Thursday, November 17 | 7—8:30pm EDT

Online via Zoom

FREE (register here)

A panel focusing on how social media platforms—notably Meta platforms—mediate diasporic knowledge sharing practices and long distance relationships. The Filipino Diaspora often communicates with loved ones local and abroad via social media or messaging platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and TikTok. Rooted in capitalism and colonialism, these platforms extract and appropriate traditional stories, teachings, and practices to package and sanitize them for white western audiences to consume.

Artists Megan Arnold, Excel Garay and The Noise Witch, and moderator Madeleine Lychek, will discuss how platforms based in capitalism and western colonialism encourage traditional knowledge sharing for proliferation but incite algorithmic racism, data mining, and digital censorship.

The event is presented as part of InterAccess's Ctrl+Shift series. Ctrl+Shift is a strategy session series that invites influential artists, technologists, scholars, and community leaders to propose solutions to challenges that affect the creative community. Structured as a panel discussion, Ctrl+Shift seeks to facilitate productive conversations and actionable strategies that can elicit change in our shared creative landscape.

ASL interpretation and live captions will be available for this event.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Megan Arnold is a Filipinx-Canadian multidisciplinary artist who wants to make you laugh and cry and cringe. She creates affective performances that collapse the divisions between humour/pathos, amateurism/mastery, play/labour, and art/entertainment. Her favourite activity is karaoke and she is currently in the Studio Art MFA program at the University of Guelph. Megan has exhibited and performed at venues and festivals across Canada and Europe. She obtained a BFA from the University of Western Ontario in 2015, and was part of the collectively run studio and gallery space Good Sport in varying capacities from 2016-2019.

Excel Garay is a Filipina-Canadian diasporic-settler occupying Mi'kma’kiterritory in Kjipuktuk, Eskikewa’kik (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her practice makes use of desire and hesitation as reflective spaces. The two emotions act as beneficial forms of affect that allows both the artist and the viewers to have new understandings of abject experiences from prismatic contradictions, diasporic experiences, epistemic violence, complacency, and complicity. She often enhances the spectral states of herself and common everyday objects to reveal their complex histories that are tied to extraction, unseen labor, globalization, and colonization. However, she is also curious about empowering secrets and mutual desires gained by connecting with others through her art and community process. Hauntology and Queer Phenomenology under a necropolitical lens foregrounds her practice. Garay’s works materially manifests as paintings, weavings, immersive installations, and interdisciplinary assemblage.

The Noise Witch is an award-winning artist that explores the intersection of art, music, technology, and magic. They weave sound and soul to engulf your ears and enchant your heartstrings. From drag performance to digitally enhanced artwork, they use a combination of mediums in their work to evoke curiosity, emotion, and playfulness from audiences. The Noise Witch has been named a Buddies in Bad Times' Queer Emerging artist of 2021 and is currently producing an audio-visual EP to be released later this year.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Madeleine Lychek is an artist working in performance and various digital mediums. She explores the use of digital platforms as a mode of creation and performance in and of themselves. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts, in Studio Art with Distinction, from the University of Guelph and is currently the Program Director at Ed Video Media Arts Centre.

Image: Courtesy of The Noise Witch.