Lightning Talks – Spring 2019 Graduate Fellow and Faculty Grantees Projects

Please join us on April 15th in Digital Matters to hear our Spring 2019 Graduate Fellows and Faculty Grantees share about their DM projects.

Jace Brittain, DM Graduate Fellow, PhD candidate in Creative Writing, A Mountain Pine Script: on Bark Beetles, Illegibility, and Artistic Approaches to Climate Change

The Uintas are marked by signs of climate change catastrophe among which is the visible damage of the bark beetle epidemic. The curving, carved paths of the bark beetle means damage for forests, but what does it mean for us? Jace Brittain, PhD candidate in Creative Writing investigates illegible inscriptions and explores digital approaches to art and poetics of the Anthropocene.  How might imaginative investigations into how humans relate to our ecosystem re-frame the temporal, geographic, and political problems of scale which inhibit conversations around climate change?

Tiana Birrell, DM Graduate Fellow, Grad Student in Environmental Studies, Water You Doing? Finding Place in the Digital

Tiana Birrell is a graduate student in Environmental Humanities.  Her project “Water You Doing?” emphasizes the materiality of the digital by examining data servers and their water footprint. She draws attention to the physicality of the digital via an art installation comprised of digital software, video, projections, and physical objects. Her piece renders the invisible network of data consumption material, underscoring the amount of water and energy necessary to run our massive archives of digital information.

Lourdes Alberto, DM Faculty Grantee, Assoc. Prof. in Eng. Dept & Div. of Ethnic Studies, Recovering Indigenous Oaxacan Women’s Political Activism in Diaspora, Los Angeles 1970-1990 for a Digital Future

Lourdes Alberto’s (Assoc. Prof. in Eng. & Div. of Ethnic Studies) project digitizes an archive documenting the activism of female Oaxacan community members in Los Angeles. Since the 1970s indigenous Oaxacans have migrated to L.A. and constitute the largest indigenous population in California. The archive helps us think about how migration informs the formation of indigenous archives and how indigenous Latinas/os/xs mobilize links to indigenous homelands to push back against economic exploitation, preserve mother tongues, and reconfigure indigenous identities for US-born/raised children.

Wendy Wischer, DM Faculty Grantee, Asst. Prof. in Sculpture Intermedia, Battlegrounds: Where U.S. Land Management and Women’s Health Policy Collide

Over 46% percent of land in the Western US is owned and managed by Federal Agencies. Controversy exists over current and future plans for managing territory due to conflicting stakeholder values. Many US state government agencies control and regulate women’s health and bodies. Wendy Wischer, Asst. Prof., Sculpture Intermedia, explores how management and policy of land and the female body collide, in hopes of discovering understanding and solutions. This creative exploration uses a variety of digital processes to capture video footage from above, the surface, and within.