Media Art Lab

Oolite 

Media Art 

Oolite 

Salon Series 

Media Art 

Salon Series 

May–November, 

2023 

May–November, 

Curated by 

2023 

Kelani 

Nichole 

Curated by 

Digital Arts Fellow 

Kelani 

Nichole 

Digital Arts Fellow

Introduction: 

“Encoding Miami” 4 

Recursive Value 14 

Generative Generosity 34 38 

Fluid Identity 52 58 

Unstable Ecologies 78 

Cover: Detail from 

“Accelerated Species” 

by Felice Grodin 

This page: Avatar 

studies for “F4EDRA” 

by Tara Long 

Oolite Media Art Salon Series / 3

Encoding 

Miami 

Introduction by Kelani Nichole, 

Digital Arts Fellow 

Salons emerged in the 17th 

century as vibrant gatherings 

convening intellectuals, artists 

and philosophers to discuss 

ideas and critique one another’s 

work, fostering a culture of 

intellectual exchange and 

enlightenment. Often held in 

intimate quarters, these events 

were instrumental in shaping 

public opinion, artistic trends 

and philosophical thought, 

bringing together people of 

all social classes through 

dialogue and debate. Over 

the past decade, I have been 

experimenting with subversive 

variants of the classic salon 

format with artist communities 

in New York City, Los Angeles 

and now Miami. 

When I moved to Miami and 

started spending time in local 

studios, I immediately saw the 

power of the work being done 

here. These artists’ studios 

are precariously positioned 

at the front door of climate 

catastrophe, late capitalist 

speculation (their city was 

one of the first to be flooded 

with crypto culture) and they 

sit squarely at the epicenter 

of global political instability. 

Local artists live day in, and 

day out, with the cataclysmic 

changes coming to society 

at large. They are processing 

the complexity of Miami – the 

deeply divided class struggle 

and opulent consumption, the 

ebb and flow of mass tourism 

and torrential downpours, 

failure of infrastructure and 

the impossibility of ambition 

in the wake of it all. In these 

studios, I discovered reflections 

on this instability, distant early 

warnings about what’s coming. 

I found optimistic futures in the 

form of resiliency practice that is 

necessary to create critical work 

in this uneasy paradise. 

The Oolite Media Art Salon 

Series was conceived as a 

way for the long-established 

arts organization to begin a 

deeper engagement with the 

emerging media art being 

created in Miami. It was 

envisioned as a “lab” focused 

more on critical practice and 

dialogue than tech demos. 

Our format took inspiration 

from the Experiments in Art 

and Technology (E.A.T.) of the 

1970s initiated by artist Robert 

Rauschenberg and engineer Billy 

Klüver, which often showcased 

works that evolved through the 

course of many happenings 

and exhibitions. This mode of 

creation is an inevitability for 

artists working with emerging 

technology, a practice that 

requires iteration, failure and 

experimentation through trial 

Kelani Nichole at Oolite Satellite with a prototype of the TRANSFER 

Download featuring “Liminal Beings” (2019) by Eva Paparargariti. 

Photo by Through the Shutter. 


and error. A similar focus on 

“work-in-progress”—coupled 

with the critical conversations 

of the salon format—was 

the framework in which our 

gatherings took shape. 

Those of us who are deeply 

invested in contemporary art 

know the power of an intimate 

studio visit. It’s a special, 

transformative expereince of 

spending time one-on-one with 

an artist and seeing work-inprogress 

develop over time, into 

an exhibition, and (hopefully) 

entering the care of a collection. 

Those early visits are precious, 

as an artist works to distill 

our contemporary human 

experience in real time into 

an artwork, a reflection of our 

moment, working through all the 

messiness of a culture in crisis 

to show us something beautiful. 

As a curator, I have been lucky 

to have this kind of access to 

artists as they are working out 

how to channel their visions into 

artworks. The greatest joy of my 

practice has been seeing how 

studio visits help artists shape 

their work, and sharing this 

experience with more people. 

The Oolite Media Art Salons 

were an invitation to get a peek 

inside the studio, an intimate 

look at the work being done here 

in the city. 

Bringing people together around 

the vibrant “works-in-progress” 

happening in these studios 

quickly ignited an impassioned 

group of local artists, 

technologists and curious 

creative practitioners. The 

first salon was dreamed up in 

collaboration with artists whom 

I had been visiting with for some 

months already – Fabiola Larios, 

Moises Sanabria, Leo Castañeda 

and Lauren Monzón, coupled 

with another artist whose work 

I had recently encountered 

through the John S. and James 

L. Knight Foundation’s Knight 

New Work Awards, Cynthia 

Cruz. These artists trusted me to 

activate their work in space and 

put ideas into the public view 

that were not yet fully baked. 

Recursive Value was the first 

curatorial framing of the Oolite 

Media Art Salon Series, which 

centered the iterative nature in 

which artists are working with 

technology. We activated the 

space, installing rough sketches 

of AI artworks in progress so 

that the community could come 

together and connect with them 

in physical space. The first 

salon hosted a diverse group of 

folks, including technologists 

like Shawn Clybor, the newly 

appointed Chief Technology 

Strategist at Bakehouse, 

community leaders like Dennis 

Scholl, and the storied Barbara 

London, the first curator of 

sound and media art at MoMA 

in the 1970s, who had recently 

relocated to Miami. We came 

together at that first event 

and discussed the accelerated 

change in artificial intelligence 

at its peak moment entering 

popular culture. In the open 

salon conversation portion of 

the evening playfully dubbed 

Kelani Nichole and artists from “Recursive Value” in front of Oolite Satellite 

(Left to right: Moises Sanabria, Fabiola Larios, Leo Castañeda, 

Lauren Monzón, front: Cynthia Cruz) 

“AI Anonymous,” we shared our 

most intimate encounters with 

algorithms. We grappled with 

a transformative technology of 

power that we all were trying to 

make sense of in our day to day 

lives. This kind of connection 

and collaboration is the heart of 

what the salons were about, and 

the impact was felt immediately. 

Miami shutters during the 

summer, giving the salon series 

time to incubate and develop. 

By the fall, a full program had 

emerged as a monthly event 

series, with three new salons 

bringing together very diverse 

topics around the acceleration 

of technology in this deeply 

divided city. Miami-based artists 

were coming together at these 

salons who had been following 

each other’s work but who 

hadn’t caught up in years. Still 

separated by the dissolution 

of the community during the 

pandemic, they had no through 

line to conversation, no place 

to gather to discuss issues 

that were relevant and no safe 

space for critical conversations 

that were desperately needed. 

Encouraging artists to share their 

work in a vulnerable way and 

open themselves to critique with 

a curatorial framing to further 

develop their work, was a catalyst 

that activated an impassioned 

group of regular participants. 

And new folks entered the fold 

with each gathering. 


Artist Lee Pivnik presents “Symbiotic House” at Unstable Ecologies. 


Great art does not develop in a 

vacuum. It is the result of new 

ideas coming into contact with 

each other and gaining strength 

through clashing dialogues that 

further dissect the world around 

us. Miami is a very insular 

community, where support 

favors the easy ideas. These 

salons refigured those dynamics, 

opening an opportunity to 

rapidly bring together many 

divergent ideas, and emergent 

resiliency strategies. These 

gatherings fueled entire bodies 

of work – the early prototypes of 

Dr. Madeline Gannon’s robotics 

toolkit shown at Generative 

Generosity developed into a 

large-scale robotics performance 

at the New World Symphony 

for the Knight Foundation’s 

Catalyst just a few months later; 

AdrienneRose Gionta’s early 

explorations of performance-first 

experimental media art with 

augmented reality and multichannel 

video at Fluid Identity 

developed into a confident and 

compelling body of work that 

took shape as a solo show just 

a few months later; and the 

early experiments with critique 

at the first salon Recursive 

Value with Leo Castañeda and 

Fabiola Larios developed into 

large-scale multi-channel video 

work debuting at the Pérez Art 

Museum Miami’s “Sea Change” 

exhibition. These are just a few 

examples of how the energy 

in the Oolite Media Art Salon 

gatherings fueled forward 

experimental media artworks in 

Miami. In the pages below you 

will find updates on “work-inprogress” 

shown at these salons. 

Each Salon had a new theme, 

and with each gathering, 

the audience evolved, as did 

the collaborators and the 

technology. The engineering-led 

approach to supporting critical 

art practice that I brought to 

Oolite Arts as the first Digital 

Arts Fellow was inspired by the 

history of E.A.T. (as mentioned 

above) and looks back even 

further to the tradition of craft 

and unstructured pedagogy 

of the Black Mountain 

College from 1930-50s, an 

interdisciplinary program based 

in Bauhaus methodologies. My 

personal stash of gear from 

TRANSFER powered new 

forms of installation, multichannel 

displays, immersive 

projection and augmented 

reality installation formats the 

artists had previously not had 

much access to in Miami. I 

sat with artists in one-on-one 

“office hours” to run through 

demos, share information on 

display technologies and show 

examples of artists working with 

similar concepts. 

With the support of MAD 

Arts, some new tech entered 

the fold during Fluid Identity. 

The Broward-based arts 

organization trucked down a 

hologram display unit, allowing 

artists to conjure their avatars 

into the physical space, and 

offered technical support to 

onboard participating artists 

into this new technology. 

This combination of art and 

engineering, coupled with 

critical practice in the salons, 

came together to support 

studios examining our human 

condition in this moment 

by engaging with tech in 

subversive ways. Fueled by 

renewed interest in digital art 

and generous funding rounds 

from Knight Foundation, 

many similar projects and 

an abundance of new ideas 

emerged concurrently. 

The Oolite Media Art Salons 

became a way to bring together 

the people behind Miami’s 

digital transformation efforts, 

and make new connections 

across art, engineering and 

industry. The gatherings served 

as a way to zoom out and begin 

to map how these practices 

were evolving across the city. 

New connections were seeded, 

and a beautiful emergent scene 

took root. I’m extremely grateful 

for the opportunity to produce 

this salon series as the inaugural 

Oolite Digital Arts Fellow. 

Oolite’s VP of Programming 

(and now interim Co-director), 

Esther Park, supported 

and generously hosted the 

community, creating a special 

vibe and feeding us all delicious 

pizza to end each gathering 

with revelry and conversation. 

The salon series was a 

joyous experiment in art and 

technology, and a generative 

chapter in Miami’s digital art 

scene – an evolving work-inprogress. 


Exterior view of Oolite Satellite at Unstable Ecologies on November 28th, 2023. 



Interior view of Oolite Satellite at Unstable Ecologies on November 28th, 2023. 

Featuring work-in-progress by Thom Wheeler Castillo (left) and Lee Pivnik (right). 



Recursive 

Value 

May 13, 2023 

Leo Castañeda 

Cynthia Cruz 

Fabiola Larios 

Lauren Monzón 

Moises Sanabria 

Viewer takes the control to play the 

“Mangrove Biome” prototype of “Levels and 

Bosses” by Leo Castañeda. 

Recursive Value explored how value is defined in 

iterative ways of working. What are the benefits 

of building value in the studio over time? How 

is experimental media practice different from 

traditional contemporary art production? What are 

the modes of resilience that are emergent in studios 

exploring these new ways of working? The worksin-progress 

delved into fundamental aspects of the 

human creative condition that are being transformed 

by AI – intimacy and labor. Leo Castañeda has been 

iterating across a decade, with collaboration from 

Lauren Monzón, to produce an artwork that rivals 

in complexity what many leading game design 

companies create with huge teams. Moises Sanabria 

is poking at the scale of time and production in a 

massive online piece, co-created with AI, which 

reveals the precarious position of creative labor 

in this economy. Fabiola Larios’ conceptual and 

material proposition is the result of a deep and 

intimate collaboration with AI that examines our 

precarious relationship to surveillance technology 

and safety in times of algorithmic acceleration. 

Cynthia Cruz explores the process of self-depiction 

through the AI and aesthetic approximation, feeding 

AI images of her body and her artwork to reveal the 

implications of this rapidly emerging technology. 


Leo 

Castañeda 

Generative Art 

Video Game 

Multi-channel Video Installation 

Leo Castañeda is a former Oolite Arts resident artist, 

multimedia artist and video game designer exploring 

Latin American Surrealism in the Digital Age. His 

artwork primarily takes form in episodic games 

and immersive installations that meld atmospheric 

paintings, video, mixed reality, wearables and sculpture. 

Castañeda is a Knight Foundation Arts + Technology 

Fellow, YoungArts Artist Technology Fellow, Emergent 

Strategy Ideation Institute Praxis Project Fellow, Ellies 

Creator Award winner, and Harpo Foundation grantee. 

In addition to Oolite, he is a former resident of SOMA 

Mexico City and Khoj International Artists Association 

in New Delhi India. Castañeda has exhibited at the 

Bronx Museum of the Arts; Haus der elektronischen 

Künste Basel; Museu do Amanhã, Rio de Janeiro; Pérez 

Art Museum Miami; Espacio ArtNexus Bogotá; Digital 

Museum of Digital Art; Locust Projects Miami; Children’s 

Museum of Manhattan; and Museo de Arte Moderno 

La Tertulia Colombia. His work has been featured 

across Rhizome, PBS, ArtNexus, Killscreen, El Pais, El 

Nuevo Herald, Hyperallergic, Spike Art Magazine, New 

American Paintings and Vice. He is currently a resident 

at the Bakehouse Arts Complex in Miami. 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Leo Castañeda and Lauren 

Monzón presented a three-channel playthrough of “Levels 

and Bosses”. Since the salon, the work has continued to 

evolve into a solo booth at UNTITLED Art Fair with Negrón 

Pizarro Gallery, and an immersive, three-channel video 

installation “Levels and Bosses: Mangrove Biome” as part 

of “Sea Change” at Pérez Art Museum Miami. 

Still image from Leo Castañeda’s 

“Levels and Bosses: Mangrove Biome” 


Lauren 

Monzón 

Lauren Monzón is a film producer, video 

game producer and a cultural organizer 

from Miami. Through the lens of economic 

science fiction, Monzón brings ten years 

of experience scaling support for artists, 

audience engagement and operations 

at media organizations focused on 

South Florida, Latin America and the 

Caribbean. As a producer, Lauren’s work 

has screened across leading festivals and 

cultural institutions including Sundance, 

SXSW, AFI Fest, Rotterdam, Haus der 

Elektronischen Künste Basel, BlackStar, 

Allied Media Conference, and Berlinale. 

For her work throughout digital storytelling 

and civic media, Monzón was named 

a 2023 Ford Foundation / Rockwood 

Leadership Institute JustFilms fellow and 

2022 Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute 

Praxis Projects grantee. She currently 

serves as the PAMMTV Program Manager 

at Pérez Art Museum Miami, is a resident 

at Bakehouse Art Complex and is a board 

member at Third Horizon Film Festival and 

Bookleggers Library. 

Still image from Leo Castañeda’s 

“Levels and Bosses: Mangrove Biome” 


Cynthia 

Cruz 

Artificial Intelligence 

Video Art 


Cynthia Cruz is a Miami-based multi-media artist 

working mostly in painting and digital media. She 

received her MFA from Goldsmiths University of London 

in 2014 and was awarded the MFA Award and studio 

residency in partnership with ACME Studios. Drawing 

from her experience as an artist of Dominican descent 

and fascination with technology, Cruz creates fictional 

environments and characters using patterns and imagery 

influenced by animism, folklore and science fiction. 

Her work has been featured at Thames-Side Studios 

Gallery (2019) ACME Project Space (2014) David Castillo 

Gallery, (2018), Art Basel Miami Beach; Fredric Snitzer 

Gallery (2018), Miami; ASC Gallery (2017), London; Bass 

Museum of Art (2015), Miami Beach, among others. 

She is a recipient of the Knight Foundation New Work 

Award (2022), ACME/Goldsmiths MFA Studio Award 

(2014) and was shortlisted for the Griffin Art Prize (2016). 

Cruz was selected to participate in the Bakehouse Art 

Complex Summer Open Residency (2021), where she 

continues her work. 

Work-in-progress video series “AI, AI and I” by Cynthia Cruz, 

still from “Do you Want to Be Human” 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Cynthia Cruz shared her 

Knight New Work proposal sketches for “AI, AI and I”. 

Since the salon, the work has developed into a workshop 

at Locust Projects and a forthcoming solo exhibition 

at [NAME]. 

Oolite Media Art Salon Series / 20 


Work-in-progress video series “AI, AI and I” by Cynthia Cruz, 

still from “Out of Body Experience” 




Moises 

Sanabria 

Durational Performance 

Moises Sanabria is a Venezuelan-born, Miami-based 

interdisciplinary artist whose work extends dialectics of 

machine philosophy alongside trends in memetics and 

branding through the context of networked social-media 

life. Sanabria’s work is philosophical and political, joining 

academic aesthetics with internet meme cultures. His 

practice is deeply entangled with digital newness, using 

live-streaming, video, new media, machine learning, 

and installation to further connect science advancement 

with art. 

Sanabria founded the new artificial intelligence media 

channel AI24 Live. Previously, he was an active member 

and co-founder of the digital art collective ART404 

(Artnotfound) from 2011. Sanabria attended the School 

of Poetic Computation (2013) and the Cooper Union New 

York (2015). He has exhibited at Transmediale 2k+12, 

Hause Der Kulturen Der Welt, Institute of Contemporary 

Art Miami, Bikini Wax Gallery Mexico City, and has 

participated in international group exhibitions. Currently 

Sanabria is an artist in residence at Bakehouse Arts 

Complex. 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Moises Sanabria presented 

AI24 and exhibits his Web-based artwork “AI Everydays: 

The First 5000”. Since the salon AI24 has developed 

into a full-fledged community of AI artists livestreaming 

24-hour AI content, and Sanabria has started an artist 

residency at Bakehouse. 

Still Image of web-based generative AI artwork “AI Everydays: 

The First 5000” by Moises Sanabria 


Detail of web-based generative AI artwork “AI Everydays: 

The First 5000” by Moises Sanabria 


Fabiola 

Larios 


Site-specific Installation 

Sculpture 

Fabiola Larios is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist, who 

lives and works in Miami Beach. Her work explores the 

intersection of technology, identity and representationin 

in the digital age. Through machine learning, AI, net art, 

obsolescence programming, and e-waste, she seeks to 

challenge our understanding of the self and the impact 

ofsocial media and the internet on our lives. 

Larios co-founded the new artificial intelligence media 

channel AI24 Live. Selected exhibitions include the 

Pérez Art Museum Miami, Fundación Foto Colectania, 

PANKEGallery and Centro Cultural Los Pinos. Currently, 

she is an artist in residence at Bakehouse Art Complex. 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Fabiola Larios presented the 

first iteration of “Internet Entanglement” AI Sculpture. 

Since the salon, she has started an artist residency 

at Bakehouse, led an AI workshop at Oolite Arts, 

and developed an immersive, three-channel AI video 

installation “Weird Wired World” as part of “Sea Change” 

at Pérez Art Museum Miami. 

Work-in-progress: AI-generated installation artwork 

“Internet Entanglement” by Fabiola Larios 


Installation view of “Internet Entanglement” by 

Fabiola Larios at Recursive Value 



Salon 

Summary 

Recursive Value was the first 

experimental gathering in the 

Oolite Media Art Salon series. 

The installation came together 

with rapid collaboration from 

four artists exhibiting work-inprogress, 

including: web-based 

interactive art, sculpture, singlechannel 

video and a multi-channel 

playable video game environment. 

Each of the works exemplified 

the power of embracing iteration 

as a means of building value 

when working with AI and world 

building in the studio. 

In the front gallery, a sprawling, 

web-based work from Moises 

Sanabria, “AI Everydays: The 

First 5000” greeted visitors on a 

single-channel display. A grid of 

images almost imperceptible in 

size appeared edge to edge on the 

screen, drawing in the audience. 

Viewers interacting with the work 

using the mouse input discovered 

detailed compositions in a 

cartographic data set mapping 

speculative futures. 

The artist describes the piece 

as “an AI conceptual artwork 

that reflects on the speed of 

contemporary algorithmic 

production and the artist’s role 

in automation.” Digging into the 

process behind the work revealed 

Sanabria’s daily practice of 

communing with the algorithm 

to generate an untenable data set 

of 5,000 images every day for six 

months, then obsessively curating 

down the selection to create a 

fantastical visualization of the 

rapidly emerging technology 

as reflected in the artist’s own 

mental models. Sitting in front 

of this work, viewers had many 

questions related to AI and labor. 

“I spoke to a lot of people about 

the work. Some people were 

more open, others couldn’t fully 

grasp the idea and they felt short 

circuited. But that’s okay because 

the work was about that, how an 

image generates value, and how 

that is changing so quickly. It was 

amazing to share with [curator] 

Barbara London and get her take 

on the work. A lot of the questions 

from the audience were about the 

process, how it was made, and 

people really got into that. I got a 

sense that people are starting to 

grasp where we’re heading with 

these things.” 

“The salon was a great chance to 

rehearse with people and move 

the conversation toward what they 

are interested in. I took this as an 

opportunity to try out different 

positioning for the work to react 

to the viewer and give them what 

they want, whether they are for 

or against AI. The salons really 

helped me work through that. 

Once you present your work to 

a few people, you eventually get 

more comfortable with yourself 

talking about your work, and 

that…strengthens your 

relationship to the work.” 

—Moises Sanabria 

Across the front space, an 

ominously lit figure outlined with 

ethernet cables emerged from the 

brick wall of the gallery. Fabiola 

Larios’ “Internet Entanglement” 

is an AI generated sculptre that 

surfaces surfaces the risk of 

surveillance and lack of safety 

in online spaces. This very 

personal work was conceived 

in collaboration with AI and 

developed for the first time 

beyond the screen for this salon. 

“My artwork clicked with 

certain people; the piece is 

a little morbid but it makes 

sense to people who are also 

thinking about the risks of the 

internet. I met a lot of people 

who wanted to talk about AI 

and surveillance. Artists were 

asking how to get started, and 

I spoke to all kinds of artists – 

painting, photography and AR 

– it was amazing to see how my 

work-in-progress resonated in 

a deep way and got artists to 

think about how to get started 

with AI tools in their studio.” 

—Fabiola Larios 

Larios channeled her own lived 

experiences with cyberstalking 

and surveillance into the AI image 

generation tool Dall-E, resulting in 

eerie visualizations of the female 

form. Outlined as if traced from 

a fallen body at a crime scene, 

the piece is rendered in cables, 

the physical infrastructure of the 

internet. Extending her process of 

conceptual sketching with AI, the 

artist leveraged the space at the 

Oolite Satellite in Little River to 

experiment with materials. 

“I really appreciated the 

opportunity to develop this 

work. At the time I didn’t have 

a studio, and the space was 

perfect for putting up a work 

in progress. It made me think 

about how I want to improve 

my work in the future. It was 

helpful to work with materials 

that I never worked with before 

in the space, that process 

helped me work out the type of 

installation I wanted to create.” 


Upon entering the main space 

of the salon exhibition, viewers 

encountered a glowing, 3-channel 

portal into “Levels and Bosses,” 

a world that has been taking 

shape as a video game from 

the studio of Leo Castañeda for 

the past decade. Viewers were 

invited to take the controller and 

navigate the sentient landscapes 

from Castañeda, surrounded 

by his world. During the salon 

presentation, Lauren Monzón 

led a performative tour of the 

world while Castañeda navigated 

the controls. 

“Working with a three-channel 

display was an amazing 

opportunity to see the full 

spread of the world, and the 

prompt to do a playthrough as a 

performance piece for the salon 

was really interesting. It was 

a new challenge to figure out 

how Lauren and I can talk about 

the game in a way where we’re 


explaining it and have that 

feel like a piece in itself.” 

— Leo Castañeda 

“The salon offered us a great 

chance to think about the game 

mechanics as a performance 

piece. When people are playing 

the game, they are wading 

through it on their own, so the 

prompt to be able to come in 

and be able to think about that 

from start to finish was really 

rewarding. And it helped us 

get great feedback on some of 

the different game mechanics 

specifically as it relates to the 

controls. We got feedback 

on what might be more 

accessible.” 

—Lauren Monzón 

“Recursive Value was the first 

time we were showing the 

mangrove biome as a playable 

environment and showing it 

in this way really confirmed 

that continuing with this 

environment was the way to 

go. As the game evolved after 

the salon, this level became 

the prologue, and the narrative 

of the game re-emerged 

from there with more local 

inspiration. The sustainable 

village where beings collect 

kinetic energy from sentient 

mangroves was built up as a 

concept following the salon and 

that ended up being the piece 

that’s on view at PAMM.” 

—Leo Castañeda 

A work-in-progress series from 

Cynthia Cruz was presented 

in the main space of the salon. 

“AI, AI and I” is another series 

developed with AI tools. Cruz’s 

unique workflow moved between 

text-based AI generation tools, 

AI image generators and video 

animation to create a unique, 

hand-crafted collage aesthetic 

from the AI generated outputs. 

The series had just been awarded 

a Knight New Work grant and 

the salon gave the artist an 

opportunity to get context and 

feedback from the community. 

“I had a lot of people curious 

about the process. People 

wanted to know how much of 

my hand is in the work. This is 

how people understand AI, they 

judge how much is the artist’s 

work vs. the output of the AI. 

Talking about the process 

makes it acceptable. They 

understand how I am using 

it in the studio, and that AI 

isn’t just doing all the work for 

me. This also helped me think 

through the aesthetic I want, 

as well. What I realized through 

this experience is that the 

strength of my work is that it’s 

very clear I have my own hand 

in it, and a very specific way 

of doing things. That’s what 

makes it unique, and different 

from every other AI output.” 

—Cynthia Cruz 

Cruz’s philosophical engagement 

with AI invites us to think about 

how the emerging genre opens 

up possibilities to be in dialogue 

with algorithms about the 

Dennis Scholl and Barbara London speak with Moises Sanabria at Recursive Value. 

Photo by Andres Gimenez. 

human condition. Her unique 

compositions reflect a time 

capsule of the development of this 

rapidly-evolving technology, as 

the series progresses in line with 

the advances in the technological 

affordances of the medium. 

During the salon discussion, a 

conversation emerged about AI 

and intimacy as the crowd shared 

some of their most intimate 

encounters with algorithms in 

their daily lives – from the personal 

AI assistants that automate 

our homes to the navigational 

guidance of algorithms that 

help us move through the world, 

and more collaborative and 

consultative behaviors with Chat 

GPT and conversational AIs. 

Everyone had an opinion, whether 

positive or negative about the 

future of these technologies. There 

was room for everyone to voice 

their perspectives. 

“The people in the salon were 

very knowledgeable about the 

subject of AI. One of the things 

that stood out for me was 

when we were talking about 

algorithms and AI in our work, 

it resonated with the audience. 

Even if they were not aware of 

the specifics of the technology, 

a lot of people started to 

connect their ideas about AI 

to our art. It was a really cool 

experience to understand the 

public perception and added a 

lot of value to the scene around 

these issues.” 



“The salon discussion for 

Recursive Value gave us a view 

from both the macro and the 

micro, talking about the really 

personal intimate ways we’re 

using and experimenting with 

AI and then being able to talk 

about the human scale, and 

species-wide shifts that are 

happening as a result of this 

technology. This opens up an 

understanding of why we’re 

using technology in relation 

to those shifts. Exploring that 

with community was quite 

special. Being in dialogue 

about artificial intelligence, 

especially at the time it was 

so new, there was such a 

hunger to understand different 

perspectives. To be able to 

share our perspective, and to 

listen to other people explain 

how they are receiving these 

changes in AI was really a 

milestone moment for that 

dialogue opening up in 

our community.” 


This salon set the tone for 

gatherings that embraced 

iterative exploration which 

carried over into the subsequent 

gatherings, thanks to the artists 

who bravely opened their studios 

to the experiment. 

“The scene that came together 

through these salons has a 

specific niche position, and I 

don’t think that kind of voice 

has a lot of space in Miami. 

At Recursive Value, it felt like 

a community was coming 

together, and after the first 

one people started frequenting 

the events more, and it grew. I 

thought that momentum was 

super valuable. In the scene 

here, things tend to lean more 

toward fine art, nothing is too 

experimental, or if it is, it’s tied 

to crypto, not contemporary 

art. Through these salons we 

got to meet more artists in 

the community, and there’s 

clearly more education needed 

because people were asking 

big questions about software 

and ethics. It feels very new for 

Miami.” 

—Moises Sanabria 

“There was a discussion about 

technology that was taking 

place that was accessible 

to practitioners and novices 

alike, and we actually had a 

conversation between those 

two audiences that was legible, 

dynamic and fun. I am not sure 

I have ever seen that dynamic 

of an engagement between 

artists and audiences as it 

relates to tech art in South 

Florida.” 


Above: Kelani Nichole presents TRANSFER Data Trust at Recursive Value, 

featuring “Leap of Faith” (2023) from Lorna Mills 

Bottom: Leo Castañeda and Lauren Monzón present “Levels and Bosses” 

at Recursive Value. 

Photos by Andres Gimenez 


Generative 

Generosity 

September 13th, 2023 

Dr. Madeline Gannon 

Juan Ledesma 

Daniel Temkin 

Jay Mollica 

Generative Generosity showcased artistic projects 

that engage the ethos of transparency, iteration and 

open knowledge in the context of contemporary art. 

The participants each work with networked culture 

to imagine how artworks and open intellectual 

property can boost the impact of their practice. Dr. 

Madeline Gannon is creating an open-source toolkit 

for creative robotics that explores the obstacles and 

motivations for doing creative things with machines. 

What possibilities open up for intimacy with robots 

when their inner workings become more accessible? 

Juan Ledesma combines mass-produced objects 

related to water and sound into hybrid forms, based 

on his research into an ancient ceramic practice, 

its shamanic past and open-source future. Daniel 

Temkin shares his approach to making art with code. 

He demoed his forthcoming open-source web-based 

artwork, in which a computational process designed 

to be ignored becomes the subject of the work 

itself. Jay Mollica shared initiatives from Pérez Art 

Museum Miami that are leading the way in exploring 

how museums can engage the public space of the 

internet. His team’s projects include an augmented 

reality exhibition space, Wikipedia Edit-a-thons and 

PAMM.TV, a publicly accessible streaming platform 

for video art. 

Detail of Daniel Temkin “Dither Studies #1” (2011) 


Dr. Madeline 

Gannon 

Interactive Art 

Open Source Software 

Robotics 

Dr. Madeline Gannon is a multidisciplinary designer 

blending techniques in art, design, computer science 

and robotics to forge new futures for human-robot 

relations. Also known as “The Robot Whisperer,” Gannon 

specializes in convincing robots to do things they were 

never intended to do: from transforming giant industrial 

robots into living, breathing mechanical creatures, to 

taming hordes of autonomous machines to behave like 

packs of animals. 

Gannon is a World Economic Forum Cultural Leader, 

a former Robotics & AI Researcher at NVIDIA and a 

former artist in residence at ETH Zurich, Autodesk Pier 

9 and the Carnegie Mellon STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. 

She is known as one of the “Top 10 Women in Robotics 

Industry” and “World’s 50 Most Renowned Women in 

Robotics” according to Analytics Insight. Gannon holds 

a M.Arch from Florida International University, and a 

Ph.D in Computational Design from Carnegie Mellon 

University. 

Screenshot of Dr. Madeline Gannon’s Open-Source 

Robotics Toolkit User Interface 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Dr. Madeline Gannon shared 

an early prototype built on her open-source toolkit for 

creative robotics. Since the salon, Gannon went on to 

continue to develop her interactive installation at Locust 

Projects and installed a large-scale kinetic robotics 

sculpture with her “Koriobots: Choreographic Robots 

for Creative Expression” for a live performance “Four 

Moons” choreographed and composed by New World 

Symphony fellow and violinist Ye Jin Min as part of 

Knight Foundation’s “Catalyst” event. 


Above: Installation view of Gannon’s prototype at Generative Generosity, 

image courtesy of Gesi Schilling. 

Main: Installation of the final work “Koriobots: Choreographic Robots for 

Creative Expression” by Dr. Madeline Gannon at the New World Symphony for 

the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s “Catalyst” in December 2023. 


Juan 

Ledesma 

Indigenous Technology 

Moving Image 

Ceramics 

Juan Ledesma, an Oolite Arts’ Ellies 

Creator Award winner, is a Peruvian 

interdisciplinary artist based in Miami. 

Ledesma’s drawings, sculptures, and 

installations explore the cultural histories 

of musical objects and the diverse ways 

people relate to the audible world and to 

each other. Using the notion and practice 

of play, he’s interested in transforming 

visual mediums and spaces into zones for 

listening and collaboration. 

Ledesma’s work was the subject of a 

solo exhibition, Rhythm of Speech, at 

Locust Projects, Miami, Florida (2021). 

Group exhibitions include El Espacio 

Entre Los Otros at Radio 28, Mexico City, 

(2023), Instrument at Harvard University, 

Cambridge, Massachusetts (2018), and 

others. His awards include a commission 

from Miami-Dade Art in Public Places 

(2023), a residency with Anderson Ranch 

Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado (2023), 

and an Ellies Creator Award from Oolite 

Arts (2019). 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Juan Ledesma 

shared a new series of whistling vessels 

based on a pre-Columbian ceramic tradition 

with a deep relationship to sound and the 

natural world. Since the salon, Ledesma has 

developed a large-format public sculpture 

for Grove Central in Miami, FL and 

continued his research for the forthcoming 

series of whistling vessels. 

Documentation of work-in-progress ceramic sculptures from 

Juan Ledesma’s forthcoming “Whistling Vessels” series. 


Installation views of “Whistling Vessels” by Juan Ledesma 

at Generative Generosity 


Daniel 

Temkin 



Web-based Artwork 

Daniel Temkin makes photography, programming 

languages, net art and paintings examining the clash 

between systemic logic and human irrationality. Temkin 

has written about code and programming languages as 

an art form for publications like Hyperallergic, and in 

many academic journals including Leonardo and World 

Picture Journal, as well as his blog esoteric.codes. It won 

the 2014 ArtsWriters.org grant from Creative Capital and 

the Warhol Foundation, has been exhibited at ZKM and 

written in residence at Signal Culture and at the New 

Museum’s New Inc incubator. 

He received his MFA from the International Center of 

Photography at Bard College. Group exhibitions include 

Open Codes at ZKM, TRANSFER Download at Thoma 

Foundation, xCoAx at Museu do Chiado, Dumbo Arts 

Fest (where his work was projected on the Manhattan 

Bridge) and Future Isms at Glassbox Gallery. His work 

has been a critic’s pick for Art News, the New York Times 

and the Boston Globe. 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Daniel Temkin demoed the 

newest iteration of Dither Studies, which moved from 

the orthogonally-arranged pixels of our monitors to 

hexagonal and triangular pixels. Since the salon, the 

artist has appeared in numerous solo exhibitions with his 

Dither Studies series and has started production on an 

artist monograph with MIT press tentatively titled “Forty- 

Four Esolangs.” 



Detail of Daniel Temkin’s “Dither Studies” open source, 

web-based artwork the artist debuted at Generative Generosity

Jay 

Mollica 

PAMM TV 


Video Art 

Public Access 

Jay Mollica is the senior director of digital engagement 

at Pérez Art Museum Miami. Before joining PAMM in 

2020, Mollica worked as the creative technologist at 

the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where he led 

experiments in art and technology and modernized the 

museum’s digital platforms. 

His work has been featured in the New York Times, The 

Today Show, and Fast Company. In 2018, he won the 

Webby Award for best app from a cultural institution for 

the project “Send Me SFMOMA”. 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Jay Mollica shared a behindthe-scenes 

look at the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s 

digital initiatives. Since the salon, his team has launched 

PAMM.tv, a free virtual platform for viewing video art 

that has hosted esteemed curators including Barbara 

London, and been featured on PBS. 

Screenshot from PAMM TV, courtesy of PAMM. 


Salon 

Summary 

Generative Generosity was a 

salon about open knowledge and 

solidarity models for creative 

practice. The participants were 

interested in engaging the 

commons through their practice – 

whether by creating open artwork 

on the internet, providing toolkits 

and resources for others to use 

or otherwise contributing to open 

knowledge bases. The projects 

were all based in generosity. 

Entering the front gallery 

space, viewers encountered 

the delicately dancing robotic 

sculpture from Dr. Madeline 

Gannon. This was the first 

prototype installation of Gannon’s 

open-source robotics toolkit for 

rapid prototyping of cable-driven 

robots, the secret component 

to many large-scale interactive 

art installations. They can span 

huge spaces, lift heavy things, 

move precisely, and are endlessly 

reconfigurable. Prior to Gannon’s 

project, no off-the-shelf solutions 

existed, meaning every artist had 

to invest their time and resources 

reinventing their own toolkit. 

Gannon’s work was driven by the 

desire to give something back. 

She wanted to make these robots 

easier to use so she and other 

artists could rapidly explore new, 

non-screen-based immersive 

environments. 

“My work was at the perfect 

point to share with people: 

it was *just* operational, so 

people could play with it and 

imagine possibilities that I 

hadn’t thought of prior.” 

— Dr. Madeline Gannon 

During the salon, Gannon 

demonstrated her robots and 

the interactive user interface 

used to control them. She also 

shared more about her process 

and motivations behind the work 

and discussed the common 

threads in her work with the other 

participating artists leveraging 

open-source methodology and 

advanced technology. 

“This was the first time I 

learned about Madeline’s work 

in robotics, and it was amazing 

to hear about her journey going 

to Carnegie Mellon and coming 

back to Miami. Seeing her 

work develop and following 

her trajectory to bring that 

outlook into the scene has 

been special.” 

— Jay Mollica 

Entering the main space, visitors 

encountered an installation of 

sculpture and video from Juan 

Ledesma. His work-in-progress 

ceramics were displayed in 

the gallery alongside a video 

demonstrating the unique 

resonant sounds the vessels 

generate from the movement of 

water. Whistling vessels are a pre- 

Columbian ceramic tradition with 

a deep relationship to sound and 

the natural world. This ancient 

tradition, found throughout South 

and Central America, consists 

of a double chambered ceramic 

vessel often connected through 

a pipe and handle system. As 

water moves through the vessel 

from one chamber to the next, 

the air pressure moves through 

a whistling system imitating the 

sounds of various animals (i.e. 

birds, monkeys, humans, etc.) 

“This was the first opportunity 

I’ve had to speak about work 

that wasn’t done, and that 

in and of itself is a unique 

opportunity because you’re 

always expected to present 

work that is ‘ready’. At the salon 

there’s a community interested 

in the work you’re doing, and 

since it’s in progress, there’s 

still some questions that you 

have that can be shared openly 

and know it will be received 

well.” 

— Juan Ledesma 

Considering an anthropocentric 

lens towards nature, Ledesma’s 

series combines mass produced 

objects related to water and 

sound into hybrid forms that 

contain these whistling systems. 

Ledesma is currently researching 

this ancient ceramic practice, 

its shamanic past, and more 

specifically what he considers the 

pre-Columbian abstraction of the 

natural world. One outcome of the 

project will be a digital catalog of 

the sound recordings available as 

open-source samples for artists to 

use in their own creations. 

“I realized in the salon that I 

need to work on this series a 

bit more than I thought. The 

series was still very open. I 

hadn’t figured out how the 

ceramics would be shown. 

Sharing work-in-progress 

helped me realize that I want 

to figure out how to make more 

of these first. The relationship 

with the artisan who holds 

the ancient knowledge is such 

a core part of the work. It’s 

not as if I’m just learning the 

skills and saying “thank you so 

much” and going off into the 

studio. I want to engage in this 

conversation with someone 

who is making something that 

goes back thousands of years, 

and may or may not care about 

what the art world has to say 

about it. I’m interested in a 

deeper conversation about that 

exchange. Sometimes that 

takes time. Where I want to go 

with the series next is finding 

more people who have the skill 

set and figuring out new ways 

to explore this functional form 

together.” 

— Juan Ledesma 

“Generative Generosity brought 

together things that people 

wouldn’t necessarily see as new 

media art and found common 

overlap across different 

artworks. For example, Juan’s 

ceramic instruments based 

on an indigenous practice 

don’t necessarily translate to 

new media, but then when 


you realize the scope of what 

he’s trying to do includes 

introducing these unique 

sounds to modern music 

making tools, that makes it 

interesting. These sounds have 

been left out of the lexicon of 

music making, and now they 

are more accessible because 

of his work. It’s like finding a 

new language or adding a new 

set of characters to the 

unicode standard.” 


In the central space of the 

gallery, Daniel Temkin’s “Dither 

Studies” appeared on the large 

screen. Visitors were invited to 

approach the interactive, webbased 

work to generate brightly 

colored compositions using his 

software. The dither is perhaps 

the most fundamental algorithm 

of digital photography and is 

present in nearly everything we 

see. Dating back to the mid-70s, 

it was first used to translate color 

or grey scale images to black and 

white pixels, allowing a limited 

color palette to approximate the 

look of a gradated image. The 

“Dither Studies” project isolates 

this algorithm, dithering not a 

photographic image, but a solid 

color. While the math behind 

dithering is very simple, the 

patterns feel irrational. 

“It was wonderful to finally 

have the first public showing 

of the “Dither Studies” web 

app created after years of 

iteration, production and 

development. I met with an 

enthusiastic audience that had 

sharp questions and gave me 

feedback on the work. It was 

great to have the first coherent 

presentation of “Dither Studies” 

in front of an audience that was 

sophisticated about aesthetic 

questions and the computer 

history behind the work as well, 

and were curious about that, 

it was a nice combination of 

different types of thinking.” 

— Daniel Temkin 

In the newest iteration of “Dither 

Studies,” Temkin has moved from 

the orthogonally arranged pixels 

of our monitors to hexagonal 

and triangular pixels. To make 

this work, he used machinelearning 

techniques to develop 

dithering kernels (the weighting 

in how each pixel is calculated) 

performative in these shapes. 

The project, set to launch in fall 

of 2024, will be open source, with 

the machine learning code in 

Python and the website written in 

vanilla JavaScript. 

A lot of the work of figuring 

out how to create dithering 

algorithms with triangles and 

hexagons instead of squares 

was really a technical exercise, 

it was a kind of research that 

isn’t primarily aesthetic, but 

instead looks at why our 

monitors work the way they do, 

and how these patterns are 

developed. What you end up 

with is something aesthetic, 

something that people have an 

immediate reaction to visually 

apart from the history and the 

research that goes into the work. 

— Daniel Temkin 

“What I love about Daniel’s 

work is that it’s deep, it takes a 

concept and explores it, really 

takes it apart, and makes it 

more accessible along the way. 

I couldn’t have told you what 

dithering was before the salon, 

but seeing him demonstrate 

it step by step, and show his 

research, you can understand 

how special it is, and not only 

that but how it’s affected visual 

language in the modern age 

as well. Now I see it wherever 

I go. It’s that perfect art 

project, similar to the concept 

of “museum goggles”, where 

you visit a museum and see 

something new, and you start 

to see its influence everywhere. 

For me, Daniel’s work has that 

effect.” 


Kicking off the salon 

presentations, Jay Mollica, 

director of digital engagement 

at PAMM, shared a behind-thescenes 

look at the museum’s 

digital initiatives and his vision 

for how institutions can support 

the development of open cultural 

infrastructure. The Pérez Art 

Museum Miami is leading the way 

in exploring how museums can 

engage the public space of the 

internet. Their recent initiatives 

include New Realities, which is 

a browser-based Augmented 

Reality exhibition space free and 

open for all to explore, as well 

as Wikipedia contributions, and 

PAMM TV, a publicly accessible 

streaming platform for video art. 

“PAMM’s purview is South 

Florida, Caribbean Diaspora, 

Latin America, African 

Diaspora, and all these regions 

are under-represented on 

Wikipedia. Our Wikimedian in 

Residence was hired to bring 

our academic authority and 

expertise to that platform. 

There are a lot of artists having 

monographic exhibitions at 

PAMM that have no presence 

on Wikipedia, like Madeleine 

Hunt-Erlich, Marcela Cantuária, 

Jason Seif – all these artists 

that have deep histories and 

practices. We’re able to tie 

PAMM’s academic authority 

and historical presence to a 

number of contexts and places 

where it wasn’t before. For 

example, a landmark in Miami’s 

art history, Christo and Jeanne 

Claude’s “Surrounded Islands” 

was a project supported and 

initiated by PAMM, so being 

able to tie our history back to 

that has been huge. 

In just one year, the 

Wikimedian in Residence has 

added citations and created 

articles that have garnered 

six million views on PAMM’s 

citations and records on 

Wikipedia as of February 2024. 

As we provide articles and 

context citations to Wikipedia, 

we see that traffic flow back 

into PAMM’s web portfolio. This 

creates a feedback loop. We 

create articles about artists in 

our collection, and then we can 


query Wikipedia to pull content 

back into the website, so we’re 

immediately adding value to the 

public knowledge base and also 

using that to communicate to 

our audiences.” 


working on could contribute 

value back to the Miami art x 

tech scene — and that I got to 

see a new vein of creativity that 

I hadn’t seen in Miami before.” 

— Madeline Gannon 

The salon discussion continued, 

touching on topics such as 

collaboration and co-authorship, 

open licenses for creative IP, and 

distribution to global audiences. 

“We had a group of people 

gathered together in one place 

to think critically about how 

we use technology and how it 

might become more material 

to those of us living in Miami. 

The discussion got a bunch 

of people talking around open 

source and scalability, and 

how it would be useful to the 

community. Every geography 

is unique, there’s no one size 

fits all for technology, so 

the context of tech in Miami 

certainly means something 

different than it does in the 

context of San Francisco or 

New York City, it’s rare to 

engage with a local gathering of 

community members like that.” 


“As a newcomer to the Miami 

art and tech scene, it was 

amazing to feel instant 

community around the event. 

Everyone was so welcoming, 

and I have gotten to know a few 

other artists I met through the 

salon much better. I remember 

leaving the salon feeling 

encouraged — that what I was 


Fluid 

Identity 

October 11th, 2023 

Ruth Burotte 

AdrienneRose Gionta 

Tara Long 

Fluid Identity featured artists exploring identity by 

nurturing virtual beings. Their avatars emerged from 

the ebbs and flows of resilient femme practice, amid 

the rising tides of South Florida identity politics. In 

the daily lived existence of climate catastrophe, our 

bodies become vessels. They take on forms, stand 

in for moments in time and reflect our stories back 

into the costumes and mannerisms that adorn them. 

The salon showcased works-in-progress from artists 

iterating through their lived identity, by creating 

worlds and populating them with extensions of 

themselves. AdrienneRose Gionta explores the bias 

of representation of the female body embedded 

within the techno-utopian ideals of Silicon Valley. 

She makes space for fat avatars to thrive within game 

engines that are coded to reject non-conforming 

female forms. Tara Long’s practice of identity evolves 

through many iterations – punk, healer, painter, 

nymph. Within these versions of herself, Long sculpts 

her lived experience into divine forms of resilience. 

Ruth Burotte’s vivid characters personify her lived 

experiences as a first-generation Haitian immigrant. 

Collapsing time and cultural space, Burotte animates 

in a singular street-inspired manga aesthetic, her 

characters moving from 2D to 3D to enter our world 

and claim space for their stories. 



AdrienneRose Gionta “4.0 in Pink Bikini” (2021) 

from the Covid Pod Lyfe project

Ruth 

Burotte 

Animation 

3D Printing 

Character Design 

Ruth Burotte is a Haitian American New 

World School of the Arts graduate in Art 

& Technology. Born in Queens, NY, then 

raised in Forest Park, Georgia, she now lives 

in Miami. She works in mediums such as 

illustration, painting, motion design and 

animation. Her focus is character design 

with inclusions of storytelling. Ruth has 

been involved in local urban art projects 

to lead communities in a new cultural 

direction. 

Burrote’s creative brand collaborations 

include Adidas, Champion, NIKE, Liquid 

Death and McDonalds. Burrote serves as 

Art Director for Youth Concept Gallery. Her 

work has been shown at Oolite Arts, The 

Arsenal Miami and III Points, among others 

exhibition spaces. 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Ruth Burrote 

presented a work-in-progress 3D Printed 

Sculpture “Kenny,” which was featured at III 

Points and has evolved into a solo exhibition 

“Meki Town Mixtape” at Vaco Studios 

Miami. Since the salon, she has also been 

working on the publication of her first artist 

book. 

Artist Ruth Burotte poses with her 3D Avatar “Kenny” 

on a holographic display provided by MAD Arts 



Studies for a work-in-progress 3D printed 

sculpture “Kenny” by Ruth Burotte Oolite Media Art Salon Series / 63

AdrienneRose 

Gionta 

Augmented Reality 

Virtual Performance 


AdrienneRose Gionta, an Oolite Arts 

Resident Artist, analyzes identity and cultural 

assumptions about fatness, beauty standards, 

embodiment and fulfillment on and offline. 

She works with avatars to create inclusive 

environments in imagined digital worlds 

where fat-bodied women have it all. In doing 

this, she responds to limiting social standards 

imposed on her as a fat woman, from beliefs 

about acceptable norms within pop culture to 

personal fulfillment. 

Gionta earned an MFA in Time Based Media 

and Photography from Florida International 

University, and her BFA in Sculpture from the 

Department of Visual Arts and Art History 

and a BA in Psychology at Florida Atlantic 

University. She was awarded the South 

Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for 

Visual and Media Artists. Her work has been 

featured at Locust Projects, Oolite Arts, ICA 

Miami, The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art 

Museum, Spinello Projects and David Castillo 

Gallery, among others. She is currently an 

artist in residence at Oolite Arts. 

Installation view “Many Avatars, Many Lives” (2023). Work-in-progress 

interactive installation from AdrienneRose Gionta at Fluid Identity 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: AdrienneRose Gionta 

prototyped an interactive AR face filter 

installation and presented an experimental AR 

performance piece and installation titled “Many 

Avatars, Many Lives” 



Left: Installation view of AdrienneRose Gionta’s avatar 

“AdrienneRose (the super ego)” installed on a holographic display 

provided by MAD Arts 

Right: Study of avatar evolutions from AdrienneRose Gionta’s studio. 


Tara 

Long 


3D Animation with Motion Capture 

Photography 

Tara Long, a Miami native, is a versatile 

artist known for her work in performance, 

video, software development, AI and oil 

painting. Her creative journey is deeply 

rooted in the exploration of self-identity, a 

response to early orphanhood trauma. Long 

employs various personas, deconstructs 

and reconstructs origin stories, and uses 

surrogates to magnify facets of her identity. 

Through this process, she navigates a 

diverse range of experiences, transcending 

established narratives and overcoming past 

pain, shaping a transformative artistic path. 

Long has been featured at Locust Projects, 

Spinello Projects, ICA Miami, Pérez 

Art Museum Miami, MoMA PS1 and III 

Points Music Festival, among others. 

She completed her BFA from Parsons 

and her MFA at University of Hartford. 

Her background making large-scale 

collaborative works includes projects like 

√iøle†a§, #IHAITIBASEL, TvvinHaus LLC, JIT 

REAL, and NRM Gallery in NYC. Currently, 

she is a resident artist at Bakehouse Arts 

Complex in Miami. 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Tara Long presented 

an installation of new work “Back 2 

Back” (2023) alongside an interactive AI 

performance with her avatar “F4EDRA” 

appearing inside a holographic display 

provided by MAD Arts, with music from 

Laboratory and Deaf Dorothy. 

Installation view “Back 2 Back” (2023) 

by Tara Long at Fluid Identity 


Above: Early iteration of Tara Long’s avatar “F4EDRA” 

Center: Tara Long poses with the latest version of her avatar “F4EDRA” 

on a holographic display from MAD Arts. Photos by Through the Shutter. 


Salon 

Summary 

Fluid Identity conjured the 

avatars of three artists exploring 

identity. With support from MAD 

Arts, the participating artists had 

access to advanced technology 

and engineering support to 

take their work to the next level. 

Entering the space, viewers 

encountered “F4EDRA,” a workin-progress 

from Tara Long, 

hovering at human scale on the 

holographic display provided by 

MAD Arts. 

“I had the opportunity to visit 

the MAD Art space before 

getting the equipment on site 

at Oolite Satellite, and their 

technologist taught me how to 

use the display, which ended 

up being pretty simple if you 

are familiar with a computer. 

It was eye opening to get 

an understanding of what 

the possibilities are to use 

the display in an even more 

interesting and captivating 

way, and realizing to do that 

Iwould have to up my game to 

use programs like UNREAL and 

things I’m not versed in yet. 

It gave me a lot of inspiration 

to move forward with some 

of those more advanced 

technologies, so getting a 

glimpse into that was really 

valuable.” 

— Tara Long 

Half human, half dolphin and 

fully cyborg, “F4EDRA” is the 

culmination of over a decade 

of performance personas from 

Long’s practice interrogating 

femme resilience in South Florida. 

During the salon presentations, 

the artist performed alongside a 

pre-rendered version of her avatar 

as an early proof-of-concept for 

the more ambitious vision – to 

bring “F4EDRA” to life as a 

motion capture rigged 3D model, 

AI-powered companion and 

artistic collaborator. 

“The salon opportunity 

prompted me to sort of “Wizard 

of Oz” the larger concept of 

bringing “F4EDRA” to life as a 

performance partner. Having 

my avatar as a collaborator in 

real-time gave me more insight 

into what I would like to see her 

develop into in the future. Now 

I’m thinking, why not make her 

a full-blown AI animatronic 

partner who can be available to 

me as a sort of living machine 

that I can work with in both 

physical and emotional ways.” 

—Tara Long 

In addition to the performance and 

avatar, Long installed a large-scale 

photographic work that brought 

her personal narrative into the 

futuristic installation. In “Back 2 

Back,” Long poses as a reflection of 

an old photograph of her mother. 

The works taken together invite 

us to think about generational 

trauma and creative resilience in 

the emerging age of loneliness 

brought on by the pandemic and 

tech accelerationism. 

Entering the main space, viewers 

found themselves walking 

through an augmented reality 

portal installed by AdrienneRose 

Gionta. The artist invited visitors 

to pose with her for a photograph 

as a younger, more animated 

version of themselves. Stepping 

in front of the camera, faces are 

transformed in real-time with face 

filter augments, which are then 

displayed back into the space on 

a large display for all to witness 

the avatar transformations. 

The interactive installation was 

housed inside a fantastical dream 

world blooming with roses, and 

inhabited by Gionta’s avatars, 

projected larger-than-life in their 

many evolutions. 

“In the salon we installed a 

series which is about the selfie, 

and we took it to the next level 

to explore circulation, and 

the experience of watching 

and being watched, which is 

what the work is about. People 

loved that. They were enjoying 

the interactivity of seeing 

themselves on the screen and 

taking photos. This type of AR 

installation was something I 

had been wanting to do but 

didn’t know how to make 

it happen. Having the tech 

partnership, expertise and 

space to experiment made it 

happen, and the feedback I got 

was extremely positive.” 

— AdrienneRose Gionta 

In the back of the space, the 

charismatic character “Kenny” by 

Ruth Burotte rotated on a large 

display. Dressed in streetwear, 

the manga-inspired 3D model 

hovered above work-in-progress 

prototypes of her 3D printed 

form. Burotte was evolving her 

characters beyond the screen into 

the physical world, and she shared 

these early sculpture studies at 

Fluid Identity. Kicking-off the 

salon presentations, Burotte took 

us through her process of hand 

modeling her animated characters 

into 3D models. 

“I was a little shy at first, 

but I felt empowered to talk 

alongside the other artists 

that were with me, and I loved 

that we were talking about 

art and technology, which 

is coming a long way every 

day. I was happy to talk about 

not only my process, but my 

love for character design and 

illustration, and trying to merge 

the physicalities of 3D, digital 

and physical media. “ 

“Showing work in progress was 

fun. While I was presenting, I 

became aware of a couple of 

things about my own work that 

didn’t really click until I was 

talking about it. I realized how 

much background and story I 

had developed with the works 

and characters. Especially the 

ways I was building a world 

around my characters – it got 

me inspired to think about 

making something more 

tangible, and start building a 

world that people can keep 

up with. Just talking about it 


Above: Ruth Burotte and Tara Long work with the holographic 

display from MAD Arts 

Below: AdrienneRose Gionta boots up her avatar on the display. 

with others, I found I had so 

much built already, and I never 

realized it. The salon reassured 

me that people are interested 

and invested in the stories I am 

telling.” 

— Ruth Burotte 

After the presentation from 

Burotte, the audience clustered 

around the glowing world 

installed by Gionta for a 

performance. Participants were 

air dropped a ceremonial text to 

follow along from their phones, 

and Gionta led us through a 

gratitude meditation and candle 

lighting ritual in reverence 

of the artist’s evolving avatar 

representations over the years. 

“The salon was way different 

than any experience I’ve had 

showing work. I’ve never shared 

in-progress work with people in 

a space like that, generally that 

happens in the studio. Having 

a curator that was encouraging 

and supportive and saying 

“whatever you need, I’ll get that 

for you” I felt safe enough to be 

able to perform and share. That 

was a big deal for me, to be 

able to experiment and put stuff 

out there and see how people 

respond to it.” 


With a renewed sense of 

calm and virtual presence, 

the audience made their way 

to the front of the space for a 

performance from Tara Long and 

“F4EDRA”, accompanied by a 

musical ensemble composed of 

Laboratory and Deaf Dorothy. 

Tara: “May I introduce you to 

my creation, my guardian angel, 

F4EDRA.” 

F4EDRA: “Greetings. It’s surreal 

to be here. Quite like the time 

Pinocchio first felt his wooden 

heartbeat.” 

Tara: “F4EDRA, do you 

understand why you were 

created?” 

F4EDRA: “In part, I am an ode 

to your lineage, a tribute to your 

battles and triumphs. The crown 

I wear, the dagger inked on me, 

these aren’t mere accessories; 

they are stories, symbols of your 

ancestors and their struggles.” 

Tara: “Yes. Your design was born 

from deep rooted pain narratives, 

but also resilience. The bionic arm 

and other parts are a testament 

to reconstruction after trauma. 

What do you see when you look at 

yourself?” 

F4EDRA: “I see strength and 

vulnerability coexisting. Just 

like Frankenstein, who was both 

monster and creation, I am an 

amalgamation of sorrow and 

hope. But, unlike him, my creator 

loves me.” 

“It felt good to perform again at 

Fluid Identity, it had been a long 

time since I had been in front 

of people sharing new work, so 

in that sense it was a shock to 

my system, but a good shock. 


Sharing a work in progress 

gave me a chance to think 

through all the things which are 

not done yet, and I know where 

to focus for the work to be truly 

rendered.” 

— Tara Long 

To close out the evening, everyone 

gathered again in the main space 

in a circle around the room to 

discuss the topics in the work. 

A vibrant conversation unfolded 

about the precarity of artistic 

production, the challenges of 

femme identity in the polarized 

social landscape of Miami, and 

the forms of resilience being 

demonstrated in Fluid identity 

by the artists, curator and salon 

partners. 

“It was a really big turnout, a 

lot of people that I knew, and a 

lot of people that I didn’t know 

that I was meeting for the first 

time. It was a lot of people that 

were tech based or art and tech 

based, and that is different. 

Usually, I’m going to exhibitions 

that are more traditional art in 

Miami, so it’s a different vibe. 

This audience felt like a good 

mix of people who understand 

and get the process, asking 

about the technical side 

which I like, we can nerd out, 

and on the other end it’s very 

traditional conversations 

which I love and respect as 

well too, but hope to see more 

conversations commingled like 

this.” 


“Everyone was so invested; I 

was taken aback by how well 

everyone was listening. The 

crowd felt like more seasoned 

and experienced artists than I’m 

used to, and professionals in 

the field. Often, I’m in the room 

with young emerging artists 

that are just graduating and 

getting their foot in the door, or 

just in the game for a few years. 

The crowd at the Oolite salon 

was more seasoned and more 

experienced, it was different.” 

— Ruth Burotte 

“I loved having the other artists 

participating in the salon with 

me. We all were dealing with 

having these other digital 

selves in our practice, and 

it was really cool to place 

myself into a cannon of other 

women creating avatars at this 

moment. I was feeling a little 

alone in an echo chamber, and 

doing the salon brought me 

closer to my community, which 

I really appreciated. 

I thought the audience was 

really open and intelligent, 

and there for it. After being 

alone creating these things, 

I was not sure how it would 

come across to people, and I 

felt they were really interested, 

even if they didn’t fully know 

what was going on. I felt their 

curiosity and they had a lot of 

questions. There were maybe 

not so many answers, we had 

a lot of questions and great 

conversation. Perhaps there are 

no answers yet with this kind of 

technology.” 

— Tara Long 

Tara Long installs her artist proofs for “Back 2 Back” at Fluid Identity 

After the salon, MAD Arts 

extended access to the 

holographic display for 

an additional week so the 

artists could continue their 

experimentation. This generous 

stewardship and support allowed 

the artists to take their technical 

knowledge to another level. 

“It was amazing to see my 

avatar on the MAD Arts 

holographic display. I am 

always trying to project 

my avatars larger than life, 

so people feel immersed. 

Usually they are on the 

computer screen, and we 

are bigger than them, and 

I’ve always loved the idea of 

them being the size of us, 

or larger than life. Getting a 

chance to experiment with this 

kind of display I realized the 

advantages and disadvantages, 

and it was an awesome 

experience because we all 

helped each other figure out 

how to use the technology. I 

don’t usually get to work with 

other artists who are working 

with technology, so I have to 

figure everything out by myself. 

In this experience we were 

all figuring it out together, 

and excited to see each 

other’s avatars come to life.” 



Unstable 

Ecologies 

November 29th 2023 

Thom Wheeler Castillo 

Felice Grodin 

Lee Pivnik 

Fereshteh Toosi 


Felice Grodin presents work-in-progress 

“Accelerated Species” at the Unstable Ecologies salon 

Unstable Ecologies welcomed artists cultivating a 

mutualistic practice between technology and the 

natural world. Ecosystems emerged from mediation 

with artificial intelligence, and we came to a new 

understanding of our place in this world through 

symbiotic exchanges between biological and 

computational processes. A softer side of digital 

transformation takes seed with interspecies refiguring 

of the technologies of power that are changing our 

lived experience. The participating artists deploy 

technology to connect our contemporary human 

experience with the environments and species of 

a city in crisis. Felice Grodin is working with AI to 

explore texture and biological patterns, subverting 

machine vision by putting technology at the service 

of her augmented reality creatures evolved from 

local species. Ferehsteh Toosi takes us on a journey 

through a younger generations’ view of the violently 

shifting geography of Miami with memory and AR 

soundscapes, telling the story of a city shaped by 

climate catastrophe and hungry developers. The 

stunning work-in-progress prints from Thom Wheeler 

Castillo envision a future for Miami where native 

growth has overcome the iconic architectures built 

in this impossible terrain. The ongoing research from 

Lee Pivnik offers speculative R&D in collaboration 

with AI to develop adaptive architectural solutions to 

Miami’s environmental precarity. 


Thom Wheeler 

Castillo 


Photography 

Thom Wheeler Castillo , 

an Oolite Arts Ellies Creator 

Award winner, lives and 

works in Miami. Interested in 

landscape, environmentalism 

and ecosystems, he works from 

an interdisciplinary approach 

entwining histories, earth 

sciences and anthropology 

to confront living through the 

anthropogenic era. Since 2021, 

he has embarked on cultural 

missions throughout the 

Caribbean region, working with 

Curator Rosie Gordon-Wallace 

and the Diaspora Vibe Cultural 

Arts Incubator’s International 

Cultural Exchanges (I.C.E). 

Wheeler Castillo graduated from 

Pacific Northwest College of Art 

with a degree in Intermedia. 

He works throughout the region 

as an educator with institutions 

including Pérez Art Museum 

Miami, O, Miami Poetry Festival, 

HistoryMiami, A.I.R.I.E. (Artist 

in Residence in the Everglades), 

Rubell Museum and Miami 

Design District. He currently 

has an Artist-In-Residence 

Studio Fellowship with DVCAI 

and is a 2023 recipient of its 

Catalyst award. 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Thom 

Wheeler Castillo presented his 

Speculative AI Photography 

Series “I Scry in These Blue- 

Green Waters” with an exhibition 

sketch that has continued to 

evolve since the salon. 

Installation view of work-in-progress generative AI photography series 

“I Scry in these Blue-Green Waters” by Thom Wheeler Castillo 


Studies from the work-in-progress generative AI photography series 

“I Scry in these Blue-Green Waters” by Thom Wheeler Castillo 


Felice 

Grodin 



Virtual Installation 

Felice Grodin, a former Oolite Arts Resident 

Artist, is an artist with a background in 

architecture, who lives and works in Miami 

Beach. Her projects depict speculative 

timelines that can be experienced in the 

present through the mediation of technology 

and community engagement. Her work hovers 

between the digital and analog realms, creating 

immersive experiences that have an impact on 

reality. 

Grodin received a Bachelor of Architecture 

from Tulane University and a Master of 

Architecture with Distinction from Harvard 

University. Selected solo exhibitions include: 

“Felice Grodin: Invasive Species” at the Pérez 

Art Museum Miami (2017-19) and “IM/Movable 

Assets” at the Miami International Airport 

(2019-20). Felice was a studio resident at 

Oolite Arts in Miami Beach, FL (2020-22). 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Felice Grodin 

presented augmented reality prototypes for 

her forthcoming series “Accelerated Species”. 

Since the salon, the series has continued to 

expand and will be featured in an upcoming 

exhibition at Dimensions Variable. 

Above: Demos of AR prototypes from work-in-progress series 

“Accelerated Species” by Felice Grodin 


Center: Detail of “Giant Waterbug” Augmented Reality installation from the 

forthcoming series “Accelerated Species” by Felice Oolite Grodin Media Art Salon Series / 85

Previous Page: Installation view at Oolite Satellite of 

“Giant Waterbug” augmented reality from the forthcoming 

series “Accelerated Species” by Felice Grodin 

Above: Demo of the AR prototype from work-in-progress 

series “Accelerated Species” by Felice Grodin 


Lee 

Pivnik 


Architecture 

Speculative Design 

Lee Pivnik, a Resident Artist at Oolite Arts, lives and 

works in Miami. Working across disciplines, he takes 

inspiration from living systems and other species to 

imagine a future based on mutualistic relationships 

instead of extractive economies. He co-directs the 

Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), an ever-evolving 

collaborative organism that brings peripheral solutions 

to environmental degradation to the forefront of public 

consciousness. In 2022, he began a long-term project 

called Symbiotic House, which reimagines the home as a 

potential site for climate care and adaptation. 

Pivnik graduated from the Rhode Island School of 

Design with a BFA in Sculpture and a concentration in 

Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies and attended 

the Immersion Program at The School of Architecture 

(TSOA) at Arcosanti. He has been awarded Knight Arts 

Challenge Awards in 2019 and 2021, and an Ellie from 

Oolite Arts (2020). Pivnik has been an artist in residence 

at Biosphere 2 (2017), Mana Contemporary Miami (2018), 

Atlantic Center for the Arts (2021), and Deering Estate 

(2022). Currently he is an artist in residence at Oolite 

Arts. 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Lee Pivnik presented his 

research and development for sustainable futures titled 

“Symbiotic House” which is his ongoing focus. Since the 

salon, Pivnik has been hosting a series of events at the 

Kampong and started his residency at Oolite Arts. 

Detail from Lee Pivnik’s work-in-progress series “Symbiotic House” 

featuring “The Living Room”, (2023) Digital Rendering 




Detail from Lee Pivnik’s work-in-progress series “‘Symbiotic House”’ 

featuring “The Living Room”, (2023) Digital Rendering

Fereshteh 

Toosi 


Sound Art 

Site-specific Installation 

Fereshteh Toosi, an Oolite Arts Ellies Award 

winner, designs experiences and art objects 

that pose questions and foster animistic 

connections. Their artwork often involves 

documentary processes, oral history and 

archival research. Immersive performances 

are produced in conjunction with small 

sculptures, short films, installations, scores, 

and poetry, often situated in gardens, parks 

and waterways. 

Their work has appeared at Independence 

Seaport Museum, Montréal/Miami New 

Narratives Lab, O Cinema, MUTEK, and 

FilmGate Interactive. They earned a Knight 

New Work award, Miami Live Arts Lab 

Alliance Award, and The Ellies Creator 

Award in 2018. Currently Toosi is an 

associate professor in the digital area of 

the Art and Art History Department of the 

College of Communication, Architecture, 

and the Arts at Florida International 

University. 

Still image from work-in-progress, site-specific 

AR sound installation “Voice Memos for the 

Future” by Fereshteh Toosi 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS: Fereshteh Toosi 

invited participants into a placemaking 

roleplay and shared Augmented Reality 

Soundscapes from their work “Voice Memos 

for the Future” which debuted at FilmGate 

Interactive. Since the salon, Fereshteh 

has continued to develop site-specific 

installations for the artwork at locations 

throughout Miami. 



Right: Fereshteh Toosi presents “Voice Memos for the Future” 

at Unstable Ecologies 

Bottom: Fereshteh Toosi (left) interviews Kasia Williams (right) 

at the northern part of Key Biscayne for “Voice Memos for the Future” 


Salon 

Summary 

Unstable Ecologies presented an 

installation of work-in-progress 

in many different form factors 

– virtual sculpture, sound art, 

architecture, social practice and 

photography. Each piece offered 

a reflection on the rapid changes 

to our environment, and together 

we opened a space for the 

community to come together to 

discuss these issues. 

Upon entering the salon, visitors 

encountered a QR code on the 

building’s facade. Scanning the 

code launched an early prototype 

from the studio of Felice Grodin, 

produced in Adobe’s rapid 

AR prototyping environment. 

Grodin’s forthcoming series 

called “Accelerated Species” 

was an early concept when the 

artist visited the Oolite Media Lab 

Office Hours some months before. 

This work inspired the salon’s 

curatorial focus on the impact 

computation has on the natural 

world. The salon gave Grodin a 

nudge to release the work for 

early feedback. The full vision for 

the series is quite ambitious. It 

includes 3D rigging and motion 

capture elements, along with 

natural plant textures being 

recognized with machine vision as 

triggers for her augmented reality 

works. The artist had already 

spent quite some time on deep 

exploration of naturally occurring 

patterns and texture generated 

in collaboration with AI and had 

developed a stunning aesthetic 

that was powerful enough to be 

shared in its own right. 

Grodin’s three early prototypes 

leveraged the capabilities of 

Adobe’s AR platform to add 

basic animation to 3D figures in 

augmented space. To compensate 

for the early prototype of 

rudimentary movements, Grodin 

crafted soundscapes to bring 

the creatures to life. The results 

were stunning – larger than life 

futuristic species penetrated the 

facade as viewers entered. After 

a presentation from the artist, 

a discussion of her process and 

conceptual background in making 

the work, visitors had a chance to 

explore the outdoor installation 

of all the species in the courtyard 

space in Little River. 

“It gave me a chance to share 

my process, which I really 

hadn’t done. The workflow is 

important for me. Speculation 

and theory come easy, 

but it was great to unpack 

this workflow I have been 

creating. It was important 

because part of what we 

are doing in the studio with 

tech is creating workflows 

in order to make artworks, 

which is really different from 

what the tech industry does 

with their interfaces, such 

as the predominant text to 

image understanding of AI. 

When artists start to marry 

different platforms and inputs 

and outputs, that to me is a 

modality of critical thinking, 

which is something we do 

not get to be privy to in the 

art world. That was great, 

to expose that level of thinking 

as creative and artistic. When 

I taught at the School of 

Architecture, I tried to always 

bring those subversive process 

ideas. The fact is that architects 

are really open to technology, 

they have to be, so I was able 

to experiment more with 

technology with my teaching 

than in the art community. 

What you did was afford me an 

opportunity to do just that at 

the salon, and I am grateful 

for that.” 

— Felice Grodin 

Entering the front gallery, 

visitors encountered a new AI 

photography series from Thom 

Wheeler Castillo entitled “I Scry 

in these Blue-green Waters”. This 

intimate and hopeful exploration 

was conceived as a series of 

landscapes transformed by 

time, in which the natural world 

regained control of the humanbuilt 

environment. Wheeler 

Castillo’s colorful series grew 

out of a place of isolation during 

the pandemic, when he started 

sharing his photography practice 

with AI image generation apps. 

Strange creatures and unknown 

landscapes emerged from the 

algorithm’s refiguring of the 

images he had captured. This led 

Wheeler Castillo down a poetic 

journey through the machine 

vision landscape of the rapidly 

developing AI platforms. 

When the artist first visited 

Oolite office hours, one image in 

particular caught our imagination 

in conversation. It depicted the 

art deco architecture of Miami’s 

South Beach neighborhood 

overgrown with mangroves by 

the AI. The artist left encouraged 

to continue developing the work, 

and we planned to produce a 

work-in-progress installation of 

some quick artist proofs. The 

work came together with stunning 

impact when Wheeler Castillo 

reacted to the space of the front 

gallery. He formed a wrap-around 

horizon line, hanging the works 

on two walls of the gallery with 

the shorelines aligned, ignoring 

the dimension of the frame, and 

instead opting for a cohesive 

landscape presentation. The 

installation created an uneasy 

sense of awe and reminded us 

of the rapidly shifting boundaries 

of art and photography as new 

ways of seeing enter our daily 

lives with force. 

“This work came out of 

isolation, and wanting to play, 

and that spirit stayed in our 

dialogue about the project. 

Ultimately, I brought that to the 

salon presentation. It was self 

reflective, and almost cathartic 

for me because it was coming 

from a place of isolation and 

wanting to find a solution or 

new direction. Burnout about 

the environment is real. You can 

be overwhelmed by the reality. 

It has to be managed because 


Above: Participants contributing during the salon discussion at Unstable 

Ecologies 

Below: Artist Lee Pivnik presents his work-in-progress “Symbiotic House” at 

Unstable Ecologies. Photos by Through the Shutter. 


you look at new science every 

few months and it’s dire. So, to 

be able to not be so heavy and 

be more playful was important, 

despite the subject matter 

being so overwhelming, the 

issue of our lifetime.” 

—Thom Wheeler Castillo 

As visitors entered the main 

space, a large screen playing short 

loops of video with subtitles from 

Fereshteh Toosi hinted at a sitespecific 

augmented reality sound 

work the artist was sharing that 

evening entitled “Voice Memos 

from the Future.” This artwork 

comes to life with geographic 

encounters. Augmented audio 

is heard as viewers seek out the 

locations where young Miamians 

have shared their story of a city 

in rapid transformation. Instead 

of allowing visitors to experience 

the work fully inside the gallery, 

the artist opted to create a 

participatory experience. 

“Watching the audience at the 

salon, I think the connectivity 

was amazing. Fereshteh was 

bringing in the audience to their 

work. People felt they were a 

part of it. They felt engaged. 

The aura Kelani created is that 

there’s no intimidation. It was 

very open hearted; it was not 

snobby or overly technical and 

I think the audience felt that.” 

—Felice Grodin 

Conjuring the experience of 

the work inside the salon, Toosi 

started off the salon with a placemaking 

exercise, asking viewers, 

“Who are the people of Miami?” 

This was a powerful gesture, 

subverting the typical approach 

to land acknowledgements by 

asking the audience to invite 

the ancestral tribes of Miami 

into the space. Answers came 

back in rapid fire from the 

knowledgeable artist community, 

including Tequesta, Calusa, 

Miccosukee and so on. After we 

had summoned all those who had 

come before us into the space, 

the artist invited the audience 

to share personal memories of 

some of the public sites in “Voice 

Memos from the Future.” This 

place-making activity revealed 

the deep civic engagement of the 

participants in the room, brought 

everyone into a presence together 

and served as a very intimate look 

at a city undergoing dramatic 

environmental change. 

“The project that I presented 

was an audio AR project and in 

a lot of ways it can feel invisible, 

so events like this are really 

helpful for me to think about 

how I want to share this with 

other people. I got this sense of 

wanting to follow through and 

create visibility for the project. 

An idea that came out of the 

salon was to go to the parks 

and seek out visitors who were 

already going there. The salon 

helped me to think through 

that circulation, because all 

the artists were talking about 

circulation in different ways, 

and that was very helpful.” 

—Fereshteh Toosi

The final work in this salon 

was Lee Pivnik’s multi-channel 

video installation of “Symbiotic 

House,” which brought us into 

the future of living in Miami. On 

the screen visitors encountered 

videos flying through renders 

of Pivnik’s 3D abode to loop us 

into the future he envisions—a 

mesmerizing and prescient 

dwelling space that exists in 

symbiosis with the environment of 

Miami. Pivnik toured us through 

the imagined home, taking us 

from the water reservoir on the 

rooftop that captures toxic rains 

after sugarcane burn off and 

processes it through an aquaponic 

filtration system, to the trees 

piercing through the compound’s 

livingroom reinforcing and 

strengthening the architecture 

as they grow. Pivnik’s fantastical 

renders also include small touches 

for resilient habitation like 

permaculture in the living room. 

Pivnik’s sprawling research 

into indigenous technologies, 

speculative sustainability and 

earthen dwellings is made 

available online at symbiotic. 

house, and the website was 

displayed on a vertical monitor 

for visitors to peruse in the salon. 

The prints Pivnik debuted that 

evening, fresh from production, 

had a reflective sheen that gave 

off an eerie glow, showcasing 

the incredible detail. Created 

in collaboration with AI, these 

works reflect a unique aesthetic 

the artist has been developing 

through workshops and courses 

engaging students with AI. 

Pivnik’s intimacy with this 

emerging technology extends 

beyond image making. He shared 

that he often turns to Chat GPT to 

write, read correspondences and 

even help prepare for interviews 

and presentations. 

“I knew the other artists in the 

salon, and knew some of their 

work better than others, but I 

don’t have a lot of opportunities 

to be in conversation about 

practice in that way, and also 

to invite others in, and that 

was exciting. Also to have this 

weaving of what we’re doing, 

and what I found so nice about 

the facilitation was the way we 

were urged to draw connections 

between what everyone was 

doing and highlight those. I 

had seen that happening at 

the salons I’ve been to before, 

so I was excited. Sometimes 

at events in Miami it feels like 

you’re dropped into something 

without a throughline, and so 

it’s very nourishing to me as 

an artist to be able to see that 

I’m in community with other 

people, the feeling of wanting 

to build a story of what we’re all 

doing, together.” 

— Fereshteh Toosi 

“There’s so much emotion 

conveyed when we talk about 

climate change because it is so 

uncertain and dire. At the salon, 

community was reinforced 

in this really interesting way. 

Most of the people in the room 

were strangers, and to have 

community with strangers was 

powerful. It’s where we need to 

be with regards to these issues 

Above: Installation view of “Symbiotic House” from Lee Pivnik at Unstable Ecologies 

Below: Felice Grodin presents her process for “Accelerated Species” at Unstable Ecologies 

Photos by Through the Shutter. 

because they affect us all. The 

reality is that all of us here in 

Miami, strangers, neighbors, 

acquaintances, we all have this 

place in common. The salon 

showed me that clearly there 

are a lot of people who are up 

for doing the best we can to 

save it, preserve it, endure it, 

and be here after whatever may 

come. That’s where the salon 

was for me the most successful, 

being able to talk about these 

things openly.” 

—Thom Wheeler Castillo 

The conversation initiated by 

these artists was one of hopeful 

optimism and grave warning. 

The playful approach at creating 

space to be present together 

was the throughline that bonded 

the works together. Ideas of 

circulation, presence, action 

and harmony permeated the 

dialogue. We all left feeling a little 

more prepared to navigate the 

instability beneath our feet with 

wonder. 


Mission Statement 

The mission of Oolite Arts is 

to support artists and advance 

the knowledge and practice of 

contemporary visual arts and 

culture in South Florida. Oolite 

Arts creates opportunities for 

experimentation and innovation, 

and encourages the exchange 

of ideas across cultures through 

residencies, exhibitions, public 

programs, education and 

outreach. 

Board of Directors 

Marie Elena Angulo, Chair 

Alessandro Ferretti, Vice Chair 

Kim Kovel, Treasurer 

Staff 

Esther Park 

VP of Programming, 

Interim Co-Director 

Munisha Underhill 

VP of Development, 

Interim Co-Director 

Tangella S. Maddox 

Interim CFO 

Cherese Crockett 

Development Senior Manager 

Dan Weitendorf 

Facilities Manager 

Hansel Porras Garcia 

Cinematic Arts Manager 

Oolite Arts’ Media Art Salon Series was made possible through 

the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. 

During her time at Oolite Arts, Digital Arts Fellow Kelani Nichole 

led a salon series that fostered critical dialogue around new media 

in Miami, oversaw the organization’s Media Art Lab, and provided 

one-on-one support to artists incorporating technology into their 

practice. 

Oolite Arts would like to thank Knight Foundation for its support 

in enhancing the way Oolite artists, and Oolite as an organization, 

use technology to elevate their work. 

Oolite Arts is generously supported by: 

Germane Barnes, Artist Board 

Member 

Chloe Berkowitz 

Edouard Duval-Carrié, Artist 

Board Member 

Lilia Garcia 

Jane Goodman 

Thomas F. Knapp 

Jeff Krinsky 

Lin Lougheed 

Reagan Pace 

Eric Rodriguez, Past Chair 

Melissa Gabriel 

Art Classes Manager 

Tabitha Cherubin 

Office Manager 

Catalina Aguayo 

Programs Manager 

Laura Guerrero 

Programs Coordinator 

Kelani Nichole is a technologist and founder of TRANSFER, an 

experimental media art space. She has been exploring decentralized 

networks and virtual worlds in contemporary art since 2013. Nichole’s 

focus is supporting artists with critical technology practice, and 

prototyping alternative models for cultural infrastructure. She has 

produced numerous solidarity experiments including the TRANSFER 

Download, an immersive exhibition format for virtual artworks. 

Currently, she is building the TRANSFER Data Trust, a decentralized 

archive and non-profit cooperative for cultural value exchange. 

Exhibitions and programs at Oolite Arts are made possible 

with support from the Miami-Dade County Department of 

Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade 

Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the City of Miami 

Beach Department of Tourism and Cultural Development, 

Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Miami Beach Mayor and City 

Commissioners; the State of Florida, Florida Department of 

State, Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Arts Council; The 

Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation; and 

the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Additional support 

provided by Walgreens Company.

Media Art Lab

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?