The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is pleased to announce our next event, featuring presentations from Morehshin Allahyari and Miguel Novelo, on May 19 from 5-6:30PM PT in the Board Room at the Humanities Center.
For those unable to join in person, we invite you to join on Zoom. Registration is at this link.
Morehshin Allahyari | Re-figuring
In this presentation, Morehshin Allahyari speaks to the significance of re-figuration in her work: the act of re-reading the past, in order to reimagine decolonial futures. Drawing upon key projects She Who Sees the Unknown and Speculations on Capture, alongside her current film-in-progress, Morehshin centers circular time as a de- and anti-colonial methodology. She explores how embracing multiple, or plural futures is a tool for challenging the Western vision and use of technologies, to continue systemic violences. She invites us to consider the meaning of making work about the future, in a current moment when, for many, the notion of a future hangs in the balance.
Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: مورهشین اللهیاری), is a Bay Area based Iranian-Kurdish artist and assistant professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University, using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of MENA (Middle East and North Africa). Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Architettura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, MoMa, Victoria and Albert Museum, Queens Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, Taipei. She has been an artist in residence at Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco, the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research in association with Transmediale, Berlin, Eyebeam’s one year Research Residency, Pioneer Works, and Harvest Works. She has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, and Al Jazeera, among others. Morehshin’s work has been the subject of critical analysis across books, academic articles, and dissertation chapters of over 100 publications.
Miguel Novelo | Digital Gravity
Digital art is a dense, physical matter. Novelo’s recent work connects contemporary computing to a long arc of indigenous tools, situating data within the weight of the geological and the ancestral. Using photogrammetry and computer vision, Novelo translates the rhythms of bodies in motion into “computing rocks”—vessels that store and process information. During his residency at Recology, Novelo focused on the haunted CPU, exposing the tension between the digital desire for levitation and the physical anchor of the body. Light is not weightless; it is an extension of the earth’s resources. Through interaction, the viewer’s body activates the gravity of the work, grounding the ghostly smears of the screen into a tactile experience. This talk examines how the digital body is realized through its relationship to physical matter, resource costs, and the ritual of motion.
Miguel Novelo (he/him/el) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher who focuses on emerging media and community organizing—currently working on algorithmic movies, technoshammanic installations, thermodynamic hypnotism, and friendly computer viruses. Novelo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and numerous international film festivals. Novelo is a lecturer at Stanford Art and Art History Department and San Jose State University.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History, the Middle Eastern Studies Forum, and the Program in Global Studies.