Join us for the Opening Night of ACCA’s Data Relations Summer School featuring Welcome to Country by Thane Garvey followed by performance lectures with exhibiting artists Winnie Soon and Mimi Ọnụọha and respondents Mehak Sawney and Mat Spisbah.
Performance lecture: Mimi Ọnụọha, The Hair in the Cable followed by conversation with Mimi Ọnụọha and Mehak Sawney
Through a series of media and artworks, Mimi Ọnụọha’s performance lecture explores absence, knowledge, and how what is missing is still there.
Performance lecture: Winnie Soon, The Poetics of Unerasable Characters followed by conversation with Winnie Soon and Mat Spisbah
Data today occupies communication, affective relationships and infrastructure via network protocols, censoring and filtering algorithms. According to Data Relations digital publication writer Yung Au, ‘All of us have lived through some form of erasure. That is the experience of having our sentences cut short. Or the experience of being the subject of the moderation that occurs across communication infrastructures.’ We have experienced, in one way or another, various forms of curated information by human and machine forces. This artist talk will unfold the poetics of erasure through forgetting, remembering, recalling, erasing, voicing and generating characters.
Biographies
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Winnie Soon is an artist coder, researcher and educator who is interested in the materiality and political ramifications of the computational processes that underpin our experiences within the digital realm. Alert to the growing importance of software in shaping our daily lives and identities, their work probes the technological and cultural imaginaries of programming, engaging with topics like queer code and coding otherwise, digital censorship, experimental diagramming and software publishing.
Mimi Ọnụọha is an artist and researcher with an interest in the ways social bias and power dynamics shape and are perpetuated by contemporary technological systems and networks. She works across different fields and disciplines to create projects that use technology to interrogate the power dynamics within digital, cultural, historical, and ecological systems.
Mat Spisbah is a curator and producer whose work focusses on contemporary new media and building connections between Australia and the Asia-Pacificregion. He is Artistic Director of digital arts collective Exhibitionist and also provides curatorial, consultancy and creative producing work for many of Australia’s leading arts festivals, museums and institutions.
Mehak Sawhney is a Montréal-based researcher and activist with research interests in sound and media cultures of South Asia. She is a PhD researcher in Communication Studies at McGill University where her doctoral project explores audio surveillance and the weaponization of sound and listening technologies in postcolonial India. She has been associated with Sarai, the media research programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, since 2017, and with Liquid Architecture, where she is a member of the Capture All project.
Read more about the exhibition here.
