Valences of the Algorithm

A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Imma Asher learned to draw at age 7 from her father. She studied dance at The Ailey School and earned a bachelor’s degree from the Parsons School of Design, followed by a master’s in fine arts with a performance concentration from University of the Arts London. Asher’s work focuses on the performance of self and her obsession with gesture to solidify gender. She is currently interested in feminine as fact and the intersectionalities through which she enters her innate womanhood. 

Jian Chen is associate professor of queer studies in the departments of English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State. Chen is also affiliate faculty in the Film Studies program and a previous director of the Asian American Studies and Sexuality Studies programs. Their research focuses on transgender and queer aesthetics and embodied practices in literature, visual culture, and contemporary theory, and their reimagining and reconstruction of social relations and movements. 

Mimi Onuoha is a Nigerian American artist creating work about a world made to fit the form of data. By foregrounding absence and removal, her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation, and video to make sense of the power dynamics that result in disenfranchised communities’ relationships to digital, cultural, historical, and ecological systems. Onuoha has lectured and exhibited internationally and has been in residence at Studio XX (Canada), Data & Society Research Institute (USA), the Royal College of Art (UK), Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (USA), and Arthouse Foundation (Nigeria, upcoming). She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.