Study Group on Images, Sounds and Technologies (GEIST)
Keynote speakers & Invited artists
Prof. Meki Nzewi (Nigeria)
Samantha Bennett (Australia)
African musical arts and science theorist, composer, music-dramatist, creative writer, ‘mother’ drummer – oral and literacy. Professor of African Music, University of Port Harcourt & Director, Centre for Indigenous Instrumental Music and Dance Practices of Africa (CIIMDA), Research, Education & Performance for SADC based in Pretoria. Practical research studies have been devoted to explicating the underlying philosophy, intentions, principles, soft science and creative theory underpinning African indigenous musical arts expressions. Contemporary documentation, analyses, interpretation, advancement, theoretical and creative continuum of African musical arts heritage have resulted in: Scholarly books, philosophical essays, research monographs, compositions, novels and journal articles (narrative scholarship style), which explicate indigenous African creative philosophy, logic, intentions and grammar, and their contemporaneous viability in education and practice; Designing, writing and producing literary musical arts works - operas, musicals, music/dance drama & TV series/serials - deriving from indigenous knowledge models; Re-orientation projects on creativity, education, research and public action performances.
Samantha Bennett is a sound recordist, guitarist and Professor of Music at the Australian National University. She is the author of two monographs, Modern Records, Maverick Methods: Technology and Process in Popular Music Record Production 1978-2000 (Bloomsbury Academic) and Peepshow, a 33 1/3 series edition on the album by Siouxsie and the Banshees (Bloomsbury Academic). She is also a co-editor of Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound (Bloomsbury Academic) and Popular Music, Stars and Stardom (ANU Press). She has published numerous book chapters on the technological, sound recording and production aesthetics of recorded popular music, her journal articles are published in Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, The Journal of Popular Music Studies and IASPM@journal and her technical papers are published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. She is currently working with Associate Professor Eliot Bates (Graduate Center, CUNY) on a large-scale, audio technology focused research project, ‘Gear Cultures’.
Fabiana Faleiros (Brazil)
Foto: Julieta Benoit
Fabiana Faleiros (1980, Pelotas, lives and works in São Paulo) is an artist and poet and works with the intersection between art and the invention of pedagogies. PhD in Contemporary Art and Culture, she usually creates installations that function as micro universes where she articulates her theoretical research, music and performances. In 2012 she recorded the album ‘Lady Incentivo: Novas formas de amar e de gravar CD' (Lady Incentive: New ways to love and record CDs). In 2018 he participated in the 10th Berlin Biennale with the 'Mastur Bar', a project started in São Paulo as a solo exhibition at Solo Shows Gallery, which has already toured Colombia, in Medellin and Bogotá, Cuba, Kiev, Innsbruck, among others.
In 2019 she was a visiting professor at Escuela Incierta, Lugar a Dudas, Cali, Colombia. She is the author of the book The pulse that falls and the technologies of the touch, Ikrek, São Paulo, 2016 -Proac Prize Book of Artist. She currently coordinates the study group ‘My thesis starts like this‘.
biarritzzz (Brazil)
Photo: Foto Leticia Barros Characterization: Libra
biarritzzz (born 1994 in Fortaleza, lives and works in Recife, Brazil) is a transmedia artist whose focus is on the interaction between the universe of the internet, the world of images and non-hegemonic bodies. She [é she?] turns art into an investigation on the multiple languages implied in this interaction, its cryptographies and tools of power. Her work remixes pop culture, videoart, meme politics, videogame aesthetics and poetry in new media. By surpassing the false opositions of technicity x amateurship and science x magic, biarritzzz, one of the first brazilian GIF-artists, thus expresses experiences and possibilities in a world of epilectic moving images as effects of a détournement of media and communicational materialities.
Pedro Aspahan (Brazil)
Pedro Aspahan holds a doctorate in Social Communication from UFMG, with a doctoral internship at King's College London, studying the relationship between Modern Cinema, Contemporary Music and the Aesthetics of Serialism in the work of Straub-Huillet. He concluded his Master's degree at UFMG with the dissertation “Between listening and seeing: The viewer's place in the work of Robert Bresson”. In the field of cinema, he works mainly as a Director, Sound Technician and Editor, specializing in the documentary field (www.pandufilmes.com). His feature, Matéria de Composition (2013, 82 '), about the creation processes of contemporary musical composition, received numerous awards in Brazil and abroad. He currently develops postdoctoral research, coordinating audiovisual work within the UFMG's Transversal Training Program in Traditional Knowledge (www.saberestraduais.org).