A CELL IS A CARNIVAL • A CELL IS A CARNIVAL •
“A CELL IS A CARNIVAL”
@GAMEPLAYARTS
RUNNING 12/06 - 12/08
OPENING NIGHT: 12/06 • 7PM - CLOSE
RSVP HERE
@GAMEPLAYARTS
RUNNING 12/06 - 12/08
OPENING NIGHT: 12/06 • 7PM - CLOSE
RSVP HERE
“ECHOES IN THE GARDEN”
12/01• 11AM - 1PM
“BEING IN PROGRESS”
@HUMAN RESOURCES
12/01 • 6 - 9PM
12/01• 11AM - 1PM
“BEING IN PROGRESS”
@HUMAN RESOURCES
12/01 • 6 - 9PM
Schedule of Events
A CELL IS A CARNIVAL is a series of three events exploring nested proximities and mixed metaphors: body as fairground, ritual as network, wormhole as world. As emerging artists and organizers, we operate as organelles, barkers, and daemons.
Our series begins with a garden-situated AI workshop led by Chelly Jin on Sunday December 1. Later that evening, we invite the community to join us at Human Resources to share works-in-progress in the company of friends and familiar strangers. We round out the week with the culminating event, “A Cell is a Carnival,” an experimental art show featuring new works by the UCLA D|MA MFA class of ‘26 cohort: Chelly Jin, Rowena Kou, Sadia Quddus, Sagan Yee, Stamatis Hamouzas, and Xiner Lan.
Sunday, December 1
Echoes in the Garden: An AI Workshop
11am - 1pm
Mathias Botanical Garden
Mathias Botanical Garden
RSVP Required: https://forms.gle/hwbQAZect56b6dN89
Sunday,
December 1
Beings in Progress: An Invitation to Gather
5 - 8 pm
Human Resources
RSVP Required: https://forms.gle/MgQCrAnsNKjiunhj9
5 - 8 pm
Human Resources
RSVP Required: https://forms.gle/MgQCrAnsNKjiunhj9
Friday, December 6
A Cell is a Carnival • Opening Night
7 - 10 pm,
Gameplayarts
Free with RSVP: https://gameplayarts.org/collections/in-person/products/dec-6th-a-cell-is-a-carnival
7 - 10 pm,
Gameplayarts
Free with RSVP: https://gameplayarts.org/collections/in-person/products/dec-6th-a-cell-is-a-carnival
December 7-8
A Cell is a Carnival • Gallery Hours
10am - 3pm or by appointment
10am - 3pm or by appointment
Learn more
Echoes in the Garden: an AI workshop
Sunday, Dec 1 • 11 AM to 1 PM🌱 Limited to 5 participants.
Location to be provided to attendees.👉🏽 RSVP Required: https://forms.gle/HHT2uPtz2FhD4X8P8
Beings In Progress: an invitation to gather
Sunday, Dec 1 • 6 to 9 PM Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home St.👉🏽 Sign up in advance: https://forms.gle/MgQCrAnsNKjiunhj9
Organized by six emerging media artists, Beings in Progress is an effort to grow our art practices beyond traditional paradigms and institutions that are prone to failure in times of crisis. This event is open to anyone who feels called to participate, and is interested in a communally-shaped creative process.
Co-facilitator Sagan Yee, a games artist and organizer from Canada, will start us off by giving a brief offering of experimental workshop techniques inspired by speculative fiction writers’ circles. We will de-emphasize non-capitalist language (“I’m not sold”, “I don’t buy it”, or “I’m not invested”) and focus on the needs of the artist rather than the demands of the critic, and share work-in-progress in a grassroots, informal setting without the hierarchical biases of an art school crit session.
Next, participants may sign up karaoke-style to take the floor for 5 to 10 minutes. Connect your laptop, or send us your slides in advance. Share something you’re working on, or thinking of working on, or an idea you’ve abandoned but which may hold the seeds of future projects. Feel free to share a finished piece of art, or a burning research question, a call to action, or something else entirely. You may be empowered to ask the group directly for feedback, or just bask in the collective glow of appreciation and encouragement. Non-presenting observers are welcome!
Finally, the room will open for discussion and informal gathering. Light snacks will be provided.
Facilitators: Sagan Yee and Stamatis Hamouzas
Organizers: Chelly Jin, Rowena Kou, Sadia Quddus, Sagan Yee, Stamatis Hamouzas, and Xiner Lan
A CELL IS A CARNIVAL
🗓️ Exhibit Run: Dec 6 – Dec 8, 2024
🎉 Opening Night: Friday, December 6 🕖 7 PM
📍 Gameplayarts, 5511 W. Pico Blvd
🎟️ Free with RSVP
Six games at the arcade, six candles for the summoning, and six stars in the constellation. Six ghosts in the shell. Six artists in transit.
There are infinite ways of mapping any six points in the spacetime continuum. This is but all of them.
A CELL IS A CARNIVAL is an experiment in nested proximities and mixed metaphors: body as fairground, ritual as network, wormhole as world. The show celebrates the osmotic ability of art and technology to move through permeable boundaries of selfhood and community. As emerging artists, we operate as organelles, barkers, and daemons. We seek to replicate, merge, and evolve in concert with friends and familiar strangers, while maintaining tenuous boundaries of individual autonomy. Inspired by images of organic membranes and the cloth walls of circus tents, our collective practice also functions as a fluid structure, shifting endlessly between solitude and belonging.
We especially invite you to join us for our Opening Night event on Friday, December 6 at 7 PM. As you cross the gallery threshold, you will discover such curious delights as: an encrypted hand puppet, divinatory technologies, consensual eavesdropping, teeth as a symbol of eroded time, the gamification of the mammalian reward system, and kaleidoscopic fragments of self and memory. We invite you to enter, to circulate and celebrate, to absorb and be absorbed in turn … and then to break away, retreat, and say our fond farewells. Until the next time.
Featuring art and performances by Chelly Jin, Rowena Kou, Sadia Quddus, Sagan Yee, Stamatis Hamouzas, and Xiner Lan.
Chelly Jin
Chelly Jin is a Korean American new media artist employing technology as a conduit for expressing and exploring spaces between belonging, performing, and healing. Her practice weaves experimental methods with interdisciplinary forms: expressive and poetic programming, co-opting algorithms for self-inquiry, and bridging web, multimedia, installation, movement, sound, and performance.
https://chellyj.in/
Rowena Kou
A visual designer and interdisciplinary artist, my interest including time based digital media, sound art and (installation). I was born in Shanghai, was in Baltimore before coming to LA.
Sadia Quddus
Sadia Quddus is a media artist and graphic designer located in Los Angeles, CA. Drawing upon her Islamic heritage, her practice utilizes observation and endurance through performance and ritual, connecting to natural landscapes through the manipulation of image surfaces. Her current research studies hyper-visibility, digital surveillance, sacred ecologies, empire, and autonomy. She uses abstraction and fragmentation to gesture at the relationships between the corporeal and territorial “body.” Sadia holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and is currently pursuing her MFA in Media Art at UCLA Design|Media Arts (D|MA).
https://sadia.space
https://www.instagram.com/sadiaaa/
Sagan Yee
Sagan Yee (he/they) is a restless explorer of animation, video games, speculative fiction, and interactive miscellany. His practice has run the gamut from cartoons and alternative controllers to computational poetry and viral Twitter bots. From 2016 to 2020, they were the executive director of Hand Eye Society, a video game arts non-profit in Toronto. His current investigations include but are not limited to: trash, jargon, stock market aesthetics, fandom subcultures, deep space, queer body horror, and eavesdropping in public spaces.
https://www.saganyee.com
Stamatis Hamouzas
Stamatis Hamouzas is a Balkan artist-investigator with a background in environmental toxicology and media arts currently pursuing his MFA at UCLA’s Design|Media Arts program. His focus is on scrutinizing the propensity within human culture to exert dominance over that which we view as ‘Other’, whether the working class, the environment, or machines. His current work focuses on U.S. Superfund sites, reconstructing them in immersive 360° environments and analyzing the communication strategies used regarding environmental hazards.
https://www.instagram.com/dredgeops