Majel Connery is a composer, vocalist, and musicologist who blends Classical influences with electronic music, praised by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for her superb voice and compositions. Connery will be performing Elderflora, a song cycle that explores the inner life of a tree from birth to death, narrated from the tree’s perspective, using its journey as a metaphor for the human experience and our connection to a world in danger. Written by Connery and performed with Felix Fan on electric cello, the cycle uses electrified instruments to evoke voices beyond human understanding. The immersive 1-hour performance offers audiences a layered and ethereal experience, blending direct and otherworldly voices.

majelconnery.com

Presented by:
• UNM Art Museum
• ARTSLab 20th Anniversary

Jared S. Tarbell is a generative artist, developer, and programmer who’s worked with code for over 30 years. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tarbell’s encounter with personal computers in 1987 sparked a lifelong passion. Fascinated by the system-like intricacies of the world, he visualizes abstract truths by observing multiple outputs and refining his algorithms.

His works bridge to mathematical beauty and abstract exploration, intertwining a subtle sense of spirituality with computational precision. Jared is a co-founder of Etsy, an online marketplace to buy and sell handmade goods.

Presented by:
ARTSLab 20th Anniversary

For over 30 years, Muth has been an internationally recognized artist, pioneering the use of light through holography, a passion that began in his teens. After studying art and physics, Muth moved to New York City, where he began exploring holography in 1980, eventually building studios in Telluride, Colorado, and later Santa Fe, New Mexico. In Santa Fe, he pushed the boundaries of large-scale holography, developing innovative techniques to create groundbreaking works that explore the light-space-time continuum.

augustmuth.com

Presented by:
• Gale Memorial Lecture Series
• UNM Research + Discovery Week
• ARTSLab 20th Anniversary

Bryan Konefsky is a cultural worker dedicated to the advancement of undependent, experimental media arts through his work as a moving image artist, teacher, lecturer and film festival director. Konefsky is the founder and director of Experiments in Cinema, an annual international film festival in Albuquerque that showcases cinematic experimentation from around the world. Additionally, he is the president of Basement Films, one of the few remaining first generation micro cinemas in the United States.

From 1995–2020, he taught moving image production and critical studies through the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of New Mexico, where he was honored in 2009 with a university-wide Teacher of the Year award. Konefsky was an invited lecturer in the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 2003–2018. Presently, he lectures at Dongguk University in South Korea.

bryankonefsky.com

Presented by:
• ARTSLab 20th Anniversary

Pippin Barr is an Associate Professor and department chair in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, where he is also a member of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre. Barr has collaborated with artists like Marina Abramović and @seinfeld2000, creating games on diverse topics such as airplane safety, chess, and parenting. Barr holds a Ph.D. focused on video game values and an M.Sc. on user-interface metaphors from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He is the author of The Stuff Games Are Made Of from MIT press.

pippinbarr.com

Presented by:
• Gale Memorial Lecture Series
• ARTSLab 20th Anniversary

Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson are artists who use collaborative processes to explore the transformations of biological and mechanical elements, often animating materials like metals and fluids to create works that question empathy with synthetic intelligence. Their projects investigate the intersections of environment, computing, robotics, and artificial life, and they have exhibited internationally at venues such as the Biennale of Sydney, the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany, and Moderna Museet in Sweden. Both recipients of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, they teach at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute, with their work being featured in major publications and held in collections like the Centre Georges Pompidou. Both artists are from New Mexico and Aaron is a UNM alumni.

dubbin-davidson.com

Presented by:
• Gale Memorial Lecture Series
• ARTSLab 20th Anniversary