News
November 2024: This website is now a static archive of my older work. Please visit https://tranxxenolab.net for my current work. If there are broken links here please contact me at asknouf at tranxxenolab dot net for more information. If you want to keep updated about my work with the tranxxeno lab you can signup for the newsletter. You can follow me on Mastodon at @zeitkunst@post.lurk.org and on Bluesky at @zeitkunst.bsky.social.
There is a lot of news to share with all of you about my activities over the past few months, but truth be told, most new content will be posted at the tranxxeno lab website going forward. Also be sure to follow me on social media: zeitkunst (Instagram), tranxxenolab (Instagram), zeitkunst (Twitter), tranxxenolab (Twitter), and my public posts on Facebook (although feel free to add me if you think we have allied interests). You can also sign up for a low-volume mailing list about my activities here. Consider the other information on this site as a wee bit outdated.
I haven't updated this website, nor my projects here, for a while now, even though a lot has happened in recent months despite the pandemic. TX-1 went and came back to space, and you can see images we received from the ISS on the TX-1 page on the tranxxenolab website. I gave a keynote about xenology at the book launch for Art As We Don't Know It at the Bioart Society/SOLU Space in Helsinki, Finland, just before international travel was shut down. I also recently spoke about my space art work for a special online discussion entitled "Fragile Life", also sponsored by the Bioart Society. I was also selected by the Biofriction consortium for a residency at the Kersnikova Institute and Kapalica Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia on further work in space art and bio art that further develops the work started in TX-1. Through this residency I am also participating in an online working group as an Aerosolnaut in "Travelling Time: Aerosol Wormholes"; stay tuned for more information regarding our presentations of the work. I was also one of four prize winners in The Lake Radio's open call, Works for Radio #4, with "A Trans Woman Reads the Harvard Sentences, with Necessary Modifications, or, Finding Occult Queer Futurities"; you can listen to the prize presentation here. Given that I don't update this website in a timely fashion, it's best to pay attention to my public Facebook posts (and if you're at all involved in practices related to what I do, feel free to friend me), or on Twitter and Instagram.
I am beyond delighted to announce that my project TX-1 is launching to the International Space Station! For more information see the project page on the tranxxenolab website.
Brief update to say that I have joined the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University as an Assistant Professor of Art + Design! More info to come as I head to the great north for a residency in September, and am developing some new projects as part of the tranxxeno lab that I'm creating.
A brief update on what I've been doing the past few months. I premiered three new electroacoustic compositions at a concert entitled "THE ALIEN (Dear Interlocutor)" with my colleagues Jenny Johnson and Diana Dabby. The three pieces are called "Lines sometimes meld when necessary", for first-person view drone pilot and musicians; "nudge gently, but wake her now", for vocalist, flute, piano, composer's voice, and electronics; and "Where were they when the noise started", for vocalist, flute, piano, electronics, and radios. Video and audio documentation coming soon, but for now you can download the scores on the respective pages. I'll also be having a book chapter about papermaking, electronics, and the legacies of the Bauhaus coming out this spring in Bauhaus Futures on MIT Press. I'm also deep into my current project, entitled The Xenology Notebooks, and was lucky to present bits this past fall in presentations at City College New York, Tuning Speculation VI, and SLSA.
I'm very excited and honored to be at Wave Farm for the next week or so to work on a new project entitled §97.215 Revisted: Poetic Ciphered Transmissions, which combines drones with an exploration of new forms of communication on the ham radio bands. I'll be posting regularly to social media during my time here, and might have some special late-night radio shows during my stay.
I have a solo exhibition opening today at the Clayton Staples Gallery at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. Entitled "Of those moments in-between, everything", the show features all new work about satellites, signals, communication with extraterrestrial entities, and handmade paper. The two pieces are called "PIECES FOR PERFORMER (S) AND EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENTITIES" (2017-present) and "they transmitted continuously / but our times rarely aligned / and their signals dissipated in the æther" (2018). The show is open until March 1st.
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Quick mid-sabbatical update: I'm hard at work on a series of new projects: written, constructed, in-between. Many things are being considered, thought-about, prototyped, built, and developed. More information to come. I'm heading in March to Japan to present on some of this new work at the TEI (Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interactions) conference, specifically my experiments integrating paper and electronics. I'll post the short paper I wrote in the coming weeks, but as a preview, see the images below. I'm using the Korean paper felting technique called joomchi to incorporate small electronic components within paper, all after the sheet forming process. Return to this site in a bit to get more details!
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Even though this news is a few months old, it never gets tiring to say that I'm so happy that my first book, How Noise Matters to Finance, is now available on University of Minnesota Press. You can get it wherever you get fine books. I'm now deep in my research leave moving between a few projects. Keywords: aliens, SETI, spirits, limits, communication, paper, craft, electronic, book.
I'm excited to say that I was reappointed as an Assistant Professor at Wellesley College! This means I get to hang around a great school for another few years at the very least, and most importantly, I get to have an early research leave for the next year. In other words, I'm on sabbatical! I'll try and post some things over the next year to keep everyone abreadst of what I'm up to, as I'm embarking on an exciting new project. More details to come...
Art for Spooks is on view at the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University from April 25 until August 23rd 2015, in conjunction with their 20th Faculty Bienial. Stop by if you have a chance!
I'm very happy to announce that it is now possible to download the Art for Spooks app from the Apple App Store! Right now the app is free. Starting February 28th, however, we're going to start charging 99¢ in order to donate money to the The Upstate NY Coalition to Ground the Drones & End the Wars. Please help support this necessary cause!
After a year of waiting, I've finally finished the redesign of the website. It took much longer than expected, mostly due to the pain of upgrading from Drupal 6 to 7. That's likely uninformative for many of you, but let's just say that that upgrading software doesn't always go as easily as planned. In any event, the site is complete, for the time being, and it looks good on mobile devices too. Questions or comments to nknouf {{at}} zeitkunst {{dot} org.