UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Arts Research Institutes (ARI) invite you to an online LASER Talk featuring this year's cohort of ARI research fellows: Anna Friz, John Jota Leaños, and Irene Lusztig. ARI Research Fellowships are awarded to support the research and creative practices of faculty in the Arts Division. Leonardo Art & Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) is an international program bringing together artists, scientists, and scholars for presentations and conversations.
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ADMISSION
Free and open to the public
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Anna Friz is a sound and radio artist, and media studies scholar. Since 1998, she has created and presented new audio art and radiophonic works internationally in which radio is often the source, subject, and medium of the work. She also composes atmospheric sound works and sonic installations for theater, dance, film, and solo performance. Current projects include We Build Ruins, a large scale sound-focused media art installation expressively considering mining and industrial corridors in the high altitude deserts in northern Chile, and ongoing projects concerning radio beacons, air traffic control, and military monitoring vs. citizen listening. Recent presentations include Ars Electronica Big Concert Night (Linz, Austria), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), SITE Gallery (Houston), Wayward Music Series/Nonsequitur (Seattle), Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso and Santiago, Chile), the City Art Gallery of Ljubljana (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Il suono in mostra sound art festival (Udine, Italy), Technosonics XVII: Transmission festival (University of Virginia), Radiophrenia (Glasgow, Scotland), Ausland (Berlin), and Kunstradio on the cultural channel of Austria's national radio.
John Jota Leaños is an award-winning Mestizo (Xicano/Italian/Chumash) new media artist using animation, documentary, and performance, focusing on the convergence of memory, social space, and decolonization. Leaños’ animation work has been shown internationally at festivals and museums including Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Short Film Corner, the Morelia International Film Festival, Mexico, San Francisco International Festival Animation, the KOS Convention 07, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Leaños has also exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leaños is a Guggenheim Fellow in Film, Creative Capital Foundation grantee, a United States Artist Fellow and has been an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Center for Chicano Studies, Carnegie Mellon University in the Center for Arts in Society, and the Headlands Center for the Arts.
Irene Lusztig is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress. Her film and video work mines old images for new meanings in order to reframe, recuperate, and reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to contemplate questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. She is the solo director, producer, DP, and editor of three acclaimed feature-length documentaries that have screened widely in festivals and are distributed by Women Make Movies: her debut film Reconstruction (2001), the feature-length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), and the performative documentary Yours in Sisterhood (2018).