Dr. Elia Vargas is an artist and a scholar working across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance, focused on naturecultural media practices. He is a visiting assistant professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. In 2024, he received a NYSCA Artist Support grant for his work on Heliotechnics/Heliotechniques. He collaborates widely, was commissioned by Goethe Institute to create a podcast on global technocultural exchange, and is the co-founder of the SF Bay Area art and technology organization, the Living Room Light Exchange. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Vargas’s work is critical, speculative, ecological, energetic, and technocultural. It is engaged in an interdisciplinary approach with contemporary and historical experimental media, digital cultural, and feminist science studies. Towards the pursuit of challenging historical forms of meaning-making, he is interested in concepts that perform change—a multi-species, or posthumanist practice of worlding. His work seeks non-representational ways to trouble the entanglements of nature, culture, and technology. His current work considers the cultural, philosophical, and techno-scientific conditions of the early American oil industry and argues for refiguring crude oil as media to decenter anthropocentric representations of nature. 

His speculative and critical writing has been published by UC Press, Vice Motherboard, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Leonardo Journal, Journal of Environmental Media; his edited art publications are collected by major institutions including Stanford University, CCA, YBCA, Amherst College; and his artworks have been featured by the Brooklyn Rail, LA Times, NPR, LitHub, OFluxo, the Manchester International Festival, Vice Noisey, and other institutions.

Contact: elia.christian.vargas[at]gmail[dot]com