PLASMA (2024)

Signals Podcast Goethe Institute (2022)

Living Room Light Exchange (2014 - present)

The Living Room Light Exchange (LRLX) is a monthly salon dedicated to new media art forms and dialogues that meets in rotating living rooms. In each ‘season’ of LRLX, we hold monthly salons where we curate three artists or cultural producers who present recent work. Engaged discussions and dialogue with attendees follows.

LRLX was founded in 2014 by Liat Berdugo and Elia Vargas to delve more deeply into the intersection of art and technology, highlighting current creative undertakings, unanswered questions, and the ways artistic practice can challenge a changing technological world. This work is particularly essential in the Bay Area—the heart of tech industry—where technology and art are more often united as the more superficial ‘techno-fetishism’. As an organization, we are dedicated to the interconnections between arts and humanities, and foreground dialogues facilitated by curators, art writers, artists, professors, and scholars—all of whom we consider to be humanities practitioners.

We meet in living rooms out of a founding belief that artists need spaces to disrupt the formality of the lecture hall, speak freely, and emphasize the vibrant flourishing of process. LRLX emphasizes inclusion and access to expand ethical concerns at the intersection of art and technology. We focus on programming historically marginalized and intersectional voices to amplify the historical absence of such perspectives.

Soundwave Biennial (2016-2018)

MEDIATE Art Group dba SOUNDWAVE is a San Francisco-based 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization that creates meaningful, cutting edge art and music experiences through the activation of people, places and environments in the San Francisco Bay Area. Working at the center of art and innovation, SOUNDWAVE’s mission is to produce exhibitions and live events that challenge perspectives and inspire new and unique experiences within ourselves and the world around us; present diverse artists, mediums and places to exchange ideas and collaborate; connect new and diverse audiences to experimental arts and visions; and provide an innovative forum and an essential voice for the Bay Area’s progressive ideas to be seen, heard and explored critically, imaginatively and without limitation. SOUNDWAVE showcases emerging and established local artists, as well as national and international artists, to bring groundbreaking ideas and perspectives to Bay Area audiences.

I served on the board as well as on the curatorial program committee from 2016 to 2018.

Interval

Interval is a space dedicated to creating interdisciplinary engagement through critical play and experimentation of art practice and scholarship.

Signal Flow at SOMArts: Night Light Multimedia Garden Party (2014)

In its fourth year, Night Light utilizes SOMArts’ post-industrial indoor space and grounds, including the garden path, street-side loading bay, theater, Bay Gallery and Main Gallery to display a multitude of applications of light in art. This year the spectacle includes two new curatorial subsections—Signal Flow (Justin Hoover, Matea Fish, and Elia Vargas) and Projected Personae— and live performances by: Jen Cohen, Sofía Córdova, Jeff Ray’s Taser Island, Mary Franck & Kadet Kuhne, PINE & Elia Vargas, Andy Puls, and Pamela Z.

Photos by J. Astra Brinkmann