Spoken Soup

Join us for an evening of poetry, music, stand-up, zine readings, and more! Spoken Soup is a monthly open mic series celebrating storytellers of New York City. We welcome anyone with words to share, regardless of where you might be at in your creative process. This month's theme is "Decoding the Archive: Talks with data:healing’s Neema Githere & Aarati Akkapeddi" In collaboration with Flawless Hacks & Femme Mâché, Tech Zine Fair hosts this month’s Spoken Soup, pairing two artists engaged with art and technology for a night of discussion, healing, and archive-building. Attendees are invited to bring belongings that are special to them or take notes and doodles during the talks, after which we will build an archive from the evening’s activities that will be published online. We will have a scanning station and a video CD and floppy disk reader available for your use. 7:15pm - data:healing spring w Neema Githere (break) 8:15pm - labor + care in archival practices 9pm - personal archiving activity 10pm - wrap About data:healing Spring (Upward Spiral)... Artist, theorist & curator Neema Githere discusses how they define data:healing, foundations of the new collective including their own journey to it, along with techno-optimism as a way of living. In this session, we'll unpack together what "data healing" activates for each of us and discuss healing technologies that exist in our lives. Neema Githere is a curator and digital theorist hailing from Nairobi, Kenya whose work explores social cybernetics. Having dreamt herself into the world via the Internet from an early age, Neema's work draws from her own coming-of-age as a digital nomad and lies at the intersection of digital art, travel and social architecture. DATA HEALING is a collective of cybermystic organizers whose vision is to alchemize data trauma into new technologies - more specifically, our work explores indigenous technologies of nature and the human body as Presentist alternatives to the military industrial data environment. About Labor + Care in Archival Practices... Aarati Akkapeddi shares her personal journey into archiving and personal archiving as an artist and technologist. Currently, she is investigating the relationship between archival practice and machine learning. How can machine learning, computer vision, and other computational processes create new readings/interpretations of the archive, particularly when it comes to images? Can we look to archival practice to contextualize the creation of datasets (specifically focussing on the labor, care and intentionality that goes into archival work)?  Aarati Akkapeddi is an Indian-American, cross-disciplinary artist and educator interested in the poetics and politics of datasets. She works with both personal and institutional archives to explore the ways in which identities and histories are shaped by different ways of collecting, preserving and presenting data. Aarati has exhibited at venues such as the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, The Java Project in Brooklyn, and The Irregulars Art Fair in New Delhi. She is also a part-time professor at The New School. About Tech Zine Fair... Tech Zine Fair is a fair of artists and publishers invested in exploring technology and imagining new futures. The first zine fair was in November 2018 and the next edition is to be announced. About Flawless Hacks... Flawless Hacks is a non-profit that supports underrepresented minorities in tech through programming across New York City. Each year they host a hackathon in April focused on learning, creativity, and fun.  Interested in participating? RSVP here and email our souperstar hosts at hellofemmemache@gmail.com.