Urgent Inquiries with Ari Melenciano, Tega Brain, and Sam Lavigne
This November, we are thrilled to present a duo of conversations, Urgent Inquiries, hosted at our friend’s Secret Riso Club, as the introduction to our new 2025/2026 season of programming, Speculating on Plurality. We invited a group of Eyebeam alum artists whose works encapsulate the heart of the program’s intensive thematic focuses, as they start to help us think about the following questions through the season:
We are more digitally connected than ever, but are we sharing realities?
What do these disparate and parallel realities invite us to consider urgently?
In an era of technofeudalism, is it possible to escape technology’s deployment in state surveillance?
Do our most popular technologies have an impulse towards creating sameness?
And, what is required to move us towards a pluralistic commons—a space that might hold our multitudes and their potentials towards shared futures?
The themes of this upcoming season of the program, Speculating on Plurality, reflect the ongoing inquiry and work of the alum community, and its concerns regarding hyper-contemporary issues that we collectively think and act through that we care about most in the arts, tech, and society.
In our first program, we welcome Eyebeam alumni, artists Ari Melenciano of Afrotectopia, whose work investigates our social and cultural relations using new media frameworks, and Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, who employ digital sabotage to frame climate crises and its mitigation in legible ways.
Artist bios
Ari Melenciano is an artist and researcher whose practice investigates cultural behavior as a dynamic cybernetic field. She positions the self as an epistemic and ontological site, and elevates invisible intelligences as co-authors to perception. Whether she is composing botanical soundscapes or crafting intuitive choreographies that use the body as a cultural research instrument, her practice designs new grammars for understanding what it means to exist, through the remembrance of ancestral interfaces. Ari's inquiries invite us to consider imagination as simultaneously a tool to excavate interiority, expand the performance of culture, and recover what the archive has forgotten. Ari has taught courses in new media technologies, design, critical theory, and culture across NYU, the Pratt Institute, Hunter College, Parsons School of Design, and Rutgers University. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Venice Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai. She is also the founder of Afrotectopia.
Tega Brain is an Australian artist and environmental engineer born when atmospheric CO2 was below 350ppm. Her work addresses issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure and has taken the form of digital networks controlled by environmental phenomena, schemes for obfuscating personal data, and a wildly popular, online smell-based dating service. Through these provisional systems she investigates how technologies orchestrate and reorchestrate agency. She is an Industry Associate Professor of Integrated Design and Media at New York University and her first book, Code as Creative Medium, is coauthored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press. She lives and works in New York.
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He is a Creative Capital grantee, recipient of the Pioneer Works Working Artist Fellowship, and the Brown Institute’s Magic Grant. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Synthetic Media and Algorithmic Justice at the Parsons School of Design.
Accessibility Note
Secret Riso Club is located on a ground-floor storefront, with a restroom on the same level. A ramp is located at the entrance.
Acknowledgment
The pair of in-person Eyebeam alumni conversations is made possible through our friends at Secret Riso Club!
Covid Guidelines
While masks are not required, they are available to all guests, and mask-wearing is encouraged. If you are feeling sick or have tested positive for COVID-19, we ask that you please refrain from participating in Eyebeam x Secret Riso Club programs to care for fellow community members.
Transportation
Secret Riso Club is located in the heart of Bushwick neighborhood, across the street from Fermi Playground, and two blocks down from Maria Hernandez Park.
The closest subway stations include the M train off of the Central Avenue or Knickbocker Avenue stops, which is approximately a 5-to-8-minute walk, and the L train at the Jefferson Street stop, approximately a 12-minute walk.
The closest bus stops are the B60 at the Wilson Av/Starr St stop and the B54 at the Myrtle Av/Evergreen Av stop.