Slime Tech Lab Logo

Slime Tech Lab

Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde (Ayo) is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, and time-traveler living and working in New York. His works range from painting and speculative design to physically interactive works, wearable technology, and explorations of “Reclamation.” 


Ashley Jane Lewis is a tech educator and interactive artist with a focus on bioart, afrofuturism and speculative design. In the summer of 2016 she was listed in the Top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada. Her works explore the relationship between past present and future for the empowered black identity, asking audiences to suspend their conceptions of reality.

February 3 at 3:25 EST-4:40 EST

Slime Tech Lab Workshop!

STL is a mobile laboratory and living system that explores new futures through science, technology, and storytelling. It is led by Afrofuturist artist Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde and technology and art educator Ashley Jane Lewis. Participants will be invited to consider slime mold as an inspiration to envision vibrant, diverse futures through speculative design and microbiology. Using an accessible 3D platform, participants will develop ideas and objects for the cooperative slime mold-influenced future as part of their artwork, Sowers.

February 15 at 3:25-4:40pm.

The Politics of Biohacking, Neuroplasticity, and the Survival of the Species: A Creative Workshop with Bill Shannon.

The Politics of Biohacking, Neuroplasticity, and the Survival of the Species: A Creative Workshop with Bill Shannon. 
Bill Shannon’s webcomic, GOING FULL CHUCKY, imagines a future where nanobots change billionaires’ neurology for the good of humanity. This interactive workshop considers comics’ potential to offer a lighthearted take on serious ethical challenges.

billevent

Bill Shannon

Bill Shannon is a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist, inventor and maker who explores body-centric work through video installation, sculpture, drawing, linguistics, sociology, choreography and dance. Bill has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, a Foundation For Contemporary Art Fellowship in Performance Art, and a United States Artist Fellowship in Dance. Bill has received three NEA Multidisciplinary Arts Awards and worked as a choreographer on the creative team behind Cirque Du Soleil’s “Varekai.”

Stop and Glow Roll

The Center for Genomic Gastronomy

The Center for Genomic Gastronomy is an international artist-led think tank that examines the biotechnologies and biodiversity of human food systems. This piece is a collaboration of its founders Zack Denfield, Catherine Kramer, and Emma Conley.

March 3 at 3:25-4:40 EST.

FOOD PHREAKING: LIVE.

This workshop features the Center for Genomic Gastronomy (CGG), an artist-led think tank that examines the biotechnologies and biodiversity of human food systems. Building on CGG’s digital dinner party, Cultures of Biotech: First Person Eater, we will explore, experiment with, and exploit food databases and create counterfactual recipes. Featured menu items will include: Smog Tasting, Cobalt-60 Sauce, Open Source Seeds, and a short history of transgenic tomatoes.

MARCH 16 AT 12-1 EST

CODEX ENTROPIA

This event premiers Richard Pell’s CODEX ENTROPIA, a cautionary epic created from found anaglyph images. Addressing the entanglement of biological life forms, computational data, and political ideology, this film narrates an alternative history of an ancient civilization that develops complex animal computing technologies and stores information in landscapes. The original music and sound design by Jason Martin positions ghosts as recordings, and recordings as ghosts. The screening will be accompanied by Q&A with the artist and a brief response from historian and philosopher of science Michael Dietrich.

Codex2.filmimage

Richard Pell

Richard Pell is the founder and director of the Center for PostNatural History, an organization dedicated to the collection and exposition of life-forms that have been intentionally and heritably altered through domestication, selective breeding, tissue culture or genetic engineering.

cel

Baum & Leahy is an Earth-based symbiotic practice exploring how sustainable futures can be grown in symbiosis between environmental ethics and multispecies aesthetics.

 

Daniel Slåttnes (b. 1986, Oslo, Norway) is an interdisciplinary visual artist who investigates the boundaries of conscious life and limits of communication by trying to collaborate with a baby rubber plant.

MARCH 22 AT 3:25-4:40 EST.

Communicating with the Non-human: Meditations with Microbes and Listening with Plants.

Communicating with the Non-human: Meditating with Microbes and Listening with Plants. 
Three artists will introduce their techniques of communicating with other species. In CELLUMONIALS, European-based artists Baum & Leahy invite viewers to connect with the invisible microscopic landscapes living within and around us and understand our bodies as ecosystems. A limited supply of their microbe meditation pillows will be available in advance to the event. Norwegian artist-engineer Daniel Slåttnes will present Plant Cyborgs, an ongoing interspecies collaboration. Slåttnes applies his considerable engineering and programming skills to listen to plants, to sculpt with them, and perhaps eventually, to dance with them. A limited supply of microbe meditation pillows that the artists created for this event can be picked up on the freebies table just inside the entrance to the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library (on the righthand side, past the Service Desk).

APRIL 2 AT 7:00-8:15 EDT.

Crossing Kingdoms: A Panel Discussion

Crossing Kingdoms is an artist-led attempt to fuse yeast cells with human embryonic kidney cells. In pursuing the creation of a biological entity that would not exist without human intervention, Crossing Kingdoms provokes scientific, aesthetic, and cultural discussions, asking, What is this living thing, and what consequences follow its existence? This talk by artist-researchers from the leading art and biology wet laboratory, SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia, will present new ways of considering the categorization of life in the context of synthetic biology.

Crossingkingdomsimage

Crossing Kingdoms

This work is an interdisciplinary collaboration between artists Ionat Zurr, Oron Catts, Tarsh Bates (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia) and scientists and social scientists Elise Cachat, Jane Calvert, Alistair Elfick, Susan Rosser & Erika Szymanski (SynthSys, University of Edinburgh).

pasted image 0 (1)

Alisha B. Wormsley is a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer who works with collective memory and the synchronicity of time through the stories of women of color.

Suzanne Kite (Kite) is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, composer, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. 

April 6 AT 6- 8:50 EST.

Dreaming Workshop: Afro-Indigenous Futures Reflections on (post-)colonial pasts, presents and futures.

Drawing on their works, Children of NAN and Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock), Interdisciplinary artists Alisha Wormsley and Suzanne Kite will introduce the public to their practice of collective community dreaming as a means to shape the past by daring to sculpt the future. This event will be capped at 25 participants.

MaryMaggic_vitrine2

Mary Maggic

Mary Maggic (Mary Tsang) is an artist-biologist interested in molecular queering, practicing in civic biosciences, open source organisms and tools, and how to deploy them. Their projects explore the biopolitical nature of biotechnologies, their roots in society and transhumanism, and the question of who gets access.

APRIL 7 AT 3:25 EST-4:40 EST

ESTROFEM LAB:: ESTROGEN GEEKING

Artist and biologist Mary Maggic will introduce and screen their short film, “Open Source Estrogen,” and discuss their work ESTROFEM LAB:: ESTROGEN GEEKING, which combines do-it-yourself science, body and gender politics, and ecological ramifications of the present. Maggic will discuss their art, including these pieces and >>Estroworld Now<<, as biotechnical civil disobedience