PLASMA Speaker Series

MONDAYS 6:00- 8:30 pm EST

Zoom Meeting ID:  983 4611 3436

Email eliavarg@buffalo.edu with PLASMA2024 in subject line for password.

0rphan Drift has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision since its inception in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. Now co-channelled by co-founders Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee, it operates across London, San Francisco and Capetown.

In recent years, 0rphan Drift has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness. The multiple channel video installation If AI Were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery San Francisco (2019), and the ACE funded IMT Gallery Becoming Octopus Meditations (2020), suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception and navigate what it means to communicate with an alien intelligence and how to address human exceptionalism’s limited understanding of ourselves in relation to other kinds of life, whether as the distributed intelligence of the octopus or the synthetic architecture of an Ai. They combine video, animation and text with newer tools such as Lidar, Blender, Touch Designer, to explore new spatio-temporal formations and ask what kinds of bodies might inhabit these new coordinates and ecologies.

0rphan Drift was partnered by the Serpentine Gallery’s Creative Ai Lab with Ai consultancy Etic Lab, for ISCRI, and now their current 9 Brains project. Installations, performances and speculative fictions have been exhibited nationally and internationally in gallery and museum spaces for over three decades. Recent exhibitions include Seismic: Art meets Science, Giant gallery, Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, UK; Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon; Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or; Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery NY and in the book Fictioning,The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, 2019; Interview in Interalia Magazine and contribution to Strike Art #77 on Ai, both 2023.

For further information, visit https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/

PLASMA (Performances, Lectures, and Screenings in Media Art) brings to Buffalo celebrated theorists and artists who are exhibiting in some of the world’s most renowned museums and galleries, and writing on the cutting edge of new media theory and expression.

Each event brings internationally celebrated artists to discuss varied arts practices, models, modes, examples, and experiences in media arts.

The series serves as a kind of hub as to how courses in new media, digital poetics, game studies, locative media, robotics, installation, media theory and performance arts can be experienced.

In this series you can see and interact with artists that you would encounter in New York, Europe and Latin America, offering a rich experience for the University at Buffalo, the city and Western New York.

The series provides, not expressive answers, but raises intriguing questions, exploring new avenues in the digital age, who we are, how we interact and where we are going.

For enrolled students, the class begins at 6:00pm.

For the full Spring 2024 PLASMA series schedule, visit: https://arts-sciences.buffalo.edu/media-study/news-events/plasma.html

PLASMA is presented by the Department of Media Study and the College of Arts and Sciences.