Digital Decay Workshop

Tuesday, September 9th, 1 PM – 5 PM, EV 10.730

Digital Decay Workshop

Hosted by the Textiles and Materiality Cluster as part of the Nested Investigations microgrant from the Milieux Institute of Arts, Culture, and Technology at Concordia University, organized with the support of Dr. Miranda Smitheram, this hands-on workshop invites participants to explore the generative potential of decay in digital and material images. From corrupted files to faded photocopies, we will hack, glitch, scan, and print our way through processes of decay, guided by ideas from Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image and Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism. How can the ruin of an image—of an archive, of a document—open up new creative pathways? Join us in rethinking the aesthetics of the deteriorated, the ruins, the breakdown of images and their technologies.

Register in advance by emailing textiles.materiality@concordia.ca

About the Workshop Facilitators:

Morris Fox (he/they) is a queer-gothic artist/writer, and an Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD candidate at Concordia (Tiohtiá:ke-Mooniyang-Montréal). Fox’s practice cruises the haunted house for feelings of community. Words and materials become a net that enmeshes, becoming a necropolis, a cemetery of desire. He interconnects eco-poetry, self-performance, VR, video, textiles, chainmaille, with queer material research, rubbing against ruins of memory, shimmering with apocalyptic imaginaries. His work seeks to “put the fun in funeral.”

Alexey Lazarev (he/him) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and third year Print MFA student at Concordia, exploring different facets of queer identities and migration: conflicts between personal and collective memories, formation and evolution of hybrid identities and the emotional side of belonging to a marginalized community. He investigates these themes using personal and found archives. Fascinated by how centuries-old methods of imagemaking adapt to the needs of contemporary society, Lazarev examines the interplay between print traditions and emergent technologies, focusing on the unorthodox application of print media, such as alternative ways of editioning, the use of 2D prints to create 3D installations and relief transfer on surfaces such as clay or plaster, creating his own material ecologies.