Trellis has been used as a structure to support plant growth for thousands of years. Drawing from traditions of participatory performance, conceptual art, and social practice, L’art du Treillageur is a project that utilizes the trellis form as a historical and aesthetic reference for thinking through support structures relevant to our current moment.
The work engages participants in construction and reflection; supplied with materials mailed to them from the artist, participants build and document their own artworks while contributing their documentation and written reflections to a community archive. This archive is hosted online, with participants’ contributions housed in a sculptural installation.
This work continues to grow as a system of social and economic relations through subsequent works, additional collaborations, and social media presence.
How To Build A Trellis
Participant Submissions
Before
After
Video walkthrough
About
M. James Becker is an artist researching the relations between political and artistic practices through participatory performance, installation, drawing, and video.
Becker’s work has been presented in public and independent art spaces in the United States and abroad, including the Opera House Palace of Arts, Cairo, Other Places Art Fair, San Pedro, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. His work and projects he’s contributed to have been featured in print and online in Hyperallergic, Complex, Curate LA, The Daily Bruin, and Alive Magazine St. Louis.
He holds a B.A. from the Design | Media Arts program at UCLA, and is currently an MFA Candidate in Digital Arts + New Media at UC Santa Cruz.
Tracks in Snow is a visual novel and interactive drama that began with a simple question: what if players chose how they said lines in a scene rather than what they said. Mechanically, there is heavy inspiration from theatrical productions in how actors can help facilitate interpretations of a script and play with line reads and the emotional tone of a scene. The script for Tracks in Snow was written to potentially work as an actual stage play as well as the script for a visual novel and follows two women as they leave their home on Passover and have their own reservations about that decision and what it means for their relationship.
Nick Junius is an interactive narrative researcher, game designer, programmer, and playwright whose work frequently revolves around character interaction, both in systems and narrative. They work with digital games and interactive fiction most commonly and use their background in playwriting to inspire their game, system, and narrative designs.
DUST WARNING (Does Albemarle know about this?) is a project that considers our dependency on the metal lithium. Lithium is the lightest metal on Earth and an unseen material in most of our electronic devices. Lithium is critical to our consumption and creation of digital media. It is fundamental to the advancement of renewable energy technology to combat climate change, with the capacity to store wind and solar energy and power electric cars. Lithium is also a mood stabilizer in the treatment of bipolar disorder and manic depression. The project draws attention to the tension between a seemingly “green” raw material that is destructive to land, ecosystems, and people.
There is only one active lithium mine in the United States—the Silver Peak mine in Thacker Pass, Nevada—operated by the multinational mining corporation, Albemarle. By staging a performance at an estranged symbol of corporate power—the boardroom table—the work is a critique of extractive capitalism, and offers a playful alternative to internal and external landscapes where capital is felt but not seen.
Visitors encounter a wall text as they enter the installation.Wall text in situ.
Wall Text:
“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”—Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”_________________Silver PeakDiscovered 1863Silver Peak is one of the oldest mining areas in Nevada. A 10 stamp mill was built in 1865 and by 1867 a 20 stamp mill was built. Mining camp lawlessness prevailed during the late sixties, and over the next 38 years, Silver Peak had its ups and downs. In 1906 the Pittsburg Silver Peak Gold Mining Company bought a group of properties, constructed the Silver Peak Railroad and built a 100 stamp mill at Blair the following year.The town, at times, was one of the leading camps in Nevada, but by 1917 it had all but disappeared. The town burned in 1948 and little happened until the Foote Mineral Company began their extraction of lithium from under the floor of Clayton Valley.—State Historical Marker No. 155Nevada State Park SystemBy: Harold C. Hendersen_________________Where does lithium “live”?Lithium is the lightest metal on Earth.Lithium is highly reactive and floats on water.If you made a fire with lithium, it would never go out.Lithium is present in ocean water. It is mined from brines and clays in salt flats and solid rock, like spodumene and petalite.Lithium-ion batteries are found in electric cars, storage units for wind and solar energy, and most consumer electronics, including laptops, smartphones, digital cameras, and sound recording devices.Lithium is used in the manufacturing of ceramics and glass.Lithium has two stable isotopes, Li-6 and Li-7, the latter of which is 92.5% abundant in nature.Lithium-6 is a critical raw material for producing tritium used in thermonuclear weapons.Lithium carbonate is used as a medicine to treat bipolar disorder and manic depression.There are only 8 lithium-producing countries.Most of the lithium mined from spodumene comes from Australia.Most of the lithium mined from brine comes from Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, in an area known as “The Lithium Triangle.”The lithium market is an oligopoly. Five mining companies, Albemarle (US) along with Ganfeng Lithium (China), SQM (Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile S.A.), Tianqi Lithium (China), and Livent (US) control over 70% of the world’s lithium supply.The global supply for lithium is expected to triple by 2025 due to increased mining activity and demand for batteries and electric cars.Albemarle’s Silver Peak mine will double its production of lithium carbonate by 2025.
I excavate the content of lithium in a performance with two Califone record players. Using the materiality of grooves on a record and analog machines to expand and condense layers of time and noise, I create a sonic landscape that explores different mood states and the geopolitical and social strata of mining.
The performance uses two Califone record players, a collection of 45rpm vinyls, an analog mixer, and two speakers.The performance run time is 8:37.
Erin Single is an artist and designer from Atlanta, Georgia.
Through video, installation, and performance, Erin creates ambient, surreal environments that explore liveness and location. She uses the theory of activist neuroaesthetics to estrange the environment and open up our minds to seeing alternatives to critical environmental issues such as extractive capitalism. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and prior to that she studied graphic design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She also has a business degree from Emory University. In her previous life, she worked as a strategy consultant advising pharmaceutical and biotech companies in Berlin, Zürich, New York City, and Philadelphia.
The Illusion of Control(er) is relinquishing control in a society where we ultimately have no control over situations but we can control the way we perceive them. Focuses on a distorted reality that allows the viewer to see the world from a new perspective.
Stephanie Layton has always been fascinated by art because it allows the viewer to step in to a new, different world, and experience life from an altered viewpoint. She expresses herself through many different mediums and is always trying to push the limits of the way art can be made by utilizing combinations of new and different technologies.
Bluestockings is a tabletop-style roleplaying game designed specifically for remote play in order to foster connection, play, and joy during the pandemic (particularly for people who enjoy tabletop rpgs). It also intervenes in a space that centers combat as its problem-solving mechanic, with disputes resolved by a central authority (the Dungeon/Game Master). Bluestockings instead positions non-competitive, social collaboration as its primary problem-solving mechanic. Narratively, it follows a Society focused on collaboratively solving community problems in salon-era, post-Reign of Terror France, where characters rebuild following massive violence in the face of a shaky government and uncertain future.
Dayna Diamond is a storyteller and artist who focuses on social connection, illuminating social misunderstandings, and revealing personal inner worlds in her work. She has worked in a variety of mediums–writing, film, photography, photomanipulation, digital painting, and games–and values dynamic ideas about how to implement digital media in all forms.
WALLED IN: AN AMERICAN RITUAL is an installation/performance that is directly inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s book “Walden”. The performance shows a day in the life of a self proclaimed poet-patriot as he attempts to reconstruct and reconcile with the American essence. Run time approximately 30 mins.
“In a Post-American United States, self-proclaimed patriot poet emerges from his cabin to lead a highly anticipated ritual of reckoning. Runes/symbols of the country of old are used in relation to the body to let out a good old fashioned American Yawp. He takes place in exciting events such as consuming gut soup, speaking in verse, and participating in subconscious visual therapy all in an effort to identify the American essence.
CW: Mentions of trauma, consumption of canned food, excretion of bodily fluids, and some sexual imagery.
Rey Cordova is a Chicanx poet, performer, and visual artist from Riverside, California. Cordova’s work is concerned with performance of identity, race, and culture through a theatrical/poetic lens. His work draws from and attempts to subvert American art and literary practices as a way to artistically confront the power structures that exist in the United States.He earned a B.A. in Theater Arts from University of California: Santa Cruz, and will soon graduate with an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media also from UC Santa Cruz.
Fair Sai Re Pi LLC is a project in reimagining a pyramid scheme company that appropriated Chinese Traditional Medicine to a fictional corporation offering Fire Therapy Treatment, inheriting the wisdom from the ancient Shennong AI. Through bringing audience in a fictional immersive VR environment, this project forms a critique on this company with internal capitalistic logic in exploitation, solidifying vertical hierarchy, and excessive consumption, and to question the relationship between Western modernity and the philosophy of Chinese Traditional Medicine.
Haoran Chang is a multidisciplinary artist who uses video installation, virtual reality, and digital print in exploring the social construction and digital mediation in contemporary society.
CLOTH^3 consists of a cloth simulated cube rendered in 3 different ways: crocheted, 3D printed, and rendered on the screen. Each method involves a different configuration of labor between the computer and the artist and affords different modes of interaction, both in touch and sight. The history of computing is deeply intertwined with textiles like the Jaquard loom or early circuits that had to be connected by hand. Baroque art was an intensification of Classical rules- artists and musicians seemed to create freely by performing in these boundaries fluently and with abundance. Today that virtuosic performance is done by the computer running code to fabricate images at many cycles per second, or to carefully extrude a single line of plastic in hundreds of layers to create a small print. A cloth simulation deforms an otherwise rigid 3D geometry into a shape that is reactive to its environment. All of these forms are still cubes, in the sense of topological geometry, and yet, if folded infinitely, they could produce any other shape. The grid is still present, often its inescapable, but it could be folded too.
Unity Primitive: Cube
Hand Crocheted Acrylic Yarn – 1x1x1 meter
A few ways of being a cube
PLA and Acrylic – 4ft x 4ft x 4in
CUBEISM 2: Baroque Edition
Videogame – for Touchscreen and Projection or Desktop
Patrick Stefaniak was born in Texas in 1993 and grew up in Indiana. He is currently an MFA student in Digital Art + New Media at UC Santa Cruz, earned a BFA in Digital Art from Indiana University in 2015, and has worked in NYC as a Creative Technologist. He works with 3D games, virtual reality, video performance, installation, writing, hole punching, crocheting, and 3D printing to think about rendering, perception, labor, queerness, and fun.
