Commiserate chicago
Media Art Festival · Curatorial Initiative
Commiserate Chicago was a two-day media art festival held at the University of Chicago’s Media Arts, Data, and Design (MADD) Center. Founded by a group of seven collaborators connected through the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the festival emerged from shared concerns about the conditions of emerging media practices and the lack of spaces centered on the sensory, emotional, and social dimensions of technological work.
The festival featured 29 artworks alongside workshops, talks, screenings, performances, and keynote events. The program brought together a wide range of experimental media, including VR, interactive systems, kinetic sculpture, olfactory games, and artist books, and served as a platform for early- and mid-career artists to exchange strategies for sustaining their practices outside major art-market centers.
Within this collaboration, I contributed to the conceptual framing of the festival and helped shape its emphasis on collective care, mutual support, and the creation of a shared critical environment for contemporary media practice.
Held February 29 – March 1, 2020, at the University of Chicago’s MADD Center, Chicago, USA.
Collaborators: Jas Brooks, Ashlyn Sparrow, Snow Xu, Jiaqi Zhang, Li Yao, Grace Kang
