Babylon

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Alicia Escott is an interdisciplinary artist practicing in solidarity with thinkers across fields undoing the construct of “nature” as a thing separated from us and our world. Escott is interested in how we each are negotiating our immediate day-to-day realities and responsibilities amid an awareness of the overarching specter of climate change, mass-extinction and the subsequent unspoken individual and collective experience of loss, heartbreak and longing— and related social and political unrest. She approaches these issues with an interstitial practice that encompasses writing, drawing, painting, photography, video, sculpture, social-practice and activism.

In 2019 Escott was an Artist in Residence at at Recology and at The Growlery both in San Francisco, she has previously been a fellow at Djerassi Art Residency, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the JB Blunk Artist Residency and Irving Street Projects. Her work has been shown in over 80 art institutions, galleries and alternative spaces— including exhibitions at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Arts Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Maritime Museum, The Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and The Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbra. She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, where she received the Richard K. Price Scholarship and a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. Escott is a founding member of 100 Days Action and half of the Social Practice Project The Bureau of Linguistical Reality. Her work has been featured in the Economist, The new Yorker, KQED, MOMUS and many others

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Amy Balkin is an artist whose works address property relations, environmental justice, and equity in the context of climate change. Her projects and collaborations include A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting (Balkin, et al.), atmospheric "clean air" park Public Smog, and environmental justice audio tour Invisible-5 (Balkin/Stringfellow/Halbur, Greenaction and POND).. Her work has been exhibited in Fleeting Territories (Kunstraum Niederösterreich), Sublime (Centre Pompidou Metz), Hybris (MUSAC), Rights of Nature (Nottingham Contemporary), and dOCUMENTA (13), and published in Decolonizing Nature (Sternberg), Materiality (Whitechapel/MIT), Work of the Wind: Land, (K. Verlag), and Critical Landscapes (UC Press).

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a participatory artwork by artists Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott working with the public to recognizing a collective loss for words to describe the emotions and experiences our species is having as our climate changes. Recognizing that just as new maps will need to be drawn, new experiences will likewise need to be codified in language to recognize or new collective realities. Asking “who has the agency to define the world around us— and the words we use to talk about it?” The Bureau thus creates a platform for people to identify feelings and experiences they do not have the language to describe and together coin neologisms to better discuss these. The Bureau is a process based social practice artwork that utilizes conversation, place-making and the facilitating of cross pollination between fields as a medium in itself. The Bureau sees the words created in this process as points of connectivity to further understanding, dialogue and conversations in the world about the ideas these words seek to codify.

Writing about The Bureau of Linguistical Reality has appeared in The New Yorker, The Economist, KQED, The San Francisco Chronical, Vice Magazine and the Huffington Post. The Bureau was the recipient of the Kindle Projects Makers Muse Award and its Mobile Field Office has traveled Nationally and Internationally including to Santa Barbra Museum of Contemporary Art, Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (BAMFA), La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, Blackwood Gallery at The University of Toronto in Canada, Southern Exposure in San Francisco and many others.

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ARTIST STATEMENT:

My practice moves between film, video, text, and painting, and I draw heavily upon methods of assemblage and recontextualization. I am intrigued by the racialization of contamination narratives, the difference between “disaster erotica” and “disaster porn”, and alternative proposals to tales of ecological catastrophe, as told through visual and text-based forms. I use my studio and research practice to investigate the enduring romance of apocalyptic narratives, implicit and explicit manifestations of propaganda, and the possibilities for radical futurisms premised upon collective imagining and imaginings that are centered around the margins. BIO: Connie Zheng is an artist, writer and filmmaker who was born in China and is currently based out of Oakland, California. She has presented scholarly work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and exhibited her visual work around the U.S., including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco), and AIR Gallery (New York). She has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and ACRE, and her writing has appeared on SFMOMA's Open Space platform, Art Practical and in the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies. She received an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, as well as a BA in Economics and English (Creative Nonfiction) from Brown University, and will be starting a PhD in Visual Studies at UC Santa Cruz this fall. She is currently a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, a Collection Fellow at KADIST, and the Art Director of Quiet Lightning.

Recently, Delta Ark has turned farther and farther away from the future, and deeper into the immediate environment. These days, aside from trying to establish a consistent political routine of advocacy in the morning, Delta_Ark does a lot of bird watching, but in strange ways. Delta_Ark has a FPV drone that flies up to the top of the trees, in order to see all the goings-on in the high branches. Delta_Ark is training machine learning algorithms to identify individual birds as well as to categorize behaviors. Delta_Ark is training another machine learning algorithm to gather that data and use it to write poetry, automatically. Delta_Ark is taking this poetry and embedding it into a multi-player VR world where people can wander and find it. This work is called Gevurah (“God’s Might,” in English). This work, as of yet, is unfinished

Hyphen-Labs is a London based design studio using technology to explore absurdities that emerge at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future. We use design to challenge conventions and stimulate conversations, placing planetary needs and collective experiences at the centre of our current evolving narratives.

Jody Stillwater 周青海 is a writer, director and creative technologist from the San Francisco Bay Area. His film and interdisciplinary project themes are based in dream logic and tactile reality, with a modern/transforming approach to visual semiotics & archetype, grounded in organic systems theory, realism and classical narrative. His cultural background as a Chinese/Norwegian/Cherokee-American amidst colliding waves of post-temporal diaspora and arhythmic, intertidal class structures has influenced a value of justice, representation and the ethereal, and allowed him to express these values in narrative and experimental cinema.

He has screened films at MUTEK SF, Marfa Film Festival, ISEA 2019, Choreoscope Int’l Dance Film Festival, Denver Film Festival, Bucharest Int’l Dance Film Festival, and has participated in various multi-disciplinary labs such as the Tribeca Film Festival Hacks Lab, the San Francisco Dance Film Festival Co-Lab, and was selected as the featured film artist at APAture 2018. He holds a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. Stillwater is also a location sound recordist, and films he has recorded have screened at Sundance, Edinburgh Film Festival, SXSW, Chicago International, Tribeca and SFIFF. He has made films in the Netherlands, Colombia, Austria, India, Chile, Slovenia, the UK and across the United States.

Judit Navratil’s practice is multivalent, engaging performance, social practices, drawing, as well as video and VR. The relationship between the real and virtual is personally significant to Judit, as she has moved between several different countries and cultures in her lifetime, and relies on digital means to connect to people and places in an attempt to construct “home.” Her projects are as much affective mappings of what it means to continuously oscillate between analog and digital, past and present. Navratil uses her body-device to keep balance through her compass-meditation: the Long Distance Somersault career. Rolling as far as she can helps her seeking higher alternatives and to gaze in the Eye of the Hurricane.

Navratil earned an MFA in Painting at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2008 and an MFA at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2019. She has been exhibiting in Hungary, Canada, France, Korea and the Bay Area. Her work has been recognized through awards and residencies including the Cadogan Art Award, a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), the Dennis Leon and Christin Nelson Scholarship and a Presidential Scholarship for Anderson Ranch. She is currently an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Lonny J Avi Brooks is an Associate Professor in Strategic Communication, at California State University, East Bay (CSUEB) + Co-Creator/Co-producer, of The Afrofuturist Podcast and serves as a Creative Director for the California Black Speculative Arts Movement and Research Affiliate for the Institute For The Future.

The AfroFuturist Podcast

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ARTIST STATEMENT: Memories of my childhood play a tremendous role in my approach to creating art today. In my early years my mother a single parent lived in fear for my health due to the environmental hazards of San Francisco’s Hunters Point district. I suffered with asthma. Therefore, my innate interest to drawing and painting became that of a marriage over sports modeling my pursuit for constant spiritual mental and physical elevation. Having siblings among others as viewers of my work challenged me to go beyond my limitations. I remember my late grandmother a Barber and tailor sewing for hours at her machine after coming home from work. I would sit at her feet and draw on a paper bag with a pen, marker, crayon or a number two pencil.

Art is an absolute liberation of my imagination, a tool I use to communicate and share my “inner-light.” I have regular memories of my childhood working at the local super market, helping elders with their shopping bags. Receiving tips helping my grandmother in her barber shop by sweeping up the hairs to find money mysteriously hidden in large clumps. At the end of each service, those who knew me would say, “Keep up the good work and never stop doing your art.” From these experiences, I have learned the treasure of focusing on minuet details. Eventually, I realized in my artistic process that I too would hide treasures. Living with this artistic expression is ritualistic in act and meditative in thought. Many times in the midst of creating, I experience dejavu. The realization of a single moment is obsolete only until it is captured by a memory of a stroke; a thought or pause for observation that I have discovered represents reincarnation of that tangible moment. Because of this, the very act of creating fine art is imparted with the relationship and responsibility I have with THE CREATOR. “The purpose of my existence.” I also feel it is my duty as self taught artist to have an internal dialog with the viewer and in many cases the ancestors, where at this point I find inspiration for artistic expression. Fathering my child, serving my community, drumming, martial arts, poetry, philosophy and ancestral facts (history), all helps with the enhancement of my expression, to captures the Black, experience in America. I enjoy manipulating dry water-based paints, oil pastels, ink pen, found objects or assemblage. Book illustrations, portraiture, and public art projects have brought me closer to my community. The purpose of my compositions is to elevate the social, political, environmental and spiritual issues of people deeply challenged by oppression. This has been my greatest enrapture. Kenya and Haiti are places for instance that influence the bold and dramatic colors in my works. Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, John Biggers and Jean-Michel Basquiat (to name a few) has inspired my artistic direction. Being an artist and growing up with-in low-income housing projects, surrounded by the early stages of Hip-Hop, had an immense impact on my ability to create freely. Although this bold life style of music, poetry, art, dance, and intense research today seems barbaric. It nevertheless has influenced me to be boundless in my creative efforts to deliver messages of empowerment to the indigenous peoples of the world.

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Serena JV Elston is an artist whose life question is: in this modern technological race for the new, what have we left behind that we should weave back in again? The narrative of her artwork deals with trauma and the dysfunction that persists throughout all levels of society. Her research-based practice investigates the disciplines of architecture, agriculture, and ancient history to search for those forgotten tools that connect us to the land, to the people, and to ourselves because in a world defined by its traumas art can be liberatory.

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Founder/Director at B4BEL4B Tiare Ribeaux is a new media and interdisciplinary Hawaiian-American artist, filmmaker and curator based in the Bay Area. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of B4BEL4B gallery, and co-founder of REFRESH. As an artist, her work explores the interfacing of technology with our human bodies and the environment, and employs storytelling to make visible social and ecological imbalances while imagining change that could produce a more regenerative and equitable future. She is interested in re-centering and uplifting indigenous knowledge, and imagining indigenous futures, and the modern indigenous experience - especially in the fields of film and media art. Her recent work at the intersection of art + biology aims to redefine and subvert the binaries of the natural versus the unnatural, and technology versus nature. She has shown work both nationally and internationally, including ISEA Gwangju and ISEA Hong Kong, IZOLYATSIA in Ukraine, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Copenhagen Fashion Film Festival, and the Imagine Science Film Festival in NYC. She was awarded a web residency with Akademie Schloss Solitude + ZKM in 2019 and selected for the American Arts Incubator in 2017-18 with the ZERO1 Art + Technology Network. She curated the Soundwave Biennial in San Francisco in 2016 and the CODAME Festival in 2015. She has won numerous grants and awards for her artistic leadership including two New and Experimental Works Grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Building Demand for the Arts Grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, San Francisco Grants for the Arts, the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. She has worked with Leonardo/ISAST, the de Young Museum, Gray Area Art + Technology, the California Academy of Sciences, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Fort Mason Center for the Arts, and the Oakland Museum of California, among others.

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