Meet the 2024 0xSalon Residents
Meet the 2024 0xSalon Residents
Having first run in 2021/2022 and again in 2023, the 0xSalon’s Research Residency Program returns for a third cycle, once more co-hosted by the Trust community & workspace in Berlin. We have two researchers in residence this year, having offered them both deferred residencies following last year’s open call.
Alessandro Y. Longo
Biography:
Alessandro Y. Longo is an independent writer and researcher based in Berlin. His work reflects critically on hegemonic techno-politics, cultural evolutions in the age of networks and systems of change. His practice plays with the language of magic, street pop culture, and game design. His research is channeled through the collective body of REINCANTAMENTO, an independent collective of researchers, philosophers, and designers exploring the entanglement between technology and magic. Their writings and projects have been featured at Beyond Cultures of Ownership, SAVVY Contemporary, IAM Festival 2021, C/O Digital Festival 2022, 48h Neukölln Festival 2023, and different online outlets.
Residency statement:
During my residency, I will continue to explore game design mechanics and how they intersect with theoretical discourses to iterate a new edition of 0xSalon’s RPG card deck, Fau0x Salon. I’m also interested in fostering conversation on the dialectics of enchantment and the relationship between capital, power, and spirituality. Finally, I will create resonances between the residency’s frame and my current research on digital gardens and undercurrent desires for a post-capitalist Internet.
Sammie Veeler
Biography:
Sammie Veeler is a Los Angeles-based artist and organizer examining the political nature of technological infrastructure and the embodied connections between people which are foundations of collective action. Through installation, poetry, performance, and world-building, Veeler exposes technologically mediated processes of individual and collective becoming.
Veeler uses archives as a container to explore themes of cultural memory, technological grief, and virtual embodiment. Since 2022, her personal practice has centered around an ongoing hybrid performance called Dead Name, which has received funding from Octobre Numerique Faire Monde, Gray Area, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Mirror Archive. She questions the stability of memory’s relationship with experience through lectures wrapped in eulogies for her pre-transition self, who she calls her ‘dead husband.’ Each address activates a spatial archive of audio from all previous performances, forming a rising chorus of dead Sammies who both interrupt her and automate her labor.
Veeler is also the co-founder of New Art City virtual art space, an online art gallery which has shown over 6,000 artists and reached 500,000 visitors since 2020. She was responsible for supporting artists, educators, and institutions while developing the gallery program in accordance with values of access and inclusion. In 2023, Veeler founded the Virtual Access Lab as a non-profit research unit of New Art City, in collaboration with Gray Area. Virtual Access Lab supports accessible digital culture through open source software, artist commissions, and digital preservation.
Veeler is a current incubator member at New Inc. in the Y10 Extended Realities track and a 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine fellow. Her work at New Art City has been supported by the Knight Foundation, Derby QUAD, the San Jose Museum of Art, and more than 30 universities around the world.
Residency Statement:
Memory Terminal is evolving practical technology. It is a mobile archive of archives housed in a Pelican case which travels with Sammie Veeler. A custom hardware device stewarded by a wetware girl. The device is designed to install virtual worlds in physical spaces in a way that is accessible, immersive, and interactive. Memory Terminal serves as a traveling offline archive of virtual worlds in New Art City’s Memory Card collection, which includes 30 exhibitions featuring 205 artists. It also hosts an archive of Veeler's personal collection of virtual worlds, which forms a multimedia diary spanning her entire artistic career and gender transition. The piece draws the human agents of computing and collective memory into focus, through activations which blur the boundary between reality and performance. Sammie plays the human NPC, alternating between docent, lecturer, archivist, and hardware engineer. At 0xSalon, Sammie will develop a spatial archive of work by previous Salon residents, which will join the other archives in Memory Terminal.
