Roberto Azaretto recently received a PhD in music composition from SUNY in Buffalo, New York. Two of his works have been performed in Buffalo this year: Eigengrau, for four instruments, was premiered in April by the Australian Ensemble Elision and Verfremdungen, and M (2) was premiered by the Hayley-Laufer duo in May.
Bentley Brown screened A Film Crew Censors Itself at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. The film premiered at the Dallas International Film Festival and will soon be shown in Indonesia and Egypt, as well as at the Arab Film Festival in San Francisco. Brown's film, First Feature, traveled to numerous venues around the world––including the International Film Festival in Rotterdam as well as venues in New Mexico, Beirut, France, Italy, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates. Jeddah Vlog, a fictional mini-series produced in Saudi Arabia, premiered online and was acquired by the distribution company Vrt. His Chad-made film, The Last Cassette Tape Studio, premiered in competition at the Ismailia Film Festival in Egypt. Another 2019 film, Nadoum Glâce, was nominated for the Young African Filmmaker Award of the Afrika Film Festival in Leuven, Belgium. Brown premiered his first video installation, Taghtiis (Submersion), in the Metamorphosis Critical Media Practices exhibit. He also published two articles on Africa is a Country: "An African Film Manifesto, Forty Years Later" and "The Disidentification of Mahamat Saleh Haroun.”
Minso Kim published the study, “Newly Generated Rituals in the Age of Digital Technology,” in Virtual Creativity. Last February, she participated in a panel on speculative environmental futures at the Anthropocene Resonance: Interdisciplinary Approaches Symposium, held at the University of Colorado Art Museum. She also presented “Blurring Borders Between the Real and Digital Worlds” as part of the 25th International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Gwangju, South Korea. In October, she will present “Being Close to Nature While in Indoor Spaces” at the BEA On Location Symposium. Finally, her prototypical project, “Shadow of Stars,” was included in the #Others section on the Future Architecture platform.
Eliseo Ortiz’s work was presented at the Currents New Media collective exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also opened a solo show of his recent critical game, “The Choreography of Us,” at El Expendio Proyectos in Monterrey, Mexico. He recently received a prize from CONARTE, the Council of Culture and Arts, in Mexico. His films screened at the San Diego Underground Film Festival and the Human and Non-Human Migration and Mobility Symposium at the University of Brighton in England. He also participated in the 65th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.
Toma Peiu spent the summer in Madison, Wisconsin, researching the Rzhevsky Collection at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and studying at the Central Eurasian Studies Summer Intensive. In 2019, he presented work at five major international conferences, including the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Pittsburgh and the RAI Film Festival in England. After screening at the Astra Film Festival in Romania and at the Inca Imperial Film Festival in Peru, If Objects Could Speak, the short documentary film he co-directed with Luiza Parvu, will be screened at Oaxaca X in Mexico. Their most recent installation, The Sea Was Here, premiered at NEST’s WILD | TAME exhibition. This month, the Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, will host a presentation on Peiu and Parvu’s work in migration-themed documentary and fiction. This fall, Peiu is serving as a visiting professor at the "Berdakh" Karakalpak State University in Nukus, Uzbekistan.
Joseph Steele presented the film Archives and Dust––made in the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s library and archive––and a performative lecture, as part of NEST's WILD | TAME exhibition. His work was supported by a NEST Fellowship with lichenologist Carly Anderson Stewart and stream ecologist Christa Torrens, both PhD candidates in the CU Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. This month, Steele and the University of Cambridge’s Emma Gomis are presenting INSTALLATION 26––a film with performed elements and props––in at Professor Julie Carr’s panel, “Real Life: An Installation,” at the University of Washington Bothel’s &NOW Conference.
Kevin Sweet presented a talk and installation––which he collaborated on with with Tara Knight and Adam Burgasse–– titled, “Sound Planetarium: Experiencing TRAPPIST 1-d in Virtual Reality,” at the 2019 TRAPPIST-1 Toward the Comparative Study of Temperate Terrestrial Worlds conference at Liège Université in Belgium.
Justin Trupiano’s installation, Frequented Paths of Genetically Evolved Neural Networks, was accepted into SciArt Magazine’s Networked show at The Nook Gallery in Los Angeles. With a grant from the Aerospace Engineering Department, Trupiano began an ongoing project, Icons, which will result in a series of visualizations representing each of the aerospace subfields, the first of which is on display in the new Ann & H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences building. He has also produced visuals for multiple exhibits in the Fiske Planetarium, including Cubic Awe and Solar Arcade.