Program 3 | Passerine Desires
5:00 PM | Saturday, July 19th 2025 | Woodland Pattern
720 E Locust St | Milwaukee, WI, 53212
Islander, Alix Anne Shaw, 5 min 52 sec
Synopsis |
Of learning to be a woman in the world, Catharine MacKinnon writes, "You learn that language does not belong to you ... that you cannot use it to say what you know. [You develop the habit] of not saying what you know until you forget it." Shifting identities and traces of memory coalesce in a feminist reframing of Homer's Odyssey. Islander limns the peripheries and articulates the silences between.
Artist Bio |
Alix Anne Shaw is a multi-media visual artist, filmmaker, and poet. A graduate of Yale University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she has exhibited internationally at galleries including the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago, the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in California, Kriti Gallery in India, and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea. Shaw is also the author of three books of poetry: Undertow (Persea 2006), Dido in Winter (Persea 2014), and Rough Ground (Etruscan, 2018). She lives in Milwaukee and online at https://alixanneshaw.carbonmade.com/ and www.alixanneshaw.com.
Granular Space, Ryan Griffis, 11 min 25 sec
Synopsis |
Granular Space is a documentary meditation on the movement and scale of the international grain trade —from one seed to millions of bushels, moved from field, to elevator, to barge, to ocean going vessel. It is Act II in a video trilogy titled “Between the Bottomlands & the World,” that tells a story of landscape, industry, and human conflict and resilience in a small town on the Illinois River.
Artist Bio |
Ryan Griffis (he/him) works on a number of large-scale collaborative projects that are focused on the ecology of the US Midwest. Combining art, pedagogy, design, creative writing, and documentary field work, his work follows the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, aiming to examine how and why economic structures and power relations drive environmental change. As an image maker and writer, he aims to produce works that produce knowledge and advocacy towards environmental justice and better relations amongst human and other-than-human communities. Ryan was born and raised in the lands currently occupied by the US State of Florida, a descendant of Welsh and other European settlers in the unceded ancestral homelands of the Mocama/Timucua, Guale, Yamasee and Seminole peoples. He currently teaches in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois.
Xeno-Euphoria, Micah Alhadeff, 4 min
Synopsis |
Xeno-Euphoria is an experimental video that imagines the rave as a portal for queer transformation, channeling trans theorist McKenzie Wark’s notion of xeno-euphoria—a rush of alien joy born from rhythm, excess, and ecstatic becoming. Using motion capture, two digital avatars engage in a shared ritual of movement, their bodies syncing, breaking apart, and re-aligning to the bass of techno. Through this cyclical choreography, the dancers undergo physical transformations, evolving into new, heightened forms.
As a digital artist who uses motion capture to choreograph digital avatars, I am fascinated by the idea of xeno-euphoria—especially as it relates to seeing my own movement embodied by an alien form. In Xeno-Euphoria, I aim to recreate the energy of the rave, a space where, as a queer person, I have often felt free to express myself and become a heightened version of who I am. I see strong parallels between the experience of raving and the process of working with motion capture and digital characters. Watching my movements mapped onto a digital body creates a feeling of euphoria that’s hard to capture in words—yet Wark’s concept of xeno-euphoria comes closer than anything else I’ve encountered.
Artist Bio |
Micah Alhadeff is a digital artist whose creative practice explores experimental game art through motion capture technologies, virtual embodiment, and glitch aesthetics.
Drawing from queer theory and technology studies, I examine how technological errors can reshape our understanding of virtual bodies. I use these digital anomalies to question relationships between physical and virtual experience. Through 3D programming and game engines, I create interactive works that challenge conventional ideas about digital identity. My work takes multiple forms, including interactive installations, real-time simulations, augmented reality projects, and experimental game environments.
Alhadeff's work was auctioned and sold by Sotheby's in 2023. He has exhibited internationally at venues including The Royal Institute in London, UK; NFT.NYC in New York, USA; NFC.Lisbon in Portugal; NFT Show Europe in Valencia, Spain; Tech Contemporary in Copenhagen, Denmark; 758 Art Space in Beijing, China; Artverse Gallery in Paris, France; RGBMTL in Montreal, Canada; Art Crush Gallery in Brussels, Belgium; and the Kalamazoo Valley Museum's Planetarium in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Micah Alhadeff is Assistant Professor of Game Art at Western Michigan University's Gwen Frostic School of Art.
Witch Island, Hannah Subotnick, 3 min 15 sec
Synopsis |
Witch Island is a place where howls transform into song and stones give birth to the dead.
Artist Bio |
Hannah Subotnick (1992) was born in a blizzard during a lunar eclipse. She is an animator, filmmaker, and photographer. These channels allow her to transform the physical into the ephemeral. Loss, seclusion, and intimacy figure prominently in her work.
Hannah is a current Fulbright Research Fellow to the Netherlands in Photography. Hannah has been an artist in residence at Yaddo and has been awarded grants from the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, Stanford University, and the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts. Her films have been screened internationally. Hannah has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Stanford University and the University of Rhode Island. She is currently a guest researcher at the University of Groningen (NL) in Philosophy.
She holds an MFA from Stanford University in Art Practice (2020), a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Film/Animation/Video (2016), and a BA from Brown University in Modern Culture and Media (2016.)
Jigna, Leah Solomon, 20 min
