Afroditi Psarra

Artist Highlight: Afroditi Psarra ✨️ ✨️Afroditi Psarra ( @afrdt ) is a transdisciplinary artist and an Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington in Seattle where she runs the DXARTS Softlab. Her practice builds on and extends the work of Cyber and Techno-Feminism(s) and the idea of gendered bodies as matrices of information. Her work has been presented at international media art festivals such as Getty PST, Ars Electronica, Transmediale and CTM, Eyeo, Piksel, Videobrasil and WRO Biennale, and exhibitions in venues like EMST, Onassis Stegi, Bozar, and Walker Art Center, among others. ✨️Her research interweaves media art, technology, and craft through the creation of artifacts shaped by a critical lens. She approaches the making of technological objects—whether through textiles, electronics, or handmade visual forms—as a form of resistance to black‑box systems. Drawing on Cyber‑ and Techno‑Feminisms and on Haraway’s notion of SF (string figures, speculative fabulations, science facts/fictions), her practice brings the softness of textiles into dialogue with the rigidity of data infrastructures, proposing new visual and material vocabularies. ✨️For our show, she is presenting her work: Ventriloquist Ontology. ✨️Ventriloquist Ontology probes the limits of control between human and machine through the relationship of a performer and a wearable entity. This entity articulates AI-generated text trained on biopolitics, algo-governance, and queer theory which manifests with involuntary movement through a series of linear actuators. The concept of ventriloquism gives agency to an ontological hybrid of wearable modules, human flesh and motor abilities, born-digital, able to produce novel language, but conditioned to its algorithmic biases. ✨️Wait…how did we get here???? is an exhibition co-curated and organised between the @xenovisualstudies and @momus_museums and will stay on view until the 14th of June 2026. 📍Experimental Centre for the Arts, B1 warehouse, port of Thessaloniki. <3

The last episode of Transmission Ecologies for the season drops today at 23:00 EET // 13:00 PT featuring CHARI @_chari.studio_ 🙌🙌🙌 CHARI is an NY Emmy nominated composer, interdisciplinary artist, humanities scholar, and new media archivist. Their practice explores alternative archival methods through and with a Black lens, building immersive worlds through sound, installation, and performance while critically engaging technology as subject, tool, collaborator, and adversary. This work draws from archival recordings of New World A-Coming, a 1940s radio program created by Roi Ottley and produced by WMCA and the City-Wide Citizens’ Committee of Harlem. The original broadcasts featured first-person accounts of African American life during World War II, addressing racial discrimination, labor inequality, military service, and everyday experiences in Harlem. In this piece, the recordings are played in reverse and mixed live, with fragments introduced, layered, and withdrawn through faders. Voices, music, and ambient sound are recombined in real time, producing a shifting composition built from excerpts of the archive. The work draws on the traditions of musique concrète, as well as DJ culture and remix practices, where recorded sound is treated as material for transformation. Listen live at 🔗 https://stegi.radio/ 🔗 channel 1 And later at 🔗 https://stegi.radio/podcasts/transmission-ecologies 🔗 . . . . . #stegiradio #transmissionecologies #audiocollage  #sonicarchives #blackradiohistory

The DXARTS Softlab @dxarts and UW Design’s Studio Tilt @studiotilt.design are excited to announce our two artists in residence—Allyce Wood @a11yce and Cathryn A. Ploehn—joining the Soft Data and Common Wares research project, with a particular focus on Hyperlocality. Hyperlocality explores data, networks, and technologies tied to closeness and the personal. It may involve working with highly specific datasets or developing technologies that operate in situated environments—off-the-cloud or even off-the-grid. Allyce Wood lives and works in Seattle, creating installations, works on paper, and textiles—with a focus on digital jacquard tapestries. For Allyce, the loom bridges traditional and digital technologies, merging online and offline experiences into woven cotton and wool. Her proposed work ‘NameDraft’, expands her artistic practice, which focuses on the intersection of textiles, code, and materiality. Building upon her research into the historical industry of women’s craft and the continued presence of textiles in domestic spaces, this project centers on name drafting, a technique used in overshot weaving that translates letters into binary structures, words into flowing patterns. This process of encoding language this way enables it to be reconfigured through looms, knitting drafts, and other textile systems. Cathryn A Ploehn is a designer and professor at the School of Design and Creative Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin. She designs interactions and data to cultivate ecological and collective livability. Her research practice, Feral Data Visualization, demands an embrace of place-based, situated, embodied, and vegetized forms of visual pattern making that de-estrange us from ecological and social community. Cat's proposed project ‘Gift of the Elderberries’ is a (open-source, offline-first) cyber ritual for practicing and recording gratitude. Gratitude reveals invisibilized systems of care, asking us to question the systems of power that manufacture conditions for pervasive (but often individualized) anxiety. . . . . #dxarts #uwdesign #digitalcraftmanship #cyberphysicalsystems #criticalmaking

What a fun night improvising at The Chapel Seattle with @afrdt — our little sonic collaboration ritual “Live Signals, Live Bodies”. I really enjoyed weaving live Software defined Radio, analog sounds, voice, modular, and SuperCollider synthesis together. Playing with someone means listing, and opening a dialogue, we were very much attuned to each other — and both surprised when it evolved into this immersive drone/noise piece. Can’t wait for the next one!💚 Big thanks to @morton_failglob for having us in the Chapel, playing along with @byronwestbrook , and everyone who came out and listened and taking pictures @mayuhanxiao and @amiemcneel 💚 You made it special. #SeattleNoiseMusic #SeattleExperimental #SeattleSynth #SeattleLiveMusic #seattlearts

Nerdiness overload..! Finally after 3 days of trial and error running SDR++ on a Raspberry Pi 4 with my embroidered kirigami antenna and an RTL-SDR module picking up Military Air transmissions at 239MHz. Come to the Chapel on Saturday if you want to hear more noisy stuff like that... We'll be playing with @maria.thraen supporting @byronwestbrook Also, excited to have this be featured in the show 'Smallish' at Cornish, curated by @esc_eunsun_choi . . . . . . #radioart #noise #etextiles #softwaredefinedradio #dxarts

Fun little EMF sniffer I made for class using the TDA2822M dual power amp IC ⚡ . . . . #dxarts #mechatronicart #physicalcomputing #noisyinterference #analogcircuits

Very excited to share that the newest episode of Transmission Ecologies will drop in a few hours at @stegiradio at 11pm E.E.S.T. // 1pm P.D.T featuring the work of sound artist. Merve Ünsal @munsal 🙌 Merve Ünsal is an artist based in Istanbul and Santa Cruz. Most recently, she had a solo exhibition, Intimations, at AVTO (Istanbul, 2024). She is the founding editor of m-est.org, a publication focused on artist-centred publishing. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Film and Digital Media Studies Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her takeover show features a range of audio works from the past 5 years, most often exhibited in installation formats, or as shortwave radio transmissions. . . . . . #transmissionart #soundecologies #soundart #radioart #fieldrecording

is happy to announce that PCAI collection artists @afrdt and @a__m__i__t__a participate in the exhibition “Wait…How did we get here?” at The MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts. “Wait…How did we get here?”; this is the question and the title of the project under which an innovative and multidisciplinary programme -including an exhibition, club nights, artistic workshops, an artistic residency, educational programmes and guided tours- takes place in MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts, in collaboration with XenoVisual Studies Collective (XVS), from 20 February until 14 June 2026. Αrtists: Babak Ahteshamipour, Margarita Athanasiou, Amanda Bennetts, Captain Stavros, Vera Chotzoglou, DREAMFacta, Nas Drimousi, Iro Drossos, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung, Katerina Giannopoulou, Puneet Jain, Foteini Korre, Iro Kraija Karavia, Julie-Michèle Morin, Afroditi Psarra, Eliana Ranti, Nana Sachini, Marisa Satsia, Eleni Thiresia. Curated by: Domna Gounari @gounaridomna / MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts, Nensi Brama, Δiμiiτρiii, Mar Osés, Pilar del Puerto, Esther Rizo-Casado / XenoVisual Studies Collective (XVS) 📌Read more: https://www.pcai.gr/pcai-collection-artist-afroditi-psarra Image credit: Ventriloquist Ontology, Afroditi Psarra, 2022 © PCAI #pcai #pcaicollectionartist #momus #ventriloquist

DXARTS 471 Mechatronic Art aftermath ♥️ The most chaotic, existential, dreamy and critical explorations on speculative artifacts... I really love teaching this course. The results are always soooo rewarding! Thank you @maria.thraen for your amazing contribution to the class 🙏 . . . . . . #dxarts #digitalart #experimentalart #physicalcomputing #mechatronics

Very excited to be showing my work Ventriloquist Ontology in the context of the exhibition “Wait…How did we get here?” at MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts. The MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, an institution dedicated to the exploration, presentation, and promotion of experimental artistic practices, collaborates for the first time with the fluid collective XenoVisual Studies (XVS), which operates as a network for artistic experimentation and critical inquiry, investigating how emerging technologies reshape aesthetics, reality, identity and society. The shared aim of this collaboration is to create a space for experimentation, reflection, and connection, where artists engaged in interdisciplinary research explore diverse artistic forms as tools for critical and creative engagement with new technologies, artificial intelligence, and digital systems, while at the same time, the project foregrounds decolonial, queer, trans/feminist, and crip (+) approaches to perception, knowledge production, and ways of relating to the world (+). Curated by: Domna Gounari / MOMUS-Experimental Center for the Arts, Nensi Brama @nensibrama , Δiμiiτρiii @dimiitrii , Mar Osés, Pilar del Puerto, Esther Rizo-Casado / XenoVisual Studies Collective (XVS) Αrtists: Babak Ahteshamipour, Margarita Athanasiou, Amanda Bennetts, Captain Stavros, Vera Chotzoglou, DREAMFacta, Nas Drimousi, Iro Drossos, Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung, Katerina Giannopoulou, Puneet Jain, Foteini Korre, Iro Kraija Karavia, Julie-Michèle Morin, Afroditi Psarra, Eliana Ranti, Nana Sachini, Marisa Satsia, Eleni Thiresia. Opening: Saturday, 14 February 2026, 20:00 🔗http://www.momus.gr/en/exhibitions/waithow-did-we-get-here🔗 . . . . . #experimentalart #techofeminism #xenovisualstudies #criticalmedia #postdigital

We invite applications to the 2026 A-I-R Soft Data and Common Wares, at the University of Washington, Seattle, on the topic of ‘Hyperlocality’. ‘Soft Data and Common Wares’ is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the DXARTS Softlab, run by Afroditi Psarra and Design’s Studio Tilt, run by Audrey Desjardins. Both labs are interested in collecting, archiving, and critically transcoding data from the intimate spaces of the home and the body, and the search for meaningful interpretations. Hyperlocality examines data, networks, and technologies related to matters of closeness and the personal. The hyperlocal might imply working with a very specific dataset, or building technologies that operate in a situated environment, off-the-cloud, or even off-the-grid. We envision multidisciplinary projects that explore the creation of artifacts, materials and interpretative processes. We invite thought-provoking juxtapositions of data that offer critical perspectives and build new vocabularies of commons. We will host two one-month residencies, in Spring 2026. We encourage applications that engage with the student community and we expect residents to host an open-studio and give an artist talk. We envision that in the last week of the residency there will be an on-campus public showing of the work. We offer $7000 total (including honorarium, airfare, and accommodation), shared studio space, access to fabrication equipment, a small budget for materials and an exhibition space. Application deadline: January 31, 2026 Proposed residency dates: April 1 - May 31, 2026 Eligibility: Artists, designers, performers, creative researchers. Open to US citizens only, because of funding constraints. For questions: Afroditi Psarra ([email protected]) or Audrey Desjardins ([email protected]) Link in Bio for application! . . . . #artistresidenyprogram #dxarts #dxartssoftlab #design #studiotilt

Excited to share that the last episode of Transmission Ecologies for 2025 drops this Sunday at @stegiradio at 11pm Athens time // 1pm PT featuring the work of Abram Stern ⚡ Abram Stern's (they/he) art and research practice seeks out ways that institutionally situated media tells on itself. Much of this work draws from collections of government media and metadata. They look closely at technical systems and make projects that operate within the gaps of intelligibility. Rather than seeing these gaps as problems to be closed or solved through technical solutionism, Stern makes work that functions in a poetic capacity to surface rhymes and dissonances among institutions, infrastructures, formats, and techniques of sense-making. Abram's show is divided between two recent durational transmission-based projects they've built using open source software, software defined radio, and collections of media. The first is an excerpt from “enhance-redact (cancer surveillance study #1)”, which operates on a series of medical images produced as part of cancer surveillance of their body which are iteratively looped through a process of {transcoding to slow-scan television (SSTV), broadcast, reception, image enhancement, image analysis}. Textual descriptions of objects identified in the enhanced images are broadcast as radio-teletype (RTTY). The second is an excerpt from “numb.station”, in which utterances of numbers drawn from collections of archived cold-war era numbers stations and machine listening datasets are broken into very short segments and reassembled. Speech-to-text methods “listen” to these scrambled, reassembled sounds. Sounds recognized as numbers by software are broadcast using a software-defined radio (SDR) transceiver over FM radio. This recognition, however, might more accurately be understood as misrecognition, as these sounds functionally become gibberish. An interference signal broadcasts into the hollow space between these two logics. Listen at 🔗http://stegi.radio/podcasts/transmission-ecologies🔗 . . . . . #radioart #transmissionart #netart #experimental #noise #soundart #stegiradio