Mer Maggie Roberts and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy

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Off Campus

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Starts at 12 PDT - WHAP! Lecture Series Spring 2021

Maggie Roberts aka Mer is a British artist whose practice is underpinned by themes of machine vision, speculative worlds, shamanism, and techno-human evolution. Roberts explores these individually and as part of the collaborative artist 0rphan Drift (which she co-founded in 1994). Her methodology involves detailed research, immersive multimedia installation and cross disciplinary collaborations with scientists, theorists, musicians, coders, digital artists, and activists. Collaborating with Etic Lab and the Serpentine’s Creative AI Lab, current projects consider artificial intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus, exploring other systems of perception and proprioception. Recent exhibitions include Becoming Octopus (2020); If AI were Cephalopod, Telematic Gallery San Francisco (Artforum's Critic's Choice, 2019); Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender and Resistance, Nottingham Contemporary (2018); Unruly City, Dold Projects, St. Georgen, Germany; Matter Fictions, Berardo Museum, Lisbon (2016). Featured in Fictioning, the Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press (2019). Research Fellow with Goldsmiths University Visual Cultures Department. Symposia include Kraken; The Shaping of a Message; Rituals in Liquidity and Everting the Virtual.

Nandita Biswas Mellamphy is associate professor of Political Science, an affiliate in Women’s Studies and Feminist Research, core faculty in (and former associate director of) the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, and current director of The Electro-Governance research group, all at The University of Western Ontario in Canada. She is (co)author and (co)editor of several works including The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche (2011); The Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche and the Network-centric Condition (2016); Apps and Affect (2015); Larval Terror and the Digital Darkside (2014); Cosmopolitanisms, Social Inclusion, and Global Futures (2018) and ‘Full-Spectrum’ Ops: The Emergence of Larval Warfare (forthcoming). Currently, she is assistant editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science, as well as an associate editor of Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism.