Ari Melenciano
2020 FIC Fellow
Ari Melenciano is an artist, designer, creative technologist, researcher, and educator who is passionate about exploring the relationships between various forms of design and the human experience. Currently, her research lies at the intersections of human-computer interactive technologies, social impacts of technology, counterculture, sound, multisensory experiential design, experimental pedagogy and speculative design. Ari is the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution fostering interdisciplinary innovation at the intersections of art, design, technology, Black culture and activism. Ari teaches technology, society, and design at NYU ITP and the Pratt Institute. Ari is currently an artist-in-residence at MICA, holds technology residencies at Pioneer Works and CultureHub, and is a member of New Inc's Experiments in Art and Technology Track supported by Rhizome and Nokia Bell Labs.
Projects
Radio Dada | Dada Radio
An experiment in sound, electromedia, and the internet as an artistic media - Radio Dada | Dada Radio considers how emerging technologies can allow for greater autonomy and possibility in media production and consumption for audio-visual entertainment.
Afrotectopia 2020
Afrotectopia is a social institution fostering interdisciplinary innovation at the intersections of art, design, technology, Black culture, and activism. It is generally experienced through an annual festival in NYC. Afrotectopia 2020 is an exploration of an online environment materializing the Afrotectopia community's research, practice, and experiments by creating an opportunity to explore, learn and engage at the intersections of art, design, Black culture, racial activism, and technology in virtual space.
Neon Earth
Neon Earth is currently a research studio, public practice of prototyping, and an incubation of widely varying experiments exploring speculative design, mixed reality in the web in the form of net art, indigenous computing, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), architecture, spatialized sound, and algorithmically controlled modular synthesis. The research conducted is synthesized into human-machine interactions both in the web and through physical computation, taking the form of experimental pedagogy.