of oil extraction\, border control\, and war. At the time of the total eclipse\, the work continues the wordplay present in the exhibition by intermixing images of oil pumps – often referred to as “nodding donkeys” – with footage of a donkey wearing a hand sewn blanket. Shot transitions foreground a graphical motif – seen on the donkey blanket – that is present on the billboards installed around Buffalo such as those used by the Geological Society of America\, an interpretation of the geological timescale. The precise duration of the work places the work in the present as it looks backwards and to the future. \nNext to the video work\, on a shelf with a black light\, THE TOTALITY (pieces) playfully looks towards the future. Small shapes featuring visual icons of the oil industry\, the work is a speculative imagining of what a future fossil\, unearthed by children\, will look like.
\n\nThe following conversation between Jason Livingston and Phoebe A. Cohen took place on February 16\, 2024 over Zoom. It has been edited for clarity\, and can also be read on our website. \nJason Livingston \nYou are quite active in public-facing science. You recently appeared in an episode of PBS Nova Ancient Earth\, and you are currently producing a podcast called Jax and Phoebe Make a Planet! Can you say more about your passion for science\, and sharing that passion with the public? Are stories helpful in communicating? What kind of stories do you want to tell\, and how do you want to tell them? \nPhoebe A. Cohen \nThat’s a big question. I have always loved sharing my enthusiasm for science and the natural world. And it’s been a part of my professional life since I graduated from college in one form or another. It comes from a variety of places. One is that I think the natural world is really fucking amazing and fascinating\, and I think that I have had the privilege of being able to spend much of my life in deep study of our planet and its past. That is something that most people will never have an opportunity to do. It’s not necessarily because of a lack of interest. \nAs a paleontologist\, people are always telling me\, oh my god\, I loved fossils as a kid\, I loved dinosaurs as a kid\, you know\, I loved collecting rocks as a kid. And it’s always as a kid. A lot of my passion for communicating science is about sharing my enthusiasm\, my knowledge\, and my sense of awe and wonder for the natural world with adults. Not that sharing with kids isn’t important\, but I feel like so many adults feel like they are disconnected from that part of themselves\, or that they’re not allowed to have that sense of awe and wonder as grown-ups. That it’s something they had to leave behind as children. \nI consider myself a storyteller. My science is a historical science. I will never know the truth about what happened 800 million years ago. My job is to take pieces of the past and weave them together in what I think is the most likely story given the evidence\, given the data. Being a paleontologist\, someone who works in deep time\, requires a massive amount of imagination. I have to\, in my mind and with my data\, reconstruct a world that no one has ever seen\, and no one will ever see. That requires imagination. It requires vision. It’s one of the reasons I love doing what I do. Storytelling is something that I’ve always loved doing; I’ve always loved reading stories and writing them when I was younger. It comes very naturally to me to want to communicate science as a story. That fits in well with this project\, which is about bridging these artificial divides and schisms between the sciences and the humanities. \nJL \nI think sometimes people think that science is all about the truth or that science is only about certainty. Which isn’t the case. I’m wondering two things. One is\, more broadly\, if there’s something about stories that can allow for uncertainty\, and then more specifically\, if geological records can allow for that storytelling. As it turns out\, there is a lot of uncertainty. There are a lot of things that simply aren’t known\, like unconformities. \nPC \nYeah\, yeah. Missing time. The scientific method as taught in a seventh-grade science class is you have a hypothesis\, you do an experiment\, and you see whether the results of your experiment confirm your hypothesis or not\, and if they don’t then you adjust your hypothesis. That works for a lot of biology and chemistry and physics\, but it does not work for historical sciences like geology. It also doesn’t work for astronomy\, which is also a historical science because you’re looking at light from stars or galaxies or supernova that is millions of years old. You can’t do an experiment on a black hole\, just like you can’t do an experiment on a trilobite or a dinosaur. \nAnd so we have to think about science differently. Like I said earlier\, we will never know the truth. All we can do is do the best that we can\, given the tools and information that we have\, and that will change over time. \nThis is something that you and I have sort of butted heads with a little bit: this idea of\, is there an objective truth? I think that I have some comfort with that uncertainty\, up to a point. Because I still believe that like the natural world exists\, that reality exists\, and that there are observations that can be made about the natural world that are true. I knock my coffee off the desk and it will fall to the ground. There are rocks outside that we can date using geological and chemical techniques that are millions or billions of years old. Those things are true. \nI think I have more comfort with uncertainty than other scientists do because of the nature of my discipline. And also because of my personality. But there’s a limit to that. I guess an empiricist at heart. \nJL \nThere may be a productive tension between us but also between a lot of people in these kinds of collaborations. What I see is there’s the question of method and there’s the question of goal\, and where it fits in the world\, too. I think some of our differences have come out not so much about whether a rock can be dated and placed in time\, because it can be. But where does that certainty fit into meaning making? Or in shared worlds? That may be where I place my focus in the arts and humanities. \nWhen we began this project\, we talked a lot about how the absence of the sun during a total eclipse affords an opportunity to think about the importance of the sun for all manner of things. Photosynthesis and life on the planet. The production of energy for all life forms\, including the production of fossil fuels. The predicament we’re in because of burning fossil fuels. How we might imagine a transition to renewables and a more just distribution of resources. Now that we’re further along into the project\, and the eclipse is a few weeks away\, what are your thoughts on art’s role in imagining new worlds? Or maybe that’s too grand! Do you think art can play a role? What can we do to not fall into doom and gloom futurecasting? Feel free to be honest about art’s limitations. I see no reason to be overly rosy. \nPC \nThat’s a really interesting question. I think of myself as a pragmatist when it comes to thinking about climate change and global change. Anthropogenic global induced change because it’s not just climate\, right? We are inexorably altering the planet. Our actions will lead to the extinction of other species that otherwise would not have gone extinct in this time interval. That climate change is going to negatively impact our species and it’s going to disproportionately impact minoritized communities\, the Global South. These things I believe to be true. I also am a deep believer in harm reduction. You can sort of use a harm reduction framework to think about climate change. My perspective is that anything we do is better than doing nothing. It will not only reduce harm on other species and ecosystems\, but also on other people. If we can take actions now that will mitigate suffering\, then I believe we have a moral and ethical responsibility to do so\, even if we cannot reverse the impacts that we are enacting on the planet. \nThat’s my positionality in terms of thinking about where we are. I think being a doomer is a very privileged position. I also firmly believe in the Mariame Kaba quote\, “hope is a discipline.” It requires work to be hopeful. She said that in the framework of abolition\, but I think it holds just as true for thinking about environmental degradation and climate change and global change\, global warming. \nAnyway\, art\, right\, art. I’m getting there\, don’t worry! \nMy research is on 800-million-year-old tiny fossils. My research does not have a direct climate change focus. It doesn’t have modern-day relevance in the most specific sense of that term. So is what I do useless? No. Because what I’m doing in my research and my teaching is\, I am giving my students a holistic and comprehensive view of how the Earth system works\, and how it has changed over time\, which is essential to understanding the situation we’re in now and how our impacts will affect the Earth system moving forward. It’s also just a way to share the Earth’s resilience\, right? \nExplaining that mass extinctions have happened in the past and that life and the earth have always recovered\, I think\, is a place of hope. So what does that mean about art? You could say\, well\, my work is not relevant\, it doesn’t have inherent value because it’s not immediately addressing the societal problem of everybody right now. But that’s silly. It has value. And art has value too. I see my work and artistic work as quite similar in that way. Art has inherent value because it gives us a different way of seeing the world and seeing ourselves and seeing each other. Thinking about deep time and thinking about Earth’s history does a similar thing. It’s a way of twisting perspective and shifting someone out of their moment. That’s important for thinking about big problems. And big questions. I think it’s essential. \nAre artists going to solve climate change? No. But no one person\, no one discipline is going to solve climate change. It will require effort\, work\, creativity by people in all spectrums of society and all areas of inquiry. To say that it is only the responsibility of one group of people or another and that other people don’t have responsibility\, I think\, is wrong. It requires a shift in how we view ourselves as humans and art has a big role in that. \nJL \nI appreciate so much of what you’re saying right now. And I think it’s interesting to hear the quote you put forward from Kaba that “hope is a discipline” in the context of what we’re doing and in the context of our conversation\, where we’ve been talking about the discipline of geology as scientific discipline. What if we think about discipline as a daily practice\, of practicing something like hope or practicing something like imagination\, working on those muscles as you would with yoga or baseball or drawing? We can elevate something that seems like it’s “merely” in the realm of imagination or sci-fi thinking or artistic experimentation to considering it as a discipline- \nPC \n-an area of inquiry\, an area of work. \nJL \nAn area of inquiry\, yes\, I think it’s productive to think about it that way. You’ve mentioned deep time\, and I want to keep talking about that\, as well as several key phrases that have come up for us. Some of them are drawn from paleontology and geology\, or are scientific phrases\, and a number of them are phrases that we’ve come up with or that we’ve created between us\, like for example in the sun’s absence. Which has become an overarching title meant to unify or gather the disparate pieces in the constellation of works which will be sited in Buffalo leading up to and extending beyond the totality. No one noon\, a palindrome. We’ve focused a lot on language. What are your thoughts about how we’re approaching language in our shared work? Perhaps we could begin by talking about the phrase “not all fossils are graves.” We were on a walk at Crystal Lake with Caroline Doherty in the Catskills\, and it emerged in conversation. Why did that phrase land with you\, and why did it stick with you? \nPC \nIt’s a great question and I’ve thought about it since that moment. Language has played a big role in our collaboration\, the language of my discipline and communicating that\, and translating it to you. It’s been so cool and interesting to see the phrases from my discipline that have resonated with you. And\, you know\, one of the things that drew us together was the fact that you have this film called Ancient Sunshine. I have often talked about the fossils that I work on as essentially the remnants of ancient sunshine in the form of fixed organic carbon. I think that we found a lot of similarities in technical language and in metaphor around technical language\, which has been exciting\, I think\, for both of us. \nAnd yes\, we were on this walk\, and I was describing different kinds of fossils to you\, and I was describing trace fossils in that moment\, which are things like footprints or trackways or burrows that are evidence of the behavior of an organism as opposed to its actual physical body. It’s not like a shell or a bone. Your response to that was “not all fossils are graves.” There were a lot of layers to that for me. One is that we often think of fossils as being associated with death. \nThis framework that not all fossils are graves\, to me\, spoke of a sense of hope\, and of\, again\, of a sort of resiliency. Also\, in the sense of thinking about fossils as fossil fuels and that right now fossil fuels are leading us to our grave as a society\, as a species. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Like fossil fuels\, coal is not inherently bad. It is preserved ancient sunshine. It’s what we’re doing with it. It’s the choices that we’re making that are having a negative impact. There are two levels there. One is thinking about fossils in the sense of a bone\, or a shell\, or a trackway as being evidence of past life\, right? Focusing on the life as opposed to the death of an animal or an organism\, and then\, on the other hand\, thinking about the role of fossil fuels and ancient carbon in our current predicament. But can I flip the question around on you? \nJL \nSure! \nPC \nSo\, you know\, it immediately resonated with me and I think also with you\, which was the inspiration for the amazing print that you did with Mirabo Press. I’m curious to hear from you\, what about that phrase resonated from your perspective? \nJL \nI want to respond to one thing you mentioned\, about how coal is not inherently bad\, it’s what we’re doing with it. To tease out a bit of what you’re saying there about fossil fuels\, which bring with them certain ideas or traces of ideas about fossils\, or ancient life forms: I think this is strongly connected with what for some of us seems to be a death cult\, an orientation toward a species-level flame-out or multispecies-level flame-out in the hands of capitalists. \nThere’s a carbon fixation\, for those of us on the tree hugging side\, where we might think\, with this addiction or with this fixation\, comes the death cult. If only it were so simple. If only it were just a matter of being released from the death grip of fossil fuels. But it’s a good deal more complicated than that. One of the things that art can do\, I hope\, is bring a productive ambiguity\, a generative complexity\, to these questions which can contribute to imagination. It’s hard to predict how that will go\, of course! And it’s a humble contribution. \nAround the moment that we shared together with Caroline on our walk\, about not all fossils or graves\, I think my first response was wonder\, like being struck\, like in kid mode. That little revelation of mind blown\, what?! I didn’t realize that! At that level it was very powerful. As we talked about it and then as it sat with me\, I thought about how there are these connections between fossils and images. The way that images index objects\, as do fossils. \nPC \nYes! \nJL \nThe questions that sometimes the philosophically inclined get interested in. Is the thing the thing or is the thing not the thing? And that brought us deeper into the project- \nPC \n-right\, and I’m interjecting because a couple of weeks before the retreat\, I had been in the car with friends\, and my friend Carolyn Clayton who’s an artist. I was describing this project to her in our collaboration\, and she said\, is a fossil a photograph? And that was another moment of stopping and thinking\, having sort of an “oh shit” or “aha” moment. That definitely fed into “not all fossils are graves” and this idea of imprinting\, indexing\, which inspired the format that “not all fossils are graves” is taking in the exhibit. \nOne of the things that’s been so exciting for me in this project is stepping out a little bit\, conversations that I’ve been able to have with not just you\, but other artists in my life. I’ve stretched my conception of my work. It has allowed me to access my childlike sense of awe and wonder and curiosity in ways that aren’t always easy. \nJL \nI like that and I want to take that as an opportunity to remind you to bring your camera to Buffalo. I know that you are a long-time photographer. You have a fantastic eye. The Simons Foundation has encouraged us not to make anything or do much other than experience it\, but maybe you’ll take some pictures? \nPC \nThe camera will come. \nJL \nOkay! I feel like there’s further to go with language because at another point in the last half year of our conversations\, we realized we were both interested in where deep time and metaphor come together. This led us to look at Stephen J. Gould’s writings about metaphor\, about deep time\, about geology and paleontology vis-a-vis pedagogy and storytelling\, specifically time’s arrow and time’s cycle. These tools can be linguistic or visual or both\, like the timelines and the timescales used in your field. We’ve decided to use the timeline\, to riff on that. It’s become fundamental and is moving through our project in different iterations\, for example on the billboards we’ve been creating. How do you or your colleagues use a timeline in a classroom? What are its benefits? But also\, what are its limits? If you’ll allow me to use a pun here\, what are its faults? \nPC \nLove your puns\, so good! Timelines help us. They structure our thoughts. They also help us conceptualize processes. That are way beyond human conception. Things like the movement of tectonic plates\, changes in global climate\, the evolution of new species. Extinction can sometimes happen fast\, but evolution happens pretty slow on human timescales. Many of those processes don’t make sense unless you can conceptualize the immensity of time over which they occur. You look out the window and you don’t see the North American plate moving away from the European plate\, but they are. And again\, that comes back to the imagination\, right? I can look out the window and imagine that movement happening a micron at a time\, but I can’t actually watch it happen during my lifetime. \nI often use timelines in my courses to help students start to conceptualize for themselves the immensity of the age of the Earth\, and to bridge the gap between human perception of time and geological time. Seeing a long roll of paper down a hallway\, and realizing that all human history fits into the last half a centimeter is extremely helpful as a visualization to help students figure out what’s going on. \nIn a scientific sense or in terms of my research\, timelines are necessary for us to figure out the order of events. We cannot pull apart cause and effect without knowing how old things are relative to each other. Or their absolute ages if we’re thinking about rates of change. Geochronology\, the science of dating rocks is extremely important in my discipline and in many other disciplines because it allows us to get at causality and rate. Gould called this “tempo and mode”\, the tempo of evolution\, and then the mode type of evolution. Timelines that are calibrated are essential to that process as well. They serve a conceptual purpose\, but they also serve a more immediate research function in terms of being critical to answering questions that we’re interested in as Earth historians. \nJL \nHmm. At one point you and I discussed how a timeline can have an unfortunate effect; that the timeline may place the human being at the very end of linear time in the present moment\, as if the human is the goal. \nPC \nYes\, the dangers of timelines. Yes. \nJL \nThat’s something we have in view as a concern or as a question that we wanted to unpack in this project. \nPC \nYes\, that’s right. Thank you for prompting me\, because the problem with timelines is that they imply directionality\, and for humans\, directionality is very much linked to a sense of progress. We see an arrow moving forward and we think\, what are we moving towards? This is something else that I said at some point recently\, which is that evolution isn’t moving towards anything. It’s moving away from something. It never goes back. It does not have a direction in mind. Organisms respond to their environment in the moment and then the environment changes. They are not intending to go anywhere or do anything or be anything\, rather than what they are in the moment. Timelines can be dangerous\, and they have been used to promote a worldview that humans are the pinnacle of evolution\, that we are the top of the mountain\, as it were. That’s the danger of timelines. \nOne of the things that we were interested in playing with was creating a view\, a timeline where the moment that we are in right now was not legible\, to basically pull the viewer away from that sense of progress or inevitability. I hope we’ve been effective in that. I think that’s a powerful change\, again thinking about changing\, twisting\, altering someone’s view of themselves in the world\, right? Both art and science can do this. \nJL \nI think of our timeline as very experimental. We had to sort through a philosophical conundrum and questions about method\, to what extent nonlinearity is a useful tool for shaping time. You held the line when I was pushing for nonlinearity. We arrived at a good place\, an engagement with a dynamic of time’s arrow and time’s cycle\, to try to produce a timeline in which both are moving. We have the movement of an arrow and the movement of a cycle\, with substitutions that are designed to hopefully bring people in. For example\, rather than produce a timeline with a big bang at the beginning or all the way on the left\, it begins with laughter. We have these recurring events\, some of which are drawn very directly from geological sciences\, phrases that a scientist might recognize\, but also other phrases that are more poetic\, more human oriented\, a bit strange even\, to move in and out of human consciousness\, and not to place it at the end – \nPC \n– yes\, but throughout. That was something that I struggled with at first when we were initially conceptualizing this because it was very hard for me to remove my attachment to my timeline. There is a timeline of the earth that exists in my head that I refer to continually. This is not that timeline. I was very excited about the idea of time cycles. When you started pushing on that there was a sense of discomfort that I had to get over\, but then it transformed into enthusiasm and excitement. That’s been the case for both of us as part of this whole project\, right? Pushing each other up against these moments of discomfort where we’re having to step outside of our disciplinary bins. I think we’re both used to doing that and good at it already\, which is why this has worked. Even so\, there have still been multiple moments where we’ve tried to do that. \nJL \nVery much so. For me it’s been a good exercise in discipline\, asking myself how the tendencies in arts and humanities on what some people call geopoetics\, or “fancy” words\, can go so hard into imagination and ambiguity that certain tetherings can be compromised. It’s just to say that I think it’s dialogue that’s been at the center of our project. Without that\, I don’t think we would have landed where we have. On the question of landing\, I have one or two more questions. I thought we might take a moment to ground the project in Western New York. \nPC \nYeah. Go Bills! \nJL \nHa. Are there any rocks or geological features in Western New York or near Buffalo that interest you? What stories might local sedimentary rocks tell us? What kind of futures – if this makes sense – might we imagine from them? I’m asking you to tell us a bit about the specifics of rocks here\, and I’m asking\, if rocks tell us something about the past\, can they tell us something about the future? Are stones fortune tellers? \nPC \nMost of Upstate New York is made up of rocks that were deposited at the bottom of an ocean in the Paleozoic era\, from – I’m going to get the numbers wrong – 500 to 380 million years ago. At the time\, the Taconic Mountains were very high\, maybe as high as the Andes. They were formed by the compression of one small continent\, pushed into the side of what is now North America. A big mountain range formed\, and as it formed the crust on the back side of that mountain range flexed down and created a basin. Ocean water came in. That ocean was there for tens of millions of years. Sediments and life filled that ocean and those sediments and fossils of those living organisms fell down to the bottom of the ocean created thick layers of sediment. Tens of hundreds of millions of years later\, the ocean is gone\, the Taconics are now basically hills. Upstate New York mostly consists of these flat lying sedimentary rocks from that ancient ocean. \nThey are full of carbon. Some of them are very organic rich. Some of them are even what we call petroliferous\, which means that if you hold it up to your nose it smells like gasoline because there’s so much organic matter in there. They’re also full of fossils. I happen to work on some of the microscopic fossils that are found just south of Buffalo. There are areas that are full of shells. Corals and clams and things like that. There’s a rich record of the life that lived in those oceans preserved in those rocks. \nJL \nRocks tell us a lot about the past\, but then there’s this other thing that we’re trying to think through\, which is this future business. \nPC \nCan they predict the future? I think they can remind us about the inevitability of the future. They were once sediments at the bottom of an ocean. We are now covering the planet with ourselves and our cities and our domesticated animals. But we will also end up as sediment someday. We will be the past\, just as those corals\, preserved in rocks and Upstate New York\, or once flourishing in that ocean and are now fossils. I think maybe they can be a reminder of the inevitability of time\, and that when they were alive\, that was the present moment. The idea that that ocean would disappear was unfathomable. If a coral could fathom- \nJL \n-if a coral could fathom!- \nPC \n-they were fish. Fish could fathom. Maybe. I don’t know. How’s that? \nJL \nLove it. One more. We decided early on that the center of our work would be these bi-weekly conversations. We also wanted very early on to bring in other voices to the project. That commitment has been like a loadstone\, a way of navigating the process to allow for magnetic attractions and forces to shape outcomes. Partly this is an excitement about the unknown. How could haiku contributions generated in workshops change our direction? \nThe eclipse is a chance to wonder\, to be in awe\, to revel in our own senses. It’s also a chance to pause human overdrive\, perhaps even pause human imagination in a curious way. Are we really in control? There’s these tensions and contradictions\, then\, in an eclipse\, which I’ve been wanting to draw out. It’s a moment to ponder human insignificance. It’s also this moment to consider dumb human luck. \nAs I’ve learned from you\, a total eclipse doesn’t stand outside of time. It has this weird temporality. Deep time but not eternal. Beyond human yet situated in time and space in such a way that we human beings are uniquely positioned to experience the phenomena in terms of how the earth and the sun and the moon line up. These contradictions are sublimely dynamic. So not only have I wanted to generate a totality poetics\, if you will\, to think with these dynamics and to think of these contradictions and the motion of it all\, I wanted to bring in other voices\, a chorus so that whatever language you and I are trading in\, which is already impossibly metaphorical and metaphorically impossible\, but a language beyond us\, a language beyond you and me. Take this question as you will! We can talk about the phenomena itself or you can bug me about poetics. What about this craziness of how the eclipse is a very limited time offer from the cosmos from the position of the human? \nPC \nIt’ll be around for a while\, but eventually\, yes\, human evolution coincides with a time limited offer\, part of Earth’s history where we have total eclipses because the moon is continually moving farther and farther away from the earth. We used to have more eclipses and eventually we’ll have fewer and then eventually we’ll have none\, or no total ones. \nHow lucky are we? I mean\, it didn’t have to be this way. I think maybe that’s another way of talking about decentering the human. As in the time scale\, right? The Earth will go on and maybe other organisms will experience things that we have never been able to experience. But we get this. How cool is that? \nJL \nBefore I learned from you about how an eclipse varies over time\, that there is no such thing as a singular abstract eclipse outside of time\, and that one day in the future the alignment of our planet with the sun and moon will eclipse\, if you will\, the phenomena of the eclipse\, I think my focus was primarily on the way in which two objects that are spheres overlap with one another in the sky in such a way that the one blanks out the other and produces the phenomena\, and I didn’t think about the other sphere that’s involved\, which is the earth. It’s three bodies. In so far as it’s three bodies\, it’s not so much a couple as a chorus. That’s why I’ve been wanting to bring in so many voices to the project beyond just you and me\, to create a chorus\, a polyvocality. We’re trying to produce something cosmic. \nPC \nComing back to the beginning of the conversation about public engagement\, what better way to engage the public than to engage the public? Like bringing people in\, and giving them the opportunity to think about metaphor and time\, is something that most people aren’t ever given the ability to do\, and we can give people a glimpse of that\, whether it be participating in one of our workshops or driving by one of the billboards. The potential for a moment of reflection\, a moment of stepping outside of one’s human time scale and human framework. \nI want to ask you one quick question. There have been multiple times over the course of this collaboration where I have been like\, I don’t really know what that means\, like poetics\, for example. I know what poetry is. And so how has interacting with me been? Has it made you think differently about your own discipline and the limitations of it? What are you taking from this as you move forward in your own practice? \nJL \nIt’s a great question. I think that working with you and working on these materials has invigorated my love and wonder for and about language in a way that I wouldn’t have predicted. When I look at my film practice\, it’s full of language. If someone had asked me last summer “ What will you do next?” I might have said something like\, “A film with no words.” But through this I’ve found so many rich meanings in scientific language\, and in dialogue\, which is often figurative out of necessity. I’m coming through on the other side with a wordless film on the horizon that I still may want to make\, but I’m reminded of how important\, and precious\, words can be\, especially when dealing with something like the mystery of stones and the rare transit of celestial bodies that will be on display. \n \nBiographies\nJason Livingston is a media artist\, filmmaker\, and educator. His award-winning films have been widely exhibited at festivals and museums\, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington\, D.C.\, the International Film Festival Rotterdam\, and Media City in Canada. He is currently researching histories of extractive cinema and abolitionist re-imaginings of our shared world as a Presidential Fellow in the Department of Media Study\, University at Buffalo. \nPhoebe A. Cohen is a paleontologist\, geobiologist\, teacher\, and science communicator. Her research focuses on understanding the interactions between life and the earth system in deep time by integrating micropaleontological\, geological\, and biological lines of evidence. Phoebe is an Associate Professor at Williams College\, where her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. She is also the co-host of the forthcoming podcast Jax and Phoebe Make a Planet\, and an advocate for inclusion and equity in the earth sciences and beyond. \nAbout the In the Path of Totality initiative\nThis work is supported by the Simons Foundation and is part of its ‘In the Path of Totality’ initiative. For more information\, visit inthepathoftotality.org . \nThe Simons Foundation’s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. Since its founding in 1994 by Jim and Marilyn Simons\, the foundation has been a champion of basic science through grant funding\, support for research and public engagement. We believe in asking big questions and providing sustained support to researchers working to unravel the mysteries of the universes. Through our work we make space for scientific discovery. \nThe Simons Foundation makes grants in four areas: Mathematics and Physical Sciences\, Life Sciences\, Autism and Neuroscience and Science\, Society and Culture. Our Flatiron Institute was opened in 2016 and conducts scientific research in-house\, supporting teams of top computational scientists. We recognize the value of collective effort and know that good science requires a diversity of perspectives. We actively promote large-scale collaboration through a pioneering grantmaking approach and are committed to the sharing of knowledge within the scientific community. We understand science is part of society and culture\, and we actively provide opportunities for people to engage with science in ways that are relevant and meaningful to them. \nImage: A still from Jason Livingston’s film Ancient Sunshine. A white round sun fills the image. On the top and middle around it are yellow\, orange\, and red fields\, and on the bottom\, are black and white textures that cut off the bottom of the sun. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/jason-livingston-with-phoebe-cohen-in-the-suns-absence/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Exhibition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Ancient-Sunshine.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240228T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240228T210000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191539Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191539Z UID:10001143-1709146800-1709154000@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Malek Rasamny and Matt Peterson's Spaces of Exception DESCRIPTION:Wednesday\, February 28\, 2024\, 7 pm ET\nIn-person and online\nFree or suggested donation\nTickets required; get tickets below\nMalek Rasamny and Matt Peterson’s feature length non-fiction film Spaces of Exception (90 minutes\, 2018) features interviews with members of the American Indian Movement\, the Mohawk Warrior Society\, and Diné families resisting displacement on Black Mesa\, as well as members of Fatah\, Palestinian environmental and media activists\, autonomous youth committees\, and the families of political prisoners and martyrs. The film investigates and juxtaposes the struggles\, communities\, and spaces of the American Indian reservation and the Palestinian refugee camp. It was shot from 2014 to 2017 in Arizona\, New Mexico\, New York\, and South Dakota\, as well as in Lebanon and the West Bank. Spaces of Exception is an attempt to understand the significance of the land—its memory and divisions—and the conditions for life\, community\, and sovereignty. \nSpaces of Exception comes out of the long-term multimedia project The Native and the Refugee\, which has been presented in Canada\, Denmark\, Ecuador\, England\, France\, Guatemala\, Italy\, Jordan\, Lebanon\, Palestine\, Portugal\, Syria\, Turkey\, and the United Arab Emirates\, within the refugee camps and reservations were the film was shot\, and at venues including cinemas\, museums\, and universities. \nCo-director Matt Peterson will join us for a conversation and Q&A with Jason Corwin (Seneca Nation\, Deer Clan\, Clinical Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies) upon the conclusion of the film. This event is presented in collaboration with PLASMA at the Department of Media Study\, curated by Elia Vargas. Special thank you to Burning Books and Jason Livingston. Copies of the book\, The Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook on Sovereignty and Survival by Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall\, and edited by Kahentinetha Rotiskarewake\, Philippe Blouin\, Matt Peterson\, and Malek Rasamny\, will be available for purchase courtesy of Burning Books. \nFor in-person attendees: See how to get to Squeaky Wheel here. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. \nFor online attendees: Upon check-out\, you will receive an email titled “Your Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center order has been received!”. A private link will be included in that email; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. \n\nTeaser from The Native and the Refugee on Vimeo. \nRecent interviews with the filmmakers and reviews of the film\n“‘The Native and the Refugee’ Shares Narratives of Resistance” (Andreas Petrossiants\, Frieze) \n“In conversation with Kareem Estefan” (e-flux) \nSpaces of Exception by A.M. Gittlitz (Screen Slate) \nSpaces of Exception by Caitlin Quinlan (Reverse Shot) \nBiographies of the filmmakers and participants\nMatt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine\, an experimental space in New York City. He previously directed the documentary feature Scenes from a Revolt Sustained (2014)\, and co-edited the books In the Name of the People (2018) and The Reservoir (2022). \nMalek Rasamny is a documentary filmmaker\, researcher and writer. His work has been featured in publications including The New Inquiry\, Lundi Matin and Newlines Magazine. He is currently working on a doctoral research project at Paris Nanterre University concerning the social phenomenon of reincarnation within the Druze community of Lebanon. \nJason Corwin is a citizen of the Seneca Nation\, Deer Clan and a lifelong media maker. He was the founding director of the Seneca Media & Communications Center and has produced several short and feature length documentaries. Jason has extensive experience as a community-based educator utilizing digital media and land-based learning to engage with Indigenous ways of knowing\, sustainability\, and social justice topics. He is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor at University at Buffalo’s Department of Indigenous Studies. \nBanner image: A still from the film Spaces of Exception\, showing Standing Rock covered in snow under a gray sky. There is a road with a car in the middle of the frame\, and a few people in big coats. Over 50 flags of Indigenous nations and other countries are on either side of the road. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/malek-rasamny-and-matt-petersons-spaces-of-exception/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Hybrid,Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Spaces-of-Exception.jpeg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240219T080000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240308T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191539Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191539Z UID:10001148-1708329600-1709928000@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Extended: Jordan Lord | Works from The Voice of Democracy\, with Abby Sun and Pooja Rangan DESCRIPTION:A still from the film An All-Around Feel Good by Jordan Lord. Prominent black borders are on the left\, right and bottom edges of the image. Framed by the black borders is an image of the Colorado State Fair\, taken from the bleachers on a bright sunny day. The camera is facing outside the main stage\, where there are horses and riders in a pen\, numerous parked cars and a tractor\, and several U.S. flags\, and audience members both near the camera and across the stage. On the bottom is the caption “Belonging to the nation-state is not premised on seeing or attending.”\nNow extended through March 8: Online access to works in the exhibition\nOnline and in-person: Friday\, February February 23:\n5:30 pm ET: Screening of How Is It That You Frame Old Glory in Your Mouth?\n7 pm ET\, online and in-person: Conversation with Jordan Lord\, Abby Sun\, and Pooja Rangan.\nASL interpretation and CART provided\, catering from Alibaba Kebab for in-person attendees.\nFree or suggested donation; get tickets below\nCelebrating the closing of Jordan Lord’s solo exhibition The Voice of Democracy\, Squeaky Wheel invites audiences from Buffalo and beyond to watch the works in the exhibition online\, and join us for a screening and conversation between the artist\, Abby Sun\, and Pooja Rangan. The works in the exhibition analyze the politics of voice and accent across disability\, race\, class\, and gender\, and how they shape the terms of entry to democracy. \nAttendees will have the opportunity to experience the four works by the artist included in the exhibition anytime between February 19 through February 23. \n\nHow Is It That You Frame Old Glory in Your Mouth? (digital video\, 74 minutes\, sound\, open captions\, audio description\, 2023)\nAn All-Around Feel Good (digital video\, 25 minutes\, sound\, open captions\, audio description\, 2024)\nI didn’t set out to make a film about religion (digital video\, 30 minutes\, sound\, open captions\, audio description\, 2024)\nDocumentary Participation Agreement (PDF contract template\, 2023)\n\nOn Friday\, February 23\, online and in-person attendees are invited to a dedicated screening of How Do You Frame Old Glory in Your Mouth? at 5:30 pm ET and a conversation about the exhibition with Lord\, Rangan\, and Sun at 7 pm ET. Catering with vegetarian options will be provided for in-person attendees; ASL interpretation and CART will be provided for all. \nLearn more about the exhibition here. \nBiographies of the artist and participants\nJordan Lord (US) is a filmmaker\, writer\, and artist whose work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts\, framing and support\, access\, and documentary. Their films have been shown at festivals and venues including MoMA Doc Fortnight\, Dokufest Kosovo\, Union Docs\, and the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. Their film Shared Resources (2021) won the John Marshall Award for Contemporary Ethnographic Media at the Camden International Film Festival and the Critics Jury Prize at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. They have presented solo exhibitions at Piper Keys and Artists Space. In 2021\, they were profiled as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine\, and their work has been featured in publications such as Screen Slate\, Millennium Film Journal\, and Hyperallergic. \nAbby Sun (she/her) is IDA’s Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary magazine. Before joining IDA\, Abby was the Curator of the DocYard and co-curated My Sight is Lined with Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video with Keisha Knight. As a graduate student researcher in the MIT Open Documentary Lab\, Abby edited Immerse. She has bylines in Film Comment\, Filmmaker\, Film Quarterly\, Notebook\, Sight & Sound\, and other publications. Abby has served on festival juries for Hot Docs\, Dokufest\, Palm Springs\, New Orleans\, and CAAMfest\, as well as nominating committees for the Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye. She has reviewed projects for IDFA Forum\, BGDM\, NEA\, SFFILM\, LEF Foundation\, Princess Grace Foundation\, the Boston Foundation\, Sundance Catalyst\, and spoken on and facilitated panels at Locarno\, IFFR\, TIFF\, NYFF\, EFM\, and other film festivals. Along with Keisha\, Abby received a fall 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She produced Shared Resources and\, with Jordan Lord\, received a 2022 American Stories Documentary Fellowship for the upcoming The Voice of Democracy. Her hometown is Columbia\, Missouri\, US. \nPooja Rangan is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. Her research explores the humanitarian preoccupations of documentary media\, with an emphasis on the ethics of voice and listening. Rangan is author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press\, 2017) and co-editor of Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object\, Method\, and Practice (University of California Press\, 2023). Her forthcoming book The Documentary Audit (from Columbia University Press)\, explores the politics of listening in documentary\, asking how accented\, disabled\, and abolitionist practitioners trouble established documentary values of justice and accountability. Rangan co-edits the Investigating Visible Evidence book series at Columbia University Press and serves on the editorial board of the journal World Records; she also served as Board President of the documentary arts showcase\, The Flaherty. \nThis project was made possible through support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/jordan-lord-works-from-the-voice-of-democracy-with-pooja-rangan/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Artist Talk,Hybrid,Screenings,Virtual ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/an_all-around_feel_good-1080p-frame-at-7m48s.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20240131T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20240131T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191538Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191538Z UID:10001142-1706724000-1706731200@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Eclipse Haiku Workshop for Youth and Adults DESCRIPTION:Wednesday\, January 31\, 6–8 pm\nFree or suggested donation\nOpen to ages 12 and up\nLimited space; register below\nIn this one-time workshop\, participants will explore geological timescales\, public art\, climate science\, and poetry in anticipation of the Solar Eclipse of 2024. Through brief presentations and exercises\, guest artist Jason Livingston and paleontologist Phoebe Cohen will facilitate haiku-writing generated by the evening’s topics and prompts. This workshop is recommended for audiences young and old who would like to explore their creativity and engage with astronomy\, geology\, and climate. \nNo prior experience with writing haiku is expected. Please note: participants under age 16 must attend with an adult. \nLivingston and Cohen presented this workshop privately for our Saturday Cafe program this past Fall; we are excited to present this second edition\, open to all. Participants will have the opportunity to record audio of themselves reading their haiku aloud. Work written and recorded by participants may be requested for inclusion in Livingston and Cohen’s upcoming exhibition and public art project In the Sun’s Absence. Click here to learn more about the exhibition. \nBiographies of the instructors\nJason Livingston is a media artist\, filmmaker\, and educator. His award-winning films have been widely exhibited at festivals and museums\, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington\, D.C.\, the International Film Festival Rotterdam\, and Media City in Canada. He is currently researching histories of extractive cinema and abolitionist re-imaginings of our shared world as a Presidential Fellow in the Department of Media Study\, University at Buffalo. \nPhoebe Cohen is a paleontologist\, geobiologist\, teacher\, and science communicator. Her research focuses on understanding the interactions between life and the earth system in deep time by integrating micropaleontological\, geological\, and biological lines of evidence. Phoebe is an Associate Professor at Williams College\, where her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. She is also the co-host of the forthcoming podcast Jax and Phoebe Make a Planet\, and an advocate for inclusion and equity in the earth sciences and beyond. \nThis event is supported by the Simons Foundation as part of their In the Path of Totality project. \nBanner image: Phoebe Cohen is lecturing\, standing in front of of a projection with several students gathered around a table with notebooks. On the screen is a diagram depicting the Sun\, Moon\, and Earth’s position during a solar eclipse\, with the moon blocking the sun relative to the earth. Cohen is pointing at the moon. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/eclipse-haiku-workshop-for-youth-and-adults/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Education,Special Event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Squeaky-Wheel-Workshop-1.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231208T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231208T210000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191524Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191524Z UID:10001124-1702062000-1702069200@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Emily Watlington presents The Radical Accessibility of Video Art (for Hearing People) DESCRIPTION:Friday\, December 8\, 2023\, 7 pm ET\nIn-person at Squeaky Wheel and online\nFree or suggested donation; ASL interpretation available\nTickets available below\nJoin us for a special presentation by critic and curator Emily Watlington titled The Radical Accessibility of Video Art (for Hearing People). A coalition of moving image artists is using closed captions and image descriptions as an artistic medium. They are modeling types of access that are not afterthoughts\, but folded into a work’s makeup. This lecture will discuss those artists\, locating them alongside the video art pioneers who were initially drawn to video because it promised a radical kind of accessibility the white cube didn’t afford. \nFor in-person attendees: The event will take place at Squeaky Wheel. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. \nFor online attendees: Upon check-out\, you will receive an email titled “Your Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center order has been received!”. A private link will be included in that email; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. \nWe are excited to welcome Emily Watlington to Buffalo for the first time since her virtual Workspace Residency in 2020. This event is presented as part of the series [Speaking in Foreign Language]. \nBiography of the speaker\nEmily Watlington is a critic\, curator\, and senior editor at Art in America. Her writing often focuses on disability culture\, but also those places where art and science meet. She is a Fulbright scholar with a master’s degree from MIT—in the history\, theory\, and criticism of architecture and art—and in 2020 she received the Theorist Award from C/O Berlin. When she is able to step away from New York\, where her life revolves around reading\, writing\, and seeing art\, she is curious about roller skating\, foraging mushrooms\, deserts\, animal liberation\, and outer space. \nLiza Sylvestre\, Captioned-Channel Surfing (still)\, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Image description: Movie still\, close-up of a white man and woman wearing summer clothes in a rural setting looking excited in a phone booth. A caption reads “They are so young and excited and happy.” URL:https://squeaky.org/event/emily-watlington-presents-the-radical-accessibility-of-video-art-for-hearing-people/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Hybrid,Presentation ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Sylvestre_16.jpeg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231206T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231206T210000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191525Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191525Z UID:10001132-1701889200-1701896400@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Sharlene Bamboat's If From Every Tongue It Drips DESCRIPTION:Wednesday\, December 8\, 7 pm @ Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center and online\nPre-screening reception with catering at 6 pm\nFree and open to the public\nGet tickets for the online screening below\nSqueaky Wheel is excited to be a co-presenter of the screening of Sharlene Bamboat’s feature length hybrid-documentary\, If From Every Tongue it Drips. The film that follows a queer Urdu poet as she traces the connections between quantum physics and political movements in South Asia. The filmmaker will be present for a Q&A with Squeaky Wheel curator Ekrem Serdar. This event is presented by the Humanities Institute/Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program Film Series at the University at Buffalo\, and is screened as part of Squeaky Wheel’s event series [Speaking in Foreign Language]. \nIn-person attendees: The event will take place at 341 Delaware Ave\, Buffalo\, NY 14202. A catered pre-screening reception will begin at 6 pm. \nOnline attendees: Upon check-out\, you will receive an email titled “Your Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center order has been received!”. A private link will be included in that email; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. \nConversation between Ekrem Serdar and Sharlene Bamboat\, introduced by Donte McFaddon. Special thank you to Tammy McGovern and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center. \n \nSharlene Bamboat\, If From Every Tongue it Drips\, 68 min\, Canada\, Sri Lanka\, Scotland\, 2021\nIf From Every Tongue it Drips is a hybrid documentary film that uses the framework of quantum physics to explore the ways that personal relationships and political movements at once transcend and challenge time\, space\, identity and location. \nThe film follows the lives of a couple living in Batticaloa\, Sri Lanka; Ponni writes Rekhti\, a form of 19th century\, Urdu\, queer poetry; the other\, Sarala\, the camera operator. As their personal lives unfold on camera\, the lines between rehearsal and reality\, location and distance\, self and other dissipate and reinforce one another. \nSimultaneously\, through poet and camera operator’s daily lives\, interconnections between British colonialism\, Indian nationalism and the impact of both on contemporary poetry\, dance and music in South Asia is revealed. \nThe film explores both literal and figural translation as multiple ways of looking\, embedded within the filmmaking process\, which was all conducted long distance. The scenes were constructed in Montreal\, where Sharlene sent informal instructions to Sarala\, who then filmed Ponni\, who would then send the footage back to Montreal\, from which the next scene was written. This process continued for 6 months on a weekly basis\, after which most of the film was constructed. The sound was constructed between Montreal\, Batticaloa and the Isle of Skye\, where the sound designer Richy Carey resides. The film incorporates the sonic sphere of all three locations\, enhancing notions of quantum entanglement which are employed throughout the filmic process\, to showcase the interconnections between location\, geography\, self and other which continue to be intertwined. \nThis film nods to Sharlene’s ongoing interest in both the many ways that popular culture can be politicised\, as well as the sensuous possibilities of its reclamation. \nBiography of the filmmaker\nSharlene Bamboat is a moving image and installation artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her practice engages with translation\, history\, and sound to uncover sensory and fractured ways of understanding the relationship between the self and the social in transnational contexts. \nHer works examine the role of colonialism\, globalization\, culture\, and desire through poetics\, abstraction\, and collaboration by working with artists\, musicians and writers to animate historical\, political\, legal\, and pop-culture materials. Her most frequent collaborator\, since 2009\, is Alexis Mitchell. In addition to her art practice\, Sharlene works in the arts-sector\, including artist-run organizations and collectives in Canada\, and with artists both locally and internationally. \nBanner image description: A still from If From Every Tongue It Drips by Sharlene Bamboat. A person sits on a wooden rocking chair in a bright orange room sunshine spilling in. The person in the chair is half out of frame arms holding a piece of paper. Yellow caption on screen reads: “hence\, matter is an infolding\, an in-volution. hmmmmmmmmmmm”. Image and description courtesy of the artist. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/sharlene-bamboats-if-from-every-tongue-it-drips/ LOCATION:Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center\, 341 Delaware Avenue\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14202\, United States CATEGORIES:Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IFETID_Still_3-scaled.jpg GEO:42.8937279;-78.8753531 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center 341 Delaware Avenue Buffalo NY 14202 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=341 Delaware Avenue:geo:-78.8753531,42.8937279 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231205T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231205T210000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191538Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191538Z UID:10001125-1701802800-1701810000@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam DESCRIPTION:Tuesday\, December 5\, 2023\, 7 pm ET\n@ Journey’s End Refugee Services and online\nFree or suggested donation\nTickets available below\nAn essential work by one of the most influential filmmakers living today\, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (108 mins\, 1989) is presented as part of the series [Speaking in Foreign Language]. Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance\, printed texts\, folk poetry and the words and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam—from both North and South—and the United States\, Trinh’s film challenges official culture with the voices of women. A theoretically and formally complex work\, Surname Viet Given Name Nam explores the difficulty of translation\, and themes of dislocation and exile\, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war. Presented with an introduction by curator Ekrem Serdar. Special thank you to Women Make Movies. \nFor in-person attendees: JERS is located on the fifth floor of Tri-Main Center; head left after you exit the elevator. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. \nFor online attendees: Upon check-out\, you will receive an email titled “Your Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center order has been received!”. A private link will be included in that email; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. \nBiography of the filmmaker\nTrinh T. Minh-ha is the recipient of numerous awards and grants (including the “Trailblazers” Award at MIPDOC\, Cannes; AFI National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award\, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation\, the National Endowment of the Arts\, the Rockefeller Foundation\, the American Film Institute\, The Japan Foundation\, and the California Arts Council)\, her films have been given over fifty retrospectives in the US\, the UK\, Brazil\, Canada\, Italy\, Korea\, Spain\, the Netherlands\, Slovenia\, France\, Germany\, Switzerland\, Austria\, Japan\, India\, Taiwan\, Hong Kong\, Jerusalem\, and were exhibited at the international contemporary art exhibition Documenta 11 (2002) in Germany. They have shown widely in the States\, in Canada\, Senegal\, Australia\, and New Zealand\, as well as in Europe and Asia (including in Italy\, Belgium\, Spain\, Sweden\, Finland\, Japan\, India\, Taiwan\, Jerusalem\, Reassemblage was exhibited at The New York Film Festival (1983) and has toured the country with the Asian American Film Festival among other festivals. Naked Spaces received the Blue Ribbon Award for Best Experimental Feature at the American Int’l. Film Festival and the Golden Athena Award for Best Feature Documentary at the Athens International Film Festival in 1986; it toured nationally and internationally with the 1987 Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Surname Viet Given Name Nam has received the Merit Award from the Bombay International Film Festival\, the Film as Art Award from the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SF Museum of Modern Art) and the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film and Video Festival. Shoot for the Contents won the Jury’s Best Cinematography Award at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival and the Best Feature Documentary Award at the Athens International Film Festival\, and toured internationally with the 1993 Biennale of the Whitney Museum. A Tale of Love showed internationally in over twenty-four film festivals\, including Berlin and Toronto. The Fourth Dimension (Locarno\, Viennale\, Edinburg\, London) and Night Passage continue to exhibit widely (UK\, Austria\, Spain\, Japan\, Korea\, Shanghai). \nTrinh Minh-ha has traveled and lectured extensively—in the States\, as well as in Europe\, Asia\, Australia and New Zealand—on film\, art\, feminism\, and cultural politics. She taught at the National Conservatory of Music in Dakar\, Senegal (1977-80); at universities such as Cornell\, San Francisco State\, Smith\, and Harvard\, Ochanomizu (Tokyo)\, Ritsumeikan (Kyoto)\, Dongguk (Seoul); and is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California\, Berkeley. \nImage: A still from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film\, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989). A mostly dark image\, with a barely lit woman with black hair looking to the left of the image. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/trinh-t-minh-has-surname-viet-given-name-nam/ LOCATION:Journey’s End Refugee Services\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite #530\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Hybrid,Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/SURNAM_HERO.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231130T183000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231130T203000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191523Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191523Z UID:10001133-1701369000-1701376200@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Work-in-progress: Avye Alexandres' Compass DESCRIPTION:Thursday\, November 30\, 2023\, 6:30 pm\nFree or suggested donation\nSqueaky Wheel presents an evening with Avye Alexandres\, as she presents a work-in-progress of her upcoming project Compass. \nCompass follows four women as they each pack a bag and leave home. It is a 4-channel film installation incorporating individual soundscapes and the film actors in a live performance. The artist’s talk on this work-in-progress will include a screening of one preliminary short-film\, experiments in sound design\, additional exploratory film footage\, and a live performance component\, with a short Q&A. \nConceived and directed by Avye Alexandres\, with collaborators: Marissa Graves\, Johnette “JA” Warren-Askew\, Rachelle Toarmino\, and sound designer Francisco Corthey. Compass is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This 2023 Support for Artists Grant was sponsored by The Buffalo International Film Festival. Compass is a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. \nAbout the artist\nAvye Alexandres is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Buffalo\, NY. Her practice investigates the psycho-social ramifications of structures and space. Evolving from a background in photography and performance her work encompasses immersive sculpture\, film and video\, conceptual or participatory works\, as well as site-specific installations. Her work has exhibited in venues across the US such as The Wiesman Art Museum\, Burchfield Penney Art Museum\, The Soap Factory\, Squeaky Wheel\, IFP-MN Center for Media Arts\, Penn State University among others. She has developed work in residencies\, commissions and fellowships since 2004. Such work includes a Northern Lights/Jerome grant for an motion triggered light sculptures installation\, a Squeaky Wheel Workspace residency for a live multimedia performance\, and Buffalo Art Studio’s Restoration at Silo City material reuse project. In 2023 she received a NYSCA Support for Artists Grant for development and pre-production of Compass. Stay updated on this unique project here. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/work-in-progress-avye-alexandres-compass/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Work-in-progress ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Compass.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20231110 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20240309 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191524Z LAST-MODIFIED:20260408T213951Z UID:10001126-1699574400-1709942399@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Jordan Lord | The Voice of Democracy DESCRIPTION:Image description: A still from the film The Voice of Democracy shows a dim living room\, in which a tv hangs on the wall. The tv displays two older white people\, the filmmaker’s parents\, sitting with a gold lamp in between them. The filmmaker’s father looks angry and their mother looks concerned. The tv image is paused on a Youtube window\, which reads: “Mom and Dad interview selects\,” below which a series of other videos are recommended including “The Biggest Snubs of the Olivier Awards\,” “Top 25 Roller Coasters\,” and “Food & Wine Festival.” Reflected in a mirror below the television are the filmmaker’s parents sitting in the same set-up as their image on the television\, with the same gold lamp between them. They are looking across the room at the filmmaker\, a 30-something white person with a buzzcut and a beard\, who looks back at them with their arms folded and legs crossed\, with a serious and sympathetic look. Their father is pointing at the television\, saying something. In the center of the image\, between the mirror and the television\, is a caption that reads\, “Why?” Image and image description courtesy of the artist.\nOpening Friday\, November 10\, 5–8 pm\nFree and open to the public\nOn view Tuesdays–Fridays\, 12–5 pm and by appointment\, extended through March 8\, 2024\nEmail ekrem@squeaky.org for appointments\, including fully masked visits\nSqueaky Wheel is excited to present The Voice of Democracy\, a solo exhibition by Jordan Lord. The multimedia exhibition analyzes the politics of voice and accent across disability\, race\, class\, and gender\, and how they shape the terms of entry to democracy. \nThe Voice of Democracy is anchored by Lordʼs personal story of winning a nationwide “audio essay” high school scholarship contest\, presented by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). The installation features conversations with the artistʼs family and other participants regarding the contest\, research into the history of the VFW\, and a parallel set of reflections about the entanglements between access technology\, (disabled) audiences\, and nationalism. The work showcases how sound recordings are a vital player in the democratic process itself\, and the role recorded voices play in perceiving (and creating) a crisis in the teaching of US history\, politics\, and civics. \nThe exhibition features four works – a written contract by Lord\, and three video works that will be released over the duration of the exhibition. Through January 10\, the exhibition features a promotional video for The Voice of Democracy competition\, with audio description and open captions by Jordan Lord to provide greater context into the competition. At the opening\, Lord will be present where they will deliver brief remarks. \nSqueaky Wheel is delighted to finally welcome the artist in person for this occasion; Lord was previously a virtual Workspace Resident in 2021\, and we had screened their feature film Shared Resources in 2020. The exhibition is presented as part of [Speaking in Foreign Language]\, a thematic series of events on voice\, translation\, legibility\, and power. \nThis project was made possible through support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Humanities New York with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. \nPublic Programs\nFriday\, November 10\, 2023\, 5–8 pm\nExhibition opening with brief remarks by the artist at 7 pm \n*Postponed* Saturday\, December 2\, 5 pm\nCuratorial tour with Jordan Lord’s I Didn’t Set Out to Make a Film about Religion \nFebruary 19–23\, 2024\nOnline access to the works in The Voice of Democracy. Sign up here. \nFebruary 23\, 2024\, 5:30 pm\nOnline and in-person: Screening of Jordan Lord’s How Is It That You Frame Old Glory in Your Mouth?\, followed by a conversation with Jordan Lord\, Abby Sun\, and Pooja Rangan. Sign up here. \nSaturday\, February 20\, 2 pm\nCuratorial tour with Ekrem Serdar \nCommissioned essay and documentation\nClick here to read a newly commissioned essay on the exhibition by Amy Ching-Yan Lam. \nExhibition documentation by Squeaky Wheel and Calvin Hardick. \n\nImage descriptions\, left to right\, top to bottom: A view of the installation of Jordan Lord’s exhibition “The Voice of Democracy” in Squeaky Wheel’s gallery space. On the left is I Didn’t Set Out to Make a Film About Religion\, a red projected image on a wall\, with a red color field and the captions “‘We Heart New College”\, people holding cameras\, police officers”. On the far end of the room is a person looking at a dimly lit television screen wearing headphones\, featuring An All-Around Feel Good. On the television are a tree and captions underneath. 2. A seated person viewing How Is It That You Frame Old Glory In Your Mouth?\, a video projected on a screen. On the screen is Jordan seated with their arms and legs crossed\, and one eyebrow slightly raised. They are looking towards the camera. Next to them is a mirror showing Lord’s parents\, Deborah and Albert\, who are speaking to Jordan. Above the mirror is a television screen with video of Jordan’s parents as it’s been paused. There are captions in the middle of the screen: “I thought your essay was great\, but it’s not…” 3. A person wearing a hat and sitting on a couch\, watching a television screen that is showing An All-Around Feel Good. He is wearing headphones. An arena is on the screen\, along with the caption “This barrier quite literally marks national borders” 4. A person holding Jordan Lord’s Documentary Participation Agreement\, a stapled document over multiple pages. On the document is several paragraphs of text; the lighting is most aligned to the following paragraph “The standard appearance release agreement is premised on several necessary fictions\, including the possibility that the filmmaker(s) are not responsible for what they choose to put into their own films; that representations of a person’s life\, story\, or likeness can rightfully become the sole property of someone else; and that the conversion of these representations into the filmmaker(s) private property secures a relationship of trust.”\n\nIntroduction by Jordan Lord\n \nThe show isn’t finished yet. Two of the videos I’ve just started on. The other one I only finished editing this week. I’m telling you this\, less as an apology or an excuse\, and more to think about how it changes the work you might find here. \nIn many ways\, this show was prompted by seeing Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s film The Viewing Booth. The film largely consists of recording sessions\, where he films the reactions of a Temple University student\, Maia\, as she watches video documentation of apartheid in Palestine. The film is meant to question the limits of documentary images as a tool to change the minds of those who are already fixed in their beliefs. The film shows Maia in the process of seeming to waver in her Zionist ideology\, when presented with brutal evidence of the violence of Israeli settler colonialism in the West Bank\, only for her to end up casting doubt on the veracity of the images she sees. She decides that she cannot trust the images alone because all recorded images are shot from an inherently subjective point of view and claims that the videos would need more context\, in order for her to believe them. \nGrowing up in a Zionist Christian evangelical family\, there was little about Maia’s intransigence that surprised me. However\, what most disturbed me about the film is the way in which Maia confirms her belief system\, not through a lack of media literacy\, but actually through tools of media criticism. \nAt one point\, she reacts to a video recorded by a Palestinian father of his frightened children woken up in the middle of the night by the IDF raiding their home. She compares the beginning and end of the video––the fact that we don’t see what happened before or after the video was recorded––to cuts in a Hollywood film or tv show\, arguing that the spatial and temporal frames of a video are forms of editing in themselves and\, therefore\, cannot be trusted as the whole truth. Of course\, as Alexandrowicz points out to her\, there are mappable distinctions we can make between video evidence\, documentary film\, and fiction. However\, she remains unconvinced and becomes increasingly confident in her counter-reading of the images as constructed and\, therefore\, untrustworthy. In reflecting on the film\, I feel starkly confronted with the fact that the analytical tools I teach in filmmaking classes are not necessarily enough to help students counteract the glut of disinformation and ideology in the media they encounter and can just as easily prompt dangerous misreadings and misperceptions. \nI felt similarly disturbed when I learned that Christopher Rufo\, the man described by some as “the most influential right wing activist in America” at the moment\, began his career as a left-leaning documentary filmmaker. Right up until his 2019 fellowship with the conservative disinformation machine\, the Claremont Institute\, he was working on a PBS-commissioned documentary about poverty in deindustrialized cities\, called America Lost. To look at the start of the film\, one could easily mistake it for a fairly run of the mill liberal documentary. It’s only through the increasingly ideological voiceover that Rufo interprets what he sees\, not as the ravages of capitalism\, but the dissolution of the nuclear family. In his own self-narrative\, when confronted with these images\, he had to rethink everything he thought he previously knew\, hamfistedly underlining his own film’s relationship to the liberal documentary as a tool for political conversion\, even as he deploys its tropes for a conservative audience of the already converted. \nIt’s not just documentary strategies but criticality itself that Rufo wields as a weapon in the new culture war on liberal arts education. He has turned from the liberal documentary form toward making didactic Youtube videos that analyze all of our social structures as having been taken over by liberals\, in the wake of the failures of Marxist movements of the 20th century. In these videos and talking head appearances on conservative media\, he chases after the bandwagon while also perpetually testing out new dog whistles for racism\, transphobia\, and misogyny\, popularizing Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies as household terms for conservative parents to use in school board grassroots organizing\, prompting a new wave of book bans and racist history textbooks. The legislation he advised Trump on to defund DEI trainings in government agencies has been copycatted all across the country to make it much more difficult to teach things that were already quite difficult to teach\, not only reanimating old classics like ‘the gay teacher who wants to make their students gay’ but also creating new analytical language for conservatives to prevent the classroom from being used to teach students the analytical tools to be able to recognize these tactics and the historical context to be able to situate them. (1) \nOver the same period of Rufo’s rebrand\, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a living\, teaching in various liberal arts colleges\, recently moving across the country to take a full-time job. In my teaching\, I try to foreground access tools like audio description and captioning as fundamental parts of making a film. When students are first exposed to the idea that these tools can be used as part of their creative practices\, they often focus on the idea that all description is “subjective.” Although I\, of course\, agree that creative practices of description push back on the so-called “objectivity” of standard access practices\, to name this work a process of making images “subjective” feels disturbingly resonant to me with Maia’s interpretation of what she sees in The Viewing Booth. \nAlthough this might come across as semantic\, what I want to understand about description––especially when it comes from more than one person––is whether it can be used\, less for telling us something about images themselves and more about demonstrating the position of the person doing the describing. And maybe instead of thinking about these positions as fixed\, we can think about description as showing how audiences are situated\, in relation to what they see and hear (or don’t see and hear). Another way of putting this is that I’m curious about what these access practices\, in which audiences describe what they see and what they hear\, might be able to tell us about how a position forms and at what points it is challenged. \nThis feels particularly urgent to consider in this moment\, in which students\, teachers\, lawyers\, filmmakers\, and artists––among many others––are\, again\, experiencing disciplinary and legal action\, losing their jobs\, and ending up on lists for taking a position about how they interpret images of Palestinian genocide. The images of this genocide hold their own self-evident facts\, but the process of how they’re interpreted creates the political reality for those who live in relation to them. This is different from saying that the images are relative. – Jordan Lord \n(1) And as Kay Gabriel highlights in her n+1 article\, “The Anti-Trans Panic and the Crusade Against Teachers\,” these strategies most likely have an economic motive of eroding solidarities between teachers unions and parents of public school students\, rather than merely bringing conservative values to the classroom. \n\nAbout the artist and writer\nJordan Lord (US) is a filmmaker\, writer\, and artist whose work addresses the relationships between historical and emotional debts\, framing and support\, access\, and documentary. Their films have been shown at festivals and venues including MoMA Doc Fortnight\, Dokufest Kosovo\, Union Docs\, and the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. Their film Shared Resources (2021) won the John Marshall Award for Contemporary Ethnographic Media at the Camden International Film Festival and the Critics Jury Prize at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. They have presented solo exhibitions at Piper Keys and Artists Space. In 2021\, they were profiled as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine\, and their work has been featured in publications such as Screen Slate\, Millennium Film Journal\, and Hyperallergic. \nAmy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of Property Journal (2024); Baby Book (2023)\, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry; and Looty Goes to Heaven (2022). From 2006 to 2020 she was part of the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. Their exhibition Entertaining Every Second (2018-19) looked at experiences and legacies of the American War in Vietnam. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto\, and was born in Hong Kong. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/jordan-lords-voice-of-democracy/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Artist Talk,Exhibition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Jordan-Lord-Voice-of-Democracy-scaled.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231103T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231103T190000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191524Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191524Z UID:10001131-1699034400-1699038000@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Squeaky Wheel's 20th Animation Fest! DESCRIPTION:Friday\, November 3\, 6 pm ET @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum and online\nFree or suggested donation\nTickets for online screening below. In-person audiences can just come to the AKG!\nFeaturing 10 films made near and far\, the 20th edition of Squeaky Wheel’s Animation Fest features animations made in a variety of media\, forms\, and materials\, from stop-motion puppetry\, AI generated imagery\, hand-drawn works and more. \nThe 10 films in the programs present a smorgasbord of delights\, personal visions\, and topics\, including internet-era love letters\, surreal narratives\, family relationships\, and films both energetic and joyful\, and somber and quiet. The fest features work by Asparuh Petrov\, Birgit Rathsmann\, Claire Schlaikjer\, Emily Sasmor\, Ivana Bosnjak Volda and Thomas Johnson Volda\, Jeffrey Zablotny\, Jingyi Wang\, Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore\, Megan Young\, and Sarah E. Jenkins. The 20th Animation Fest was curated by Squeaky Wheel staff members Caroline Doherty\, Ekrem Serdar\, Mark Longolucco\, and Meg Specksgoor. \nFor in-person attendees: No tickets are required; the event is free as part of the museum’s First Fridays. The event will begin in the auditorium of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum at 6 pm. \nFor online attendees: Upon check-out\, you will receive an email titled “Your Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center order has been received!”. A private link will be included in that email; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here.\n
\n\nSarah Jenkins\, Disappearing Acts\, 4 min\, 2022\nDarkness encroaches upon a loggy landscape of animated tricks and turns.\nJeffrey Zablotny\, Sub Terra\, 8.5 min\, 2022\nA routine tree inspection unexpectedly gives way to a journey into the deep. Set in a hidden subterranean world\, ‘Sub Terra’ is the haunting mystery of a cryptic\, first-person perspective. \nIvana Bosnjak Volda\, Thomas Johnson Volda\, Remember How I Used to Ride a White Horse\, 10 min\, 2022\nA waitress goes about her daily routine serving coffee whilst having thoughts of escaping her reality. A costumer is constantly recording and listening back to the surrounding sounds of the café and is completely fixated by this task. Apathy is a condition that leads consciousness into stagnation\, but do either of them realise that they are themselves examples of this condition? \nClaire Schlaikjer\, Baking With Piggu\, 3.5 min\, 2023\nWarning: contains some flashing images. Piggu started life as a real stuffed pig\, sewn out of canvas and stuffed with recycled fabric insulation\, which I made in the spring of 2020. The pig gradually acquired a striking physical presence that I had not intended or expected. The sparseness of his construction made him enigmatic — he was a (literal) blank canvas whose staring eyes could suggest any emotion and contain any experience. He became a perfect muse\, as a physically pliable but spiritually unyielding subject. This led me to consider the complexity of our relationships with anything creature-like\, where familiarity is often confused with understanding. For this animation\, I wanted to explore this dynamic of misidentification\, and what it would be like if Piggu’s internal world was as real as I imagine it to be. In the story\, toys suffer the same unfulfilled desires and fantasies as people\, but their real tragedy comes from their inability to express themselves. Piggu inspires empathy\, but this empathy breeds relationships that can be as doting as they are callous. Through animation\, I was curious to see the effect of empathy towards creatures or objects which we cannot communicate with\, especially when those creatures are given the chance to react but not respond. \nBirgit Rathsmann\, Primitive Games: Love Letter\, 5 min\, 2018\nThree shapes created by an animator create havoc in her computer while she is on her lunch break. They write a love letter to their animator\, but since they don’t know what it’s like to have a body\, the letter is .. unusual.\nBirgit Rathsmann: Writer\, Director\, Producer\, Animator\nBlue Shape: River L. Ramirez (Pervert Everything\, Los Espookys)\nWhite Shape: Mary Houlihan (CEO Skyscraper)\nRed Shape: Becket Bowes \nEmily Sasmor\, Flore\, 2 min\, 2022\nFLORE is a one act opera. Flore’s partner calls her up to declare their love to her in an endless night. \nAsparuh Petrov\, Trace\, 7 min\, 2022\nА young writer dedicates his nights to hunting entangled phrases with his pen. The moment he is confronted with the pregnancy of his wife his world collapses. Lingering fears and painful memories overwhelm him and he needs to trace the missing piece. \nKahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore\, The Clay She Is Made Of\, 2 min\, 2023\nThe Clay She Is Made Of draws parallels between the profound strength and creativity of Sky Woman from the Rotinonhsyón:ni / Haudenosaunee creation story and the filmmaker’s mother. This two-minute animated and live-action film is narrated all in Kanyen’kè:ha (Mohawk). \nMegan Young\, Carry On\, 3 min\, 2023\nThis piece is part of an ongoing project\, titled With What We Could Carry\, considering the responsibilities we embrace and what we shed as we travel across borders and through time. It explores the complexities of heritage\, labor\, and technological advancement through social practice and computational rendering. The resulting animation combines 3D mesh and models of myself\, my mother\, and my children collected through LiDAR and photogrammetry scans. Our flesh and figures are represented as overlapping and traversable landscapes reflecting themes of migration\, matriarchy\, and the dreams of our elders. (The looping animation was originally produced for viewing as a media installation.) \nJingyi Wang\, Good Old Days Part.1\, 5 min\, 2023\nGood Old Days Part.1” is a 5-minute experimental film that tells a story about a city with a collective memory of a bygone era and its tangled residents. It’s done through a series of absurd cinematic shots\, pixelated spatial transitions\, scenario-based sounds\, and symbolic graphical repetition. It is part of an ongoing experimental media project that plays around film and its extended forms\, which examines the rebellion of psychic structure against its environment in digital space. It keeps pace with time and ends when the end is near.\n
\n\nAsparuh Petrov (1981) developed a passion for animation after he graduated from the High School of Applied Arts in Trojan in 1999. Since 2007 he has worked as a freelance animation director\, and has been creating his own animation projects. Asparuh is one of the lead directors of Compote Collective productions. In 2016 he founds PHAZZA – a platform for examination of our problematic reality with the means of animation.\nWhile working on commercial animation\, motion graphics\, music videos and artists’ videos\, Birgit Rathsmann co-founded an Improv comedy group for shy visual artists. Now\, Birgit loves creating characters who navigate awkward situations with humorous results\, and this has resulted in a number of short films. Primitive Games”” is an improvised animated web series and a collaboration with comedians River L. Ramirez and Mary Houlihan. \nClaire Schlaikjer is an artist\, animator\, and illustrator from London\, England. She holds a BA in Visual Art and Computer Science from Brown University. As a freelance animator\, she has worked on projects ranging from science education to social advocacy\, and has collaborated with artists and arts institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver and Women & Their Work in Austin\, TX. Her personal artwork explores the place that animals hold in our collective imagination and the ways in which the evolution of their visual representations reflects our changing relationship with the natural world. \nEmily Sasmor is a new media artist based in Brooklyn\, NY. They create animated operatic visual albums telling stories about violence and the comforts upheld by it. Their work has appeared in various shows\, festivals\, and screenings including; Curyatid in Hudson Yards\, 20/92 Video Festival\, and Digerati Emergent Media Festival. They have been awarded a Cultural Counsel Video Grant\, and Guaranteed Income from CRNY. They run Single Channel\, an experimental art publishing house. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago\, and a BFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture\, Temple University. \nIvana Bosnjak Volda (1983) graduated from the Graphics Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and Animation at the University in Volda\, Norway. Ivana has been professionally involved in various stop motion projects across Europe\, and has led animation workshops for children and students. Thomas Johnson Volda (1984) graduated in Time Based Media from the University of Wales Institute\, Cardiff\, and at the New Media Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He is multidisciplinary artist often combining animation and performance art disciplines in his work\, and has created puppet performances at numerous festivals across Europe. Ivana and Thomas co-directed award-winning stop-animation short films Simulacra (2014)\, Imbued Life (2019) and Remember How I Used to Ride a White Horse (2022). \nJeffrey Zablotny is a director based in Toronto\, Canada. His film work is often marked by intricate sound design and unconventional use of visual effects as a way to explore how interior landscapes mirror a hidden world outside ourselves. His films have premiered at TIFF\, Austin Film Festival\, Hot Docs\, and internationally at festivals in Japan\, Germany\, and the United Kingdom. A member of VES (Visual Effects Society)\, his work has been made possible with support from the Canada Arts Council\, Ontario Arts Council\, and the NFB. \n镜伊Jingyi Wang is an artist and experimental filmmaker who lives and works in Shanghai and New York. Her work examines how psychic\, physical\, and symbolic structures imply and manifest themselves within everyday survival spectacles and sceneries. In her recent work\, she delves into the strangeness of private and public environments and the detachments of their subjects through film and computer graphics. \nKahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore is an independent filmmaker\, podcaster\, and educator. Moore is Kanyen’kehà:ka (Mohawk)\, a fluent Kanyen’kè:ha speaker (ACTFL intermediate/high)\, and an enrolled member of Six Nations of the Grand River territory. Moore is a founding member/co-owner of The Aunties Dandelion: a media-arts collective informed by traditional Onkwehòn:we (Indigenous) teachings and focused on revitalizing communities through stories of land\, language\, and relationships. She spent two decades in Washington\, DC as producer/director/writer with Discovery Channel\, National Geographic\, and others. Moore is a Banff 2023 Indigenous Screen Summit pitch participant and 2022 Banff Spark program participant for women who own media businesses. \nMegan Young is an interdisciplinary artist\, with a background in immersive and interactive design. Notable credits include ISEA in Hong Kong\, Open Spaces in Armenia\, Ammerman Center Biennial for Art & Technology at Connecticut College\, Open Engagement in Chicago\, and SPACES in Cleveland. She is a Lecturer and Digital Art Area Head at Indiana University and has previously taught for Cleveland Institute of Art and Kent State University. Young holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art + Media from Columbia College Chicago. \nSarah E. Jenkins is a queer Appalachian artist making work about extraction\, hidden labors\, and disappearance in an experimental animation practice. Their work has been shown at the MFA Boston\, Torrance Art Museum\, Emerson Contemporary\, and Wonzimer. Jenkins’ is a MacDowell Fellow and she was recently awarded a Changing Climate residency at SFAI. Their work is included in the forthcoming book Queering Appalachia’s Visual History: A Collection of Queer Appalachian Photographers\, University of Kentucky Press. Jenkins lives in Northampton\, MA with her darling cat\, Nessie.\n \nSponsors\nSqueaky Wheel’s Animation Fest is presented with generous support from the Richard W. Rupp Foundation\, FGI Landscaping\, PUSH Buffalo\, TriMain Center\, Rigidized Metals\, BreadHive\, Buffalo Expendables\, Buffalo State College Communication Dept\, Rose Jade Consulting Coop\, Lumpy Buttons Gifts\, Good Neighbors Credit Union\, and Villa Maria College. The North Park Theater event is presented with generous support from Councilman Joel Feroleto. \n\nBanner image: A red and white still from the film Trace by Asparuh Petrov. Three hand drawn faces looking to the right; their faces are intercut with lines like a comic strip. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/squeaky-wheels-20th-animation-fest/ LOCATION:Buffalo AKG Art Museum\, 1285 Elmwood Avenue\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14222\, United States CATEGORIES:Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Trace-Animation-Fest.jpg.jpg GEO:42.9324531;-78.87566 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Buffalo AKG Art Museum 1285 Elmwood Avenue Buffalo NY 14222 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=1285 Elmwood Avenue:geo:-78.87566,42.9324531 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231102T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231102T210000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191524Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191524Z UID:10001127-1698951600-1698958800@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index DESCRIPTION:Thursday\, November 2\, 2023\, 7 pm ET\n@ Squeaky Wheel and online\nFree or suggested donation\, ASL interpretation provided\nTickets available below\nAn essential publication covering dozens of years of vital media art\, the recently published Cyberfeminism Index gathers over 1\,000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media\, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces\, digital rights activist groups\, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art. Squeaky Wheel is excited to welcome designer\, professor\, researcher\, and editor of Cyberfeminism Index Mindy Seu who will present on the project and will be joined in conversation with Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan\, Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Copies of Cyberfeminism Index will be available for purchase courtesy of Burning Books. This event is presented in collaboration with Trinity Square Video. \nFor in-person attendees: See Squeaky Wheel’s location and accessibility info here. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. \nFor online attendees: Upon check-out\, you will receive an email titled “Your Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center order has been received!”. A private link will be included in that email; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. Online attendees can purchase a copy of Cyberfeminism Index through our partners at Burning Books here. \nBiographies of the presenters and about our partners\nMindy Seu (b. 1991\, California) is a designer and technologist based in New York City. Her expanded practice involves archival projects\, techno-critical writing\, performative lectures\, design commissions\, and close collaborations. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies\, historical precursors of the metaverse\, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index\, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art\, was commissioned by Rhizome\, presented at the New Museum\, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre\, New Museum)\, academic institutions (Columbia University\, Central Saint Martins)\, and mainstream platforms (Pornhub\, SSENSE\, Google)\, and been a resident at MacDowell\, Sitterwerk Foundation\, Pioneer Works\, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation include projects for the Serpentine Gallery\, Canadian Centre for Architecture\, and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Frieze\, Dazed\, Gagosian Quarterly\, Brooklyn Rail\, i-D\, and more. Mindy holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from the University of California\, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. \nDr. Tina Rivers Ryan is Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and an internationally recognized expert in the history of media art\, including video and digital art. Her exhibitions at the AKG include 2021’s “Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art” (co-curated with Paul Vanouse and winner of the 2022 Award of Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators) and 2022’s “Peer to Peer” (the first U.S. museum survey of artists working with blockchain technologies). Her next exhibition\, “Electric Op\,” will examine the six-decade history of the relationship between geometric abstraction and media art. In addition to her curatorial work\, she is a regular contributor to Artforum and has written commissioned essays for many of the world’s leading museums\, including The Met\, Dia\, and the V&A. Dr. Ryan holds five degrees in art history\, including a BA from Harvard and PhD from Columbia. \nBurning Books is a radical bookstore in Buffalo\, NY. We opened in September of 2009 on the anniversary of the Attica prison uprising.\nWe focus exclusively on social justice issues and work to support individuals and movements that are struggling against oppression and domination in all its forms. We have a highly curated selection of titles dealing with activism\, race\, antifascism\, environmentalism\, colonialism\, indigenisim\, capitalism\, feminism\, queer studies\, animal liberation\, class\, disability\, and more; including books for children\, middle graders\, and young adults. We also carry posters\, games and gift items – all following our mission of social justice and sustainability. Through our speaker series\, we bring vital perspectives from authors and activists around the country to discuss paths towards positive change in our world. We are happy to be a partner of – and the main distributor for – the Certain Days Freedom for Political Prisoners yearly calendar\, which acts as a major fundraiser for U.S. Political Prisoner support across the country. If you’d like to help ensure that the kind of radical and empowering ideas that Burning Books has fostered remain alive and kicking\, please take a moment to sign up for Friends of Burning Books. \nFounded in 1971\, Trinity Square Video is one of Canada’s first artist-run centres and its oldest media arts centre. We are a not-for-profit\, charitable organization. For 50 years\, Trinity Square has been a champion of media arts practices. Our activities are guided by a goal to increase our members’ and audiences’ understanding and imagination of what media arts practices can be. Trinity Square strives to create supportive environments\, encouraging artistic and curatorial experimentation that challenge medium specificity through education\, production and presentation supports. As video-based practices have become increasingly present across disciplines\, Trinity Square engages artists and curators in critical investigations into the changing conditions of perception\, materiality and the virtual. We consider all of our artistic activities and structures through a process of critical self-reflection\, continuously evaluating the ethical positioning of our programming\, jury structures\, inter-organizational relationships\, et cetera. In addition to holding aesthetic worth in its own right\, our artistic programming extends our education and production activities in order to generate new knowledges. Trinity Square’s programming is guided by three priorities: 1) promoting an expanded definition of media arts; 2) promoting the meaningful engagement of diverse voices in all levels of our operations; and 3) supporting and nurturing the production of new works by artists and curators. Our membership represents the diversity of the city and honours the original mandate of the organization—seeking to reduce barriers to access related to race\, gender\, sexual orientation\, and socio- economic and physical ability. \nImage description: A photograph of a thick green book with the title Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu. Image courtesy of Inventory Press. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/mindy-seus-cyberfeminism-index/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Book Launch,Hybrid ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Mindy-Seu-scaled.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20231017T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20231017T210000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191524Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191524Z UID:10001123-1697569200-1697576400@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Echolocations: Films in translation and transcription DESCRIPTION:Tuesday\, October 17\, 7 pm ET\n@ Journey’s End Refugee Services (2495 Main St #530\, Buffalo\, NY 14214) and online\nFree or suggested donation\nTickets available below\nGathering nine short films\, this screening looks at how voice and language are made legible across borders and power. Bringing together essay films and personal non-fiction films\, historical analyses and experimental films\, the filmmakers’ approaches to subtitles\, captions\, translations\, and interpretation grapple with the histories\, present\, and futures of imperialism\, colonialism\, racism\, and ableism. Alternately playful\, angry\, contemplative\, utopian\, and generous\, the films help us imagine new relationships\, between films and audiences\, and between each other\, across languages and voices. \nFeaturing films by Alex Dolores Salerno\, Astria Suparak\, champoy\, JJJJJerome Ellis\, Johann Diedrick\, Nadia Shihab\, Saif Alsaegh\, Sky Hopinka\, and Buffalo filmmaker Olivia Ong Evans who will be in person. Presented as part of [Speaking in Foreign Language]. \nThis event will take place in person at Journey’s End Refugee Services (JERS) and online. \nFor in-person attendees: JERS is located on the fifth floor of Tri-Main Center; head left after you exit the elevator. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. \nFor online attendees: Upon check-out\, you will receive an email titled “Your Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center order has been received!”. A private link will be included in that email; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 72 hour access. Not a member yet? Sign up here. \nAccessibility: For in-person audiences: ASL interpretation can be requested with 3 days notice for the Q&A with Olivia Ong Evans. For both in-person and online attendees: Several of the films have open captions. Some of the films\, such as champoy’s english is yr mother tongue and Astria Suparak’s On the Neon Horizon have no spoken dialogue\, while Nadia Shihab’s Echolocation elects not to translate moments where Iraqi Turkmen is spoken. The subtitles in Sky Hopinka’s wawa actively think through the act of translation from Chinuk Wawa to English. Alex Dolores Salerno’s El Dios Acostado provides captions and audio descriptions in English and Spanish. Please see individual film notes below. \n
\n\nThe total program length is ~85 minutes. Program notes courtesy of the artists.\n\nchampoy\, english is yr mother tongue\, 4 min\, 2020 \nWhen the American colonial education system in the Philippines imposed English as the sole language for teaching\, suppressing indigenous languages and turning classrooms into sites of linguistic dominance. How did we learn to embrace translation as a playful act? How did we reclaim our agency as a people and assert our own identities in the face of oppressive language policies? How How De Karabaw De Batuten. \nSaif Alsaegh\, 1991\, open captions\, 12 min\, 2018 \n1991 revolves around a conversation between the filmmaker\, an Iraqi asylum-seeker living in the US\, and his mother Bushra\, an Iraqi immigrant who was living in Turkey while she awaited approval to immigrate to the US. Both are in uncertain positions regarding their immigration statuses and have not been able to see each other for years. 1991 navigates the distance between them. Through a facetime phone conversation\, the film expresses the ways that a relationship becomes virtual and symbolic across forced distance. 1991 is set in a cabin where the filmmaker lives a semi-imaginary\, peaceful life\, building fires\, cooking\, and dancing. The central phone conversation details Bushra’s memory of the filmmaker’s birth in the middle of the 1991 Gulf War and the danger and suffering she went through. Through poetic juxtaposition of the virtual landscape of the phone\, the calm landscape of the cabin\, and the chaotic landscape of memory\, the film paints a cruel image of the horror of war\, displacement\, and separation. \nNadia Shihab\, Echolocation\, open captions\, 9 min\, 2021 \nThe rain in Oakland\, my grandmother’s home in Baghdad\, my aunts’ voices in What’s App\, my daughter learning to count to 10\, my brother playing the darbuka\, the cicadas in Texas\, the walls of my studio\, the search for new forms.\nNote: Dialogue in Iraqi Turkman is intentionally not translated / subtitled. \nJJJJJerome Ellis\, Impediment is Information\, open captions\, 15 min\, 2021 \nThis music-video-poem work centers on an 18th century newspaper advertisement for the recapture of a fugitive slave with “an impediment in his speech.” A handheld camera captures blurry conifers; a saxophone prays to a mountain. By rearranging the words of the advertisement to create lines of poetry\, I am seeking new meanings and sites of resistance in the archive. The work was commissioned by ISSUE Project Room in New York City. It premiered on Juneteenth\, a day that recognizes the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. In creating this work for the occasion of Juneteenth\, I wanted to celebrate Black freedom practices. I think these practices divinely exceed official proclamations\, emancipatory and otherwise. \nJohann Diedrick\, Dark Matters\, 2021 \nDark Matters exposes the absence of Black speech in the datasets used to train voice interface systems in consumer artificial intelligence products such as Alexa and Siri. Utilizing 3D modeling\, sound\, and storytelling\, the project challenges our communities to grapple with racism and inequity through speech and the spoken word\, and how AI systems underserve Black communities. \nAstria Suparak\, On the Neon Horizon\, 8:27 min\, 2023 \nOn the Neon Horizon is a short video essay that takes one of the world-building tics of white science fiction — gratuitous signage in Asian languages — to consider its utopian potential and dystopian applications. \nFantastical mise en scène\, breathtaking B-roll footage\, and special effects deliriums from four decades of mainstream sci-fi by white American\, Australian\, Canadian\, European\, and New Zealander filmmakers craft an insidiously Asian futurescape — sometimes achieved by simply shooting in a present-day Asian country or a North American Chinatown. In aggregate\, these productions inextricably tether non-white cultures to criminality and contagion\, portraying Asian cultures and people as existential threats to white Western ideas of freedom. \nSky Hopinka\, wawa\, open captions\, 4 min\, 2014 \nFeaturing speakers of chinuk wawa\, an Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest\, this film begins slowly\, patterning various forms of documentary and ethnography. Quickly\, the patterns tangle and become confused and commingled\, while translating and transmuting ideas of cultural identity\, language\, and history. Courtesy of Video Data Bank. \nAlex Dolores Salerno\, El Dios Acostado\, 11 min\, 2020 \nEl Dios Acostado entangles conversations of rest\, care\, and colonialism\, and asks us to consider what the land has to teach us about rest. The video incorporates access as part of its aesthetic. Adding to the slow pace of the video\, all of the visual descriptions and narration are repeated twice\, once in Spanish and once in English\, with a doubling of large captions centered in the frame. The video begins with a nap alongside the mountain “Mandango”\, meaning “dios acostado” or “sleeping god”\, and describes the gentrification of the small town of Vilcabamba\, which was dubbed “the valley of longevity” by European and North American researchers in the 70s who the artist’s mother encountered as a child. The video then cuts to her hometown\, San Pedro de la Bendita\, a nearby town spared from worldwide recognition. Introduced through a view of family tombstones at the town’s cemetery\, the artist’s mother describes her relationship to her hometown\, highlighting the love and care that can flourish with a relationship to land and community. \nOlivia Ong Evans\, Identity Karma\, 11 min\, 2021 \nIdentity Karma is an abstract video project that emerged from a period of research and reflection on Suharto’s New Order Era in Indonesia. Creating the video was a way to reflect on the intergenerational consequences of cultural repression\, and the personal effects of anti-Chinese discrimination. It is an homage to my ancestors\, to my mother\, and to the land. The video was guided by the question: What happens to our cultural and racial identities when we are alone? It jumps between over-saturated\, multi-layered moments and landscapes removed from social context\, and scattered words in English\, Bahasa Indonesia\, Simplified Chinese\, and Hokkien. The distance and frustration of miscommunication co-exists with the closeness and familiarity that can be expressed through language. Footage from Bogor\, Indonesia and Haudenosaunee land in Buffalo and Western New York interact throughout the video. \n
\n\nAlex Dolores Salerno (b. 1994\, Washington D.C.) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn\, NY. Informed by queer-crip experience\, community\, and culture\, they work to critique standards of productivity\, notions of normative embodiment\, 24/7 society\, and the commodification of rest. Salerno received their MFA from Parsons School of Design and their BS from Skidmore College. They have exhibited at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt)\, Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Castellón (Castellón)\, ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts (Brussels)\, Art Windsor-Essex (Canada)\, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation’s 8th Floor Gallery\, the Ford Foundation Gallery (NYC)\, among others. Salerno is a recipient of the 2022 Wynn Newhouse Awards\, and their work has been featured in the New York Times and Art in America. They recently participated in the Visual Artist AIRspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center (2022-2023)\, and they are currently in residence at BRIClab: Contemporary Art Residency Program at BRIC (2023-2024). \nAstria Suparak is an artist and curator based in Oakland\, California. Her cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues (like institutionalized racism\, feminisms and gender\, and colonialism) made accessible through a popular culture lens\, such as science fiction movies\, rock music\, and sports. \nchampoy (pronouns: they/them/he/him/she/her/siya ) is a Filipinx interdisciplinary artist\, filmmaker and educator weaving historical and personal narratives through film\, installation and performance.” \nJJJJJerome Ellis is a proud stutterer. Through music\, literature\, performance\, video\, and photography he researches relationships among blackness\, disabled speech\, divinity\, nature\, sound\, and time. His body of work includes: contemplative soundscapes using saxophone\, flute\, dulcimer\, electronics\, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure archival documents. Born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants\, he lives in Norfolk\, Virginia\, USA with his wife\, ecologist-poet Luísa Black Ellis. They like walking in the woods and drinking tea together. \nJohann Diedrick (he/him) is an artist\, engineer\, and educator who makes listening rooms for encountering new sonic possibilities off the grid. His performances\, installations\, and sculptures surface resonant histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded in space\, peeling back vibratory layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours\, workshops\, and open-source hardware/software. \nNadia Shihab is an artist whose work explores the personal\, the relational and the diasporic. Her first feature documentary Jaddoland was awarded five festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit “Truer than Fiction”” Award in 2020. Her recent short films include Sister Mother Lover Child (2023)\, Echolocation (2021) and Amal’s Garden (2012). Her work has screened internationally\, including at Cinema du Réel\, Walker Art Center\, Berkeley Art Museum\, Black Star Film Festival\, Images Festival\, DOXA\, Camden International Film Festival\, Kassel Dokfest and Cairo International Film Festival. Her creative practice is preceded by a decade of work as a community practitioner and housing advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was raised in west Texas by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and is an Assistant Professor in Film in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. \nOlivia Ong Evans is an artist living in Buffalo\, New York on Haudenosaunee homelands. Her video art often explores themes of migration and identity construction through experimental glitch. To shape identity from change\, to find meaning in misunderstanding\, to imagine home. Her video Identity Karma was created as part of the Squeaky Wheel Workspace Residency in the Summer of 2021. \nSaif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of Saif’s work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the indigenous Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s\, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives. His films have screened in festivals including Cinéma du Réel\, Kurzfilm Hamburg\, Kassel Dokfest\, Aesthetica Short Film Festival\, and in galleries and museums including the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and Rochester Contemporary Art Center. \nSky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale\, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside\, California\, Portland\, Oregon\, and Milwaukee\, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa\, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video\, photo\, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape\, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal\, documentary\, and non fiction forms of media. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance\, Toronto International Film Festival\, Ann Arbor\, Courtisane Festival\, Punto de Vista\, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial\, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies\, Bard College\, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles\, France. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019\, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019\, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019\, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video\, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow\, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography\, and is a 2022 MacArther Fellow. \n \nAstria Suparak\, On the Neon Horizon\, 8:27 min\, 2023Saif Alsaegh\, 1991\, 12 min\, 2018Alex Dolores Salerno\, El Dios Acostado\, 11 min\, 2020Johann Diedrick\, Dark Matters\, 2021Nadia Shihab\, Echolocation\, 9 min\, 2021Olivia Ong Evans\, Identity Karma\, 11 min\, 2021JJJJJerome Ellis\, Impediment is Information\, 15 min\, 2021Sky Hopinka\, wawa\, 4 min 2014champoy\, english is yr mother tongue\, 4 min\, 2020\nImages from left to right\, top to bottom: Astria Suparak\, On the Neon Horizon (2023); Saif Alsaegh\, 1991 (2018); Alex Dolores Salerno\, El Dios Acostado (2020)\, Johann Diedrick\, Dark Matters (2021); Nadia Shihab\, Echolocation (2021); Olivia Ong Evans\, Identity Karma (2021); JJJJJerome Ellis\, Impediment is Information (2021); Sky Hopinka\, wawa (2014); champoy\, english is yr mother tongue (2020).\nBanner image: JJJJJerome Ellis\, Impediment is Information (2021). URL:https://squeaky.org/event/echolocations-films-in-translation-and-transcription/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Hybrid,Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/impediment-still-1.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20231017 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20240226 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191523Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191523Z UID:10001129-1697500800-1708905599@squeaky.org SUMMARY:[Speaking in Foreign Language] DESCRIPTION:[Speaking in Foreign Language] brings together several of Squeaky Wheel’s Fall/Winter 2023 activities–screenings\, presentations\, and a solo exhibition–within a curatorial framework on how voice and language function across borders and power. \nThe series was developed through an engagement with\, and brings together\, the work of several former Squeaky Wheel Workspace residents–including Emily Watlington\, Jordan Lord\, Johann Diedrick\, Olivia Ong Evans\, and Saif Alsaegh–within a larger media arts context\, including feature films by Sharlene Bamboat and Trinh T. Minh-ha\, and short films by Alex Dolores Salerno\, Astria Suparak\, champoy\, JJJJJerome Ellis\, Nadia Shihab\, and Sky Hopinka. Additional events TBA. \n\n \nScreening | Tuesday\, October 17\, 7 pm ET\, in-person and online \nEcholocations: Films in Translation and Transcription\nGroup screening with work by Alex Dolores Salerno\, Astria Suparak\, champoy\, JJJJJerome Ellis\, Johann Diedrick\, Nadia Shihab\, Olivia Ong Evans\, Saif Alsaegh\, and Sky Hopinka \n\n \n \nExhibition opening | Friday\, November 10\, 5–8 pm \nJordan Lord’s The Voice of Democracy\nOn view through February 10. Featuring a newly commissioned essay by Amy Ching-Yan Lam. \n\n \nScreening | Tuesday\, December 5\, 7 pm ET @ Journey’s End Refugee Services and online \nTrinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam\n\n \nScreening | Wednesday\, December 6\, 7 pm @ Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center and online \nSharlene Bamboat’s If From Every Tongue it Drips\nPresented by Humanities Institute/Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program Film Series at the University at Buffalo \n\n \nPresentation | Friday\, December 8\, 7 pm ET\, in-person @ Squeaky Wheel and online \nEmily Watlington presents The Radical Accessibility of Video Art (for Hearing People)\n\nImage descriptions from top to bottom:\nA still from Identity Karma by Olivia Ong Evans. A bright blue and turquoise video still. There are multilayered legal documents and forms that are abstracted and blurry\, with only some words visible. The legible text includes “Declares her wish to change her name\,” “Name\,” and “Surname.”\nA still from Impediment is Information by JJJJJerome Ellis. A video still shows conifers in a snowy Wyoming landscape. A saxophone rests in a stand in the snow. The words “they try to fell black being” appear in white text overlaid on the video. The sky is blue.\nA still from the film The Voice of Democracy shows a dim living room\, in which a tv hangs on the wall. The tv displays two older white people\, the filmmaker’s parents\, sitting with a gold lamp in between them. The filmmaker’s father looks angry and their mother looks concerned. The tv image is paused on a Youtube window\, which reads: “Mom and Dad interview selects\,” below which a series of other videos are recommended including “The Biggest Snubs of the Olivier Awards\,” “Top 25 Roller Coasters\,” and “Food & Wine Festival.” Reflected in a mirror below the television are the filmmaker’s parents sitting in the same set-up as their image on the television\, with the same gold lamp between them. They are looking across the room at the filmmaker\, a 30-something white person with a buzzcut and a beard\, who looks back at them with their arms folded and legs crossed\, with a serious and sympathetic look. Their father is pointing at the television\, saying something. In the center of the image\, between the mirror and the television\, is a caption that reads\, “Why?”\nA still from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam. A mostly dark image\, with a barely lit woman with black hair looking to the left of the image.\nA still from If From Every Tongue It Drips by Sharlene Bamboat. A person sits on a wooden rocking chair in a bright orange room sunshine spilling in. The person in the chair is half out of frame arms holding a piece of paper. Yellow caption on screen reads: “hence\, matter is an infolding\, an in-volution. hmmmmmmmmmmm”. Image and description courtesy of the artist.\nLiza Sylvestre\, Captioned-Channel Surfing (still)\, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. A movie still\, close-up of a white man and woman wearing summer clothes in a rural setting looking excited in a phone booth. A caption reads “They are so young and excited and happy.” URL:https://squeaky.org/event/speaking-in-foreign-language/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Event Series ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Identity_Karma_C.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230928T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230928T210000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191523Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191523Z UID:10001115-1695927600-1695934800@squeaky.org SUMMARY:The Animation Fest: A Retrospective @ North Park Theatre DESCRIPTION:Thursday\, September 28\, 7 pm ET\n$7\nPurchase tickets to in-person screening at North Park Theatre (or just show up!)\nPurchase tickets to online screening via Eventbrite\nJoin us at the legendary North Park Theatre for a special retrospective screening that brings together 10 short films from the past 20 years of our Animation Fest! The short films collected here exemplify our little fest’s promise and potential: Personal visions and experiments\, and surprising and poignant uses of tools and technologies; and social and political commitment and critique. Open to young people and adults\, this special screening is Squeaky Wheel’s big fundraiser for the year – we invite our communities near and far to join us in celebration! \nThe 10 filmmakers present a vital cross section of our many communities\, from legends of the field to former Squeaky Wheel students from Buffalo and beyond\, including films by Adele Han Li\, Amanda Bonaiuto\, Ayoka Chenzira\, Hannah R.W. Hamalian\, Helen Hill\, Jazmyn Palermo\, Jodie Mack\, Leslie Supnet\, Maria Zjaia\, Miranda Javid\, and Robert C Banks. \nBegun as an outdoor screening in 2004\, the fest celebrates animation in all its forms. Often organized by emerging guest curators\, the fest has featured hundreds of classic and cutting edge animated works. All funds from this event go towards our award-winning exhibition\, education\, and equipment access programs. Join us! \nPlease note that the final two films\, X: The Baby Cinema and Second Sun feature flickering effects. Jodie Mack’s Unsubscribe #4: The Saddest Song in the World will not be available online\, and will only be screened in person. The total duration of the in-person screening is ~53 minutes; the online screening duration is ~50 minutes. \n
\n\nMaria Ziaja\, One Speck in the Universe\, 1 min\, open captions\, 2013\nMaria Ziaja\, Flying Bird\, 1 min\, 2013\nMaria Ziaja created these two videos during her time taking a Stop-Motion Animation class as part of Squeaky Wheel’s Tech Arts for Girls program\, taught by Alice Alexandrescu; the two films were included in the 2013 edition of the Animation Fest\, programmed by Squeaky Wheel’s 2013 staff and interns\, including Jax Deluca\, Mark Longolucco\, and Ryan Crowley. \nHelen Hill\, Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century\, 10 min\, 2001\nMadame Winger wants you to make a film about something you love. She shows you her favorite low budget filmmaking techniques\, from camera less animation to processing your own film in a bathtub. Filmed in 16 mm. Helen Hill’s work was featured in the first edition of the Animation Fest. Special thank you to Mark Johnson and the Harvard Film Archive. \nHannah R.W. Hamalian\, The Golden Age\, 9:58 min\, open captions\, 2021\n“An experimental documentary examining the traumatic history of being a woman at work in the animation industry. I put myself into conversation with a generation of women who experienced restricted creative opportunities in animation and a lack of acknowledgement as artists. Each manipulated frame is an ode to the disregarded labor of women\, wielded to create films that told young girls to dream.” – Hannah R.W. Hamalian. The Golden Age was included in the 2022 edition\, curated by Ekrem Serdar and Zainab Saleh; her work was previously included in the 2017 edition guest curated by Savion “Ineil Quaran” Mingo. \nAyoka Chenzira\, Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy Headed People\, 10:26 min\, open captions\, 1985\n“I was very concerned with the question of black women in this country and self-image aesthetics. If you look at all the commercials that come out and tell you how to fix yourself\, they are all based on the idea that there is something wrong with you. And so\, having a child\, these things became very glaring\, and I think that’s a part of Hairpiece. Hairpiece is funny\, but it comes from a position of real anger.” – Ayoka Chenzira. Included in the 2004 edition of the Animation Fest\, Hair Piece was one of the twenty-five films selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2018. The film received a 4K restoration by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation\, which is the version that is on view. Film courtesy of Kino Lorber and Milestone Films. \nAdele Han Li\, Chella Drive\, 3:29 min\, digital video on projection\, sound on speakers\, 2016.\n“A dreamlike memory of a teenager’s summer complacency and the luscious suburban environment that surrounds her. Made using hand drawn animations projected onto real life settings and rephotographed frame by frame.” – Adele Han Li. Chella Drive as included in the 2016 edition curated by Ekrem Serdar. \nJodie Mack\, Unsubscribe #4: The Saddest Song in the World\, 2:50 min\, 2010\n…broken-hearted and mashed up. – Jodie Mack. This film was included in the 2012 edition of the Animation Fest; Mack’s films were included also in the 2016 edition of the fest. Film courtesy of Canyon Cinema.\n \nAmanda Bonaiuto\, Batfish Soup\, 5 min\, 2016\n“Wacky relatives give way to mounting tensions with broken dolls\, boiling stew and a bang.\nDIRECTOR’S NOTES:\nBatfish Soup is a fictionalized absurdist film based on memories of freakish childhood visitations with my grandparents. Though the film’s spark was autobiographical\, the film transformed over the course of its production into something more fictional. This film epitomizes my interest in the darkly humorous underpinnings of domestic drama. I produced this film as my first year film in the MFA Experimental Animation Program at California Institute of the Arts.”\nBatfish Soup was included in the 2017 edition of the Animation Fest\, guest curated by Jean Zhu. Bonaiuto work was additionally screened in the 2019 edition\, guest curated by Leanne Goldblatt. \nMiranda Javid\, What Humans Do\, 6:40 min\, 2023\n“A macro view of human-actions\, as told from within a singular body. The film is a catalog of homo sapien instincts; its sequences interlace extractive qualities of our species with embodied sensory experience\, in favor of a mindful awareness of what humans do to their habitats and planet Earth at-large.” – Miranda Javid. \nJazmyn Palermo\, Teenie Hams’ Adventures in Genderland\, 9:54 min\, 2018\n“Teenie Hams’ Adventures in Genderland is a stop-motion animation that explores a transgender perspective of finding oneself. As Teenie enters a world of fairies\, witches\, creatures\, ghouls and vampires\, they find themself on an adventure in the world of people they have only heard of in scary stories. They find friends and helpful hands along the way on their adventure of exploration and self discovery.” – Jazmyn Palermo. Teenie Hams’ Adventures in Genderland was included in the 2020 edition\, guest curated by Tabia Lewis. \nRobert C Banks\, X: The Baby Cinema\, 5 min\, 1992\nDrawing by hand directly on 16mm film\, Banks challenges commercial appropriations of the image of Malcolm X. The film was included in the 2007 edition of the Animation Fest\, guest curated by Kerry Maeve Sheehan.\n \nLeslie Supnet\, Second Sun\, 3 min\, 2014\n“The rising sound of drums emphasizes flashes of lights\, images of the solar system and a post-apocalyptic imagining of the birth of our Second Sun.” – Leslie Supnet \n“Leslie Supnet’s hand-drawn animation piece is an extension of her previous work First Sun (2014)\, with the monochrome drawings of the latter giving way to bright primary pencil colours. Like its predecessor\, Second Sun extensively employs basic geometrical shapes to represent cosmic phenomena and is scored to an exhortative percussive soundtrack hinting at a ritual\, a summoning. The figures move strictly horizontally or vertically on checkered paper as though underscoring their mathematically precise cyclicity\, with the central solar circle spawning clone stars\, moons\, planets and an entire solar system. The overall impression is that of witnessing a trance-inducing cultic invocation.” – Experimenta India” \n
\n\nWorking in painting\, video\, and installation\, Adele Han Li explores creating immersive and evocative environments through mixing materials and colliding surfaces. Her work has been exhibited at festivals and galleries throughout the US and internationally. Beyond her own creative projects\, Adele was previously programmer and festival manager of the Slamdance Film Festival\, and is passionate about cultivating inclusive and nurturing spaces for fellow artists. She studied animation at CalArts and painting at Yale and is now playing with textiles\, projectors and ceramics in her home studio just outside Los Angeles\, California. \nAmanda Bonaiuto (b. 1990) is an animation director\, artist\, and educator living in New York. She is best known for her short films and commissioned pieces which have screened at film festivals and galleries worldwide. She’s inspired by humor and tilted realities. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts\, Boston in 2012 and an MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts in 2018. She is an assistant professor of Illustration at Parsons School of Design\, and makes films and commissions in her studio. \nMeet Ayoka Chenzira\, the multi-talented and award-winning filmmaker\, Emmy and NAACP nominated television director\, and digital media artist.\nAs a child\, Ayoka discovered her interest in storytelling while listening to women talk in her mother’s Philadelphia beauty parlor. With a background in modern dance\, photography\, and music\, she discovered her passion for filmmaking after being taken to every age-inappropriate movie that her cinephile parent could find. Since then\, Ayoka is known to work across a range of genres\, including drama\, science fiction\, documentary\, animation\, and interactive cinema. As an actor’s director\, able to work with various acting styles and degrees of experience\, Ayoka’s visionary style of storytelling and character development takes center stage as does her ability to emotionally and visually elevate a story. Read more here. \nHannah R.W. Hamalian (she/her) is an artist intrigued by how complicated the world is. In her animation and film practice she tends towards an experimental and poetic mode of expression\, working with the movement of animation in collaboration with dance and landscape to represent paradox and complexity. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to aim for the emotional core of an experience and craft immersive soundscapes that create a space specifically designed for asking questions.\nHannah’s work has screened and shown at festivals internationally\, including ADF’s Movies by Movers\, KLIK Amsterdam Animation Festival\, Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio\, USA)\, and the Squeaky Wheel Animation Fest (New York\, USA). She received her BA from Carleton College and her MFA from UW-Milwaukee\, and she currently teaches at Lane Community College in Eugene\, OR. \nHelen Hill (1970 – 2007) was an experimental animator\, filmmaker\, educator\, artist\, writer and social activist who lived her last years in New Orleans\, Louisiana. A native of Columbia\, South Carolina\, Hill revealed her artistic talents at an early age\, making her first short\, animated Super 8 films when she was eleven. While studying English at Harvard (BS ’92)\, she minored in Visual and Environmental Studies where she made three 16mm animated short films: Rain Dance\, Upperground Show and Vessel. After receiving an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Experimental Animation\, Hill\, along with her husband Paul Gailiunas\, moved to his native Canada where he was studying medicine and where she continued to create films and teach film animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) and at the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (AFCOOP). Soon after\, Hill and Gailiunas moved to New Orleans where Gailiunas would found a medical clinic for artists and low-income patients and where Hill\, meanwhile\, co-founded the New Orleans Film Collective and taught filmmaking. Read more here. \nJazmyn Palermo is a visual and expanded media artist living and working in Buffalo\, NY. They studied Fine Art at Alfred University with a focus in photography and video art. Their work explores a transgender perspective on fairy tales\, folklore\, and horror themes incorporating a stop-motion process and a lot of papier-mache. Their process includes asking their friends to put on a wig and move very\, very slowly. Jazmyn is inspired by the wonderful people they know and the beautiful place they live. They would like their work to create a comfortable place to enjoy the magic of finding yourself. \nJodie Mack (born 1983; London\, UK) is an experimental animator. Her films unleash the kinetic energy of material remnants of domestic and institutional knowledge to illuminate the relationship between decoration and utility. Straddling the boundary between rigor and accessibility\, her cinema questions how we ascribe value to things.\nMack’s 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Locarno Film Festival\, the Toronto International Film Festival\, the New York Film Festival\, the Jeonju International 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 was a 2017/18 Radcliffe Fellow; a 2019 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts; a 2021 MacDowell Fellow; and a 2022 Visual Studies Center Fellow. She is a Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College. \nLeslie Supnet is an experimental filmmaker who creates media works that explore loss and change. Using animation\, live-action\, found footage and material exploration\, Supnet’s process is guided by lyricism and personal affect\, often bending analog and digital techniques. Leslie completed her MFA in Film at York University in 2016. Leslie’s works have screened at festivals such as TIFF\, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)\, International Film Festival Oberhausen\,Images Festival\, Onion City\, The Edge of Frame Weekend at the London International Animation Festival and as part of special programmes at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec\, Art Gallery of Hamilton and the AGO. She has created commissions for Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival\, ArtSpin/Pleasuredome\, Film POP!/POP! Montreal and Plug In ICA. \nMaria Ziaja is from Buffalo\, NY\, and is most passionate about Sustainability and Environmental Policy. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in Environmental Studies and Russian and has worked in environmental consulting\, non-profit conservation initiatives\, and EHS policy for energy companies. She currently works at the Greenway Institute\, where she is helping reshape engineering education around goals of equity and sustainability. Before moving out of Buffalo for college\, Maria spent her formative years taking TechArts classes at Squeaky Wheel\, both at the Ansonia Building and Market Arcade locations. She feels that over the years these classes helped her grow creatively and develop an appreciation for the arts that still influences her work (now in the education sector). She is honored to be part of the Animation Fest! \nMiranda Javid (she/her) is an animator\, curator\, and art-educator currently living in Kingston New York. Her animations describe topics like cognitive experience\, human bias\, and the relationship between individuals and their communities. \nRobert C. Banks Jr. was born and raised in Cleveland\, Ohio in 1966\, and has attended Cleveland Institute of Art and Cleveland State University\, and has also served in the U.S. Air Force. Inspired by his father\, Banks is an experimental filmmaker\, cinematographer\, and teacher of filmmaking and photography at numerous colleges and universities. Banks’ films have been screened at numerous prestigious film festivals and art institutions\, both domestically and abroad\, such as Sundance Film Festival\, SXSW Film-Music Festival\, International Film Festival Rotterdam\, Museum of Modern Art\, The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar\, Chicago Underground Film Festival\, and Ann Arbor. He is a recipient of numerous awards\, including Filmmaker of the Year at the Midwest Filmmaker’s Conference\, and his film retrospectives have been featured at The BBC British Short Film Festival\, The Cleveland Cinematheque\, and The Walker Center for the Arts. One of Banks’ best-known works is the 1992 short film X: The Baby Cinema\, which chronicles the commercialization of Malcolm X’s image and legacy. Some of his other films include Motion Picture Genocide\, My First Drug\, the Idiot Box\, Outlet\, Goldfish and Sunflowers\, AWOL\, Autopilot\, and Don’t Be Still\, all of which were shot and edited on 16 and 35 mm film. Several of his short films have been added to the private collections of institutions such as The Yale University Film School and The Walker Center for the Arts. Most recently\, Banks has completed his first 35 mm feature film\, Paper Shadows\, which was seven years in the making. \nSponsors\nSqueaky Wheel’s Animation Fest is presented with generous support from the Richard W. Rupp Foundation\, FGI Landscaping\, PUSH Buffalo\, TriMain Center\, Rigidized Metals\, BreadHive\, Buffalo Expendables\, Buffalo State College Communication Dept\, Rose Jade Consulting Coop\, Lumpy Buttons Gifts\, Good Neighbors Credit Union\, and Villa Maria College. The North Park Theater event is presented with generous support from Councilman Joel Feroleto. \n\nBanner image: Hannah Hamalian\, The Golden Age. Yellow\, green\, and black paint is smeared into an abstracted version of a familiar cartoon dog character. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/the-animation-fest-a-retrospective-north-park-theatre/ LOCATION:North Park Theatre\, 1428 Hertel Avenue\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14216\, United States CATEGORIES:Fundraiser,Hybrid,Screenings ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/hamalian_golden-age_02-scaled.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230901T190000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230901T213000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191523Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191523Z UID:10001110-1693594800-1693603800@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Zain Alam at Silo City: I am sounding a sacred space DESCRIPTION:Friday\, September 1\, 2023\n7–8 pm: Performance at Silo City\, Marine A with Zain Alam\, Dayatra Amber\, and Zaimah Habeeb (aka Zaimah Beloved)\n8:30 pm: Refreshments and conversation with Zain Alam and S Shiraz Ali at Duende\nFree or suggested donation\nSqueaky Wheel is excited to welcome back Zain Alam for a special performance of his work\, I am sounding a sacred space. Utilizing Silo City’s immense resonance\, Alam and Buffalo’s own Dayatra Amber and Zaimah Habeeb (aka Zaimah Beloved) will each recite the azaan (the Islamic call to prayer)\, which Alam will distill over its duration into tonal content alone. The performance will be followed by a conversation between Alam and scholar S. Shiraz Ali on the 2nd floor of Duende. \nI hope to bring a lived sense of sound in the Islamic tradition essential for the project’s aesthetic vision: drawing attention away from the meaning of the Arabic words alone and to the rich\, diverse traditions of recitation\, heard as music in and of themselves. How can sound create sacred space\, rather than vice-versa? In the long reverb and comforting resonances of Silo City\, the workshop performance revealed to me the healing properties of sound—particularly sound carried forward by natural echoes and amplified by nothing more than the resonant qualities of the space. I’m looking forward to incorporating this knowledge into a finalized performance\, thinking deeply about how vocal practices in religious tradition can be taken outside of their usual institutional context and used in pursuit of creating sacred\, healing spaces of our own. – Zain Alam \nThe performance will begin at 7 pm at Marina A in Silo City. Enter Marina A through the back door in the garden of Duende. After a brief break\, we invite you to the 2nd floor of Duende for a conversation between Alam and S. Shiraz Ali. \nDocumentation\nThe following video showcases excerpts from the live performance that took place on September 1\, 2023. \n\nAbout the artist\, featured performers\, and speakers\nZain Alam is an artist and musician of Indian-Pakistani origin based in Brooklyn\, NY. Described as “a unique intersection\, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art\,” his recording project Humeysha began during his year working as an oral historian for the 1947 Partition Archive. His work is a project of translation using contemporary pop forms\, found sound\, and oral history as means of investigating one’s position in an outside tradition or community. Alam’s practice extends his sonic vision into video\, performance\, and writing. His works are braided together by a passion for the borrowed voice\, re/de-contextualization\, and bricolage — for how a personal mosaic of sound can empower minority and marginalized to engage in self-creation on their own terms. His essays have been published in Miami Rail\, Buzzfeed\, and The New Yorker\, and Humeysha has been covered by the New York Times\, Vice\, and Village Voice. His performances have been staged at venues including Public Arts\, Webster Hall\, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Alam has most recently completed fellowships with Bruce High Quality Foundation\, Marble House\, and South Asian American Digital Archive. \nAlam was a Workspace Resident in Spring 2022\, where he first worked on the project at Silo City. See a brief video of him talking about the project here: \n\nDayatra Amber is an Artist\, Educator\, Word Holistic Practitioner and mother of three\, who resides in Buffalo\, NY. A delicate blend of Clinical Mental Health Counseling\, the Arts\, Astrology\, Metaphysics\, Restorative Trauma Informed practice\, self-reflection\, LOVE & Holistic Healing\, DayatraAmber is a whole vibe. As a military veteran\, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at SUNY Buffalo\, and Masters serves as a communitu in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Canisius. Dayatra Amber is a lifelong Performance Artist. She debuted as an actress at Ujima Theatre Company in 2009 and began teaching theatre in 2014. DayatraAmber has performed as a Spoken Word Artist since 1998. She published her first book of Spoken Word Art in 2016 entitled Liberta. Her passion for community has lead her to a movement & radio program called Project Access to AFreeKa\, where she serves as a community organizer and personality affectionately known as DJ Bullet. \nZaimah Habeeb\, aka Zaimah Beloved is a professional singer and songwriter. She has previously released 4 studio albums that utilize catchy and beautiful melodies conjoined with clever lyrics\, to tackle challenging subjects\, such as social justice issues and God consciousness. She is presently in the studio to complete her 5th studio album\, which she calls “an album of a lifetime”. Zaimah also works as an online elementary Arabic teacher with the Islamic Learning Institute\, as well as being in her first year as a Qur’an student pursuing her Ijaazah in Hafs. Zaimah has stated she is most proud of her work as creator of “Tajweed from the Cradle to the Grave”\, which is a tajweed and fluency tutoring service\, provided free of charge to children and elderly students who are currently at the beginning and intermediate levels of Arabic fluency and Tajweed. \nS. Shiraz Ali is a scholar of Islamic intellectual and cultural history. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at University of California\, Berkeley\, where he researches the development of philosophy and rhetoric in Muslim South Asia. Ali has contributed to initiatives like PeaceNiche/The Second Floor\, Matnsaz\, Zer Zabar Paesh\, and the 2018 documentary Salam: The First ****** Noble Laureate. He holds a master’s in the study of religion from Harvard University. He was born and raised in Karachi. \nThis event is presented with Lyceum at Silo City. The Lyceum at Silo City is an urban land management nonprofit based at Silo City in Buffalo\, NY. Our modern-day lyceum captures Aristotle’s ‘walking and teaching’ and participatory method with our boots in the soil immersive approach to ecological training and experiential arts and cultural programming. Our work includes regional restoration ecology\, integrated site-responsive arts\, and intentional community-building that connects the public with Silo City’s unique urban landscape\, situated amongst the city’s largest collection of historical grain elevators. We create exceptional experiences for those who love learning\, collaborating\, and discovering. \nBanner image: Zain Alam walking with his back to the camera in a partially enclosed area on a sunny day. He is dressed in white. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/zain-alam-at-silo-city-i-am-sounding-a-sacred-space/ LOCATION:Silo City\, 85 Silo City Row\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14203\, United States CATEGORIES:Performance ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Zain-Alam-Silo-scaled.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20230825 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20231001 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191523Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191523Z UID:10001114-1692921600-1696118399@squeaky.org SUMMARY:Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio: Creativity in the Time of Covid-19 DESCRIPTION:Opening Friday\, August 25\, 5–8 pm\nOn view Tuesday–Fridays\, 12–5pm through September 30\, 2023\nFree and open to the public\nOrganized and curated by Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio\, and presented at Squeaky Wheel\, Buffalo Arts Studio\, and Buffalo Game Space.\nAmatryx Gaming Lab & Studio presents Creativity in the Time of Covid-19\, an exhibition of pandemic artwork and creative expression. The exhibition is the outcome of a three year project examining how people ranging from professional artists to first-time creatives used creativity during the Covid-19 pandemic. The project defined creative expression broadly\, including traditional and experimental art forms as well as creative hobbies such gaming\, baking\, crocheting\, and much more. \nCreativity in the Time of Covid-19 is on display August 25-September 30\, 2023\, with an Opening Reception on Friday\, August 25\, 5:00–8:00 PM. There will be a series of short talks starting at 6:00 PM in the Buffalo Arts Studio gallery space\, featuring speakers Natalie Phillips (Michigan State University)\, Lawrence Carter-Long (DisArt)\, and members of the Amatryx lab. A closing reception will take place on September 22\, 2023 at 3:00 PM in the Buffalo Arts Studio gallery space\, and feature a talk by speaker Tina Rivers-Ryan (Buffalo AKG Art Museum). The exhibition and receptions are free and open to the public. \nCreativity in the Time of Covid-19 began with experiences common to many during the pandemic lockdowns: being stuck at home without physical access to the spaces and communities people were used to\, and looking for ways to connect\, fill the time\, and process varied emotions. The project partners\, including faculty from Michigan State University\, University at Buffalo\, Washington University in St. Louis\, and United States Naval Academy\, noticed how many people tried out new forms of creative expression or began new creative projects in response to the difficulties of life in lockdown. With the financial support of the Mellon Foundation\, the project partners surveyed thousands of people across many states and sixteen countries (ranging from the US to Korea to Indonesia and beyond) about their creative expression during the pandemic. The result of this work is a collection of thousands of experiences\, stories\, and creative works from around the world that gives a broad\, diverse picture of the role creativity played in living during the pandemic. \nCreative works from the collection will appear in a series of online and physical exhibitions with each partner organization beginning in Fall 2023 and running through Spring 2024. The first of these exhibitions is Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio Presents: Creativity in the Time of Covid-19\, with community partners Buffalo Arts Studio\, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center\, and Buffalo Game Space. The Amatryx exhibition focuses particularly on LGBTQ+\, BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/Person of Color)\, and/or Western New York-based creative works. In doing so\, Director Cody Mejeur hopes that the exhibition will “prioritize the marginalized voices of communities often left out or forgotten in mainstream narratives.” As Mejeur notes\, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities were often some of the hardest hit during the pandemic\, and the Buffalo-based exhibition aims to start off the series by drawing attention to that trend and the people creating in these communities. \nAs part of the exhibition’s opening night\, the Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio will also be launching the first full release of their current video game project\, Trans Folks Walking. Trans Folks Walking is a 3D\, first person narrative game made with Unity that explores experiences of trans embodiment\, being\, and mobility. The game currently puts players in several situations drawn from the experiences of trans folks in contemporary America\, ranging from the everyday such as using the bathroom through the particular such as being trans in a Christian church. The game creates space for trans folks to share their stories and for players to experience small parts of what it means to be trans. The game is intentionally designed as an anthology of short experiences that will grow in collaboration with trans people and their communities. The game will release on August 25\, 2023 for PC and Mac on the game website itch.io\, with a Steam release to follow. \nThe Buffalo exhibition contains creative work in many forms\, including paintings\, photographs\, films\, songs\, video games\, crochet\, zines\, and mixed media sculptures. These works will be spread across multiple gallery spaces in the Tri-Main Center\, with visual and physical appearing in Buffalo Arts Studio; film\, video\, and digital media in Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center; and games and virtual reality in Buffalo Game Space. Participants are encouraged to explore works in each space on opening night\, and throughout the exhibition during each organization’s normal business hours. \nAmatryx Gaming Lab & Studio (AGLS) is a lab in the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo dedicated to gaming\, virtual reality\, social justice\, and community storytelling projects. The lab combines cutting edge research on games\, culture\, and narrative with development projects in analogue\, digital\, and virtual reality games. Amatryx is committed to the diverse exploration of social justice narratives with intersectional queer and feminist values\, such as antinormativity\, relationality\, coalitionality\, and resistance. The lab thinks critically about play and narrative as means for imagining more equitable and transformative futures. \nFor more information\, please visit: \nAmatryx and Trans Folks Walking \nBuffalo Arts Studio \nBuffalo Game Space \nCreativity in the Time of Covid-19 \nCreativity in the Time of Covid-19 is made possible by a Just Futures Initiative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Image: Loom by TD. Image courtesy Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/amatryx-gaming-lab-studio-creativity-in-the-time-of-covid-19/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Exhibition,Partners ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Loom.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230824T180000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230824T200000 DTSTAMP:20260412T132600 CREATED:20251230T191505Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251230T191505Z UID:10001112-1692900000-1692907200@squeaky.org SUMMARY:2D Stop-Motion World Building with Photoshop with Maggie Hazen DESCRIPTION:*New date* Thursday\, August 24\, 6–8 pm\nFree or suggested donation\nOpen to ages 16+. Computers with Adobe Photoshop provided.\nIn this hands on workshop\, Workspace Resident Maggie Hazen will lead participants as they create their own stop motion animations. Maggie will first cover the basics of world-building and the process of designing a visual language that represents the world you want to create. Students will then learn to use 2D stop motion animation and Photoshop to create unique worlds. Participants will work in teams to make short animated films\, which will be screened at the end of the workshop. Laptops or desktops with Adobe Photoshop will be provided. \n \nBiography of the artist\nMaggie Hazen is a New York-based visual artist from Los Angeles. Hazen’s artistic practice is characterized by the transformative power of sculpture\, video\, collage\, performance\, and installation\, which she employs to explore the complex ways in which subjects interact with and perform within the spaces they occupy. Through the synthesis of narratives drawn from popular culture and institutional systems\, Hazen’s works aim to deconstruct the familiar and make it strange\, revealing what lies hidden in plain sight. Hazen is the founder and an active member of the Columbia Collective\, which is dedicated to supporting the visibility of young incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists who have been rendered invisible by the system. Launched in 2019 at the Columbia Secure Center for Girls in the Hudson Valley\, the collective has since grown to find a new home at the Brookwood Secure Center for youth. \nHazen’s work has been exhibited\, screened and performed at institutions including The Bronx Museum\, Bronx\, NY; Foreland Contemporary Art Campus\, Catskill\, NY; Pulse Miami Beach as part of Pulse Play\, Miami\, FL; The Museum of Tolerance\, Los Angeles\, CA; Microscope Gallery\, Brooklyn\, NY; Vox Populi\, Philadelphia\, PA; Light Year on the Manhattan Bridge\, Brooklyn\, NY; The Granoff Center at Brown University\, RI; Performance Works Northwest\, Portland\, OR; The CICA Museum in South Korea; and The Boston Young Contemporaries exhibition; Boston\, MA; among others. Hazen has held residencies at Pioneer Works\, Brooklyn\, NY; De:Formal online artist residency; The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art\, Shanghai\, China\, I:O residency at the Helikon Art Center\, Izmit\, Turkey; Vermont Studio Center in Vermont and The Pasadena Side Street Projects\, Pasadena; CA. She participated as a fellow in the Bronx AIM program and The Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art at European Graduate School in Switzerland. She has studied at Biola University\, Brown University\, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design\, New York University\, The Stevens Institute of Technology\, The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art\, and the Bard College Clemente courses in the humanities program. She is currently a visiting artist-in-residence at Bard College in the Studio Arts program. \nWorkspace Residency is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. \nImage description: Maggie Hazen\, a white queer person from Southern California. She has blonde hair and is wearing a black beanie hat and a black sweater. She is candidly looking into the camera with a curious gaze. URL:https://squeaky.org/event/2d-stop-motion-world-building-with-photoshop-with-maggie-hazen/ LOCATION:Squeaky Wheel\, 2495 Main Street\, Suite 310\, Buffalo\, NY\, 14214\, United States CATEGORIES:Residencies,Skill Share ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://squeaky.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/2.jpg GEO:42.8906261;-78.8721258 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=Squeaky Wheel 2495 Main Street Suite 310 Buffalo NY 14214 United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=500;X-TITLE=2495 Main Street\, Suite 310:geo:-78.8721258,42.8906261 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR