This symposium showcases artists and technologists whose work challenges the conventional pace of digital media, fostering conversations about human interaction with technology and the impact of speed on creativity, culture, and well-being. We’ve invited artists, curators, designers, and cultural producers to be part of the conversation. Alongside the panel, we’ll host a tour of selected works and artist talks exploring this theme. These artworks become a means of exploring not only the cognitive effects of different rates of speed but also the ethical and social dimensions of time in the digital age.
The symposium will review the impact the increasing speed of digital technologies has on the human capacity for reflection, empathy, and deep thinking and encourage public dialogue about the psychological effects of living in a fast-paced, technology-saturated world. The participants will lead discussions on historical and philosophical perspectives that contrast speed with “slowness”—highlighting modern cultural concepts such as slow art and slow media.
Speed has been a tool of progress as well as a source of cultural anxiety. By inviting artists with interest in fields such as art and technology, media arts, history, philosophy, and cultural criticism, we aim to create a deeper understanding of how the human relationship with technology has evolved—and what lessons can be learned from previous eras of technological change.
At its core, CURRENTS has always been about reflecting the present moment—how we create, connect, and imagine through technology. This year, we invite you to join us at the festival as we continue that exploration.
RSVP for Day One, Day Two, or both—reserve your free tickets here
Please note: Space is limited.
A Festival ticket (either an All Access Pass or Day Pass) is also required for entry.
Suggested Donation
A $10 donation is completely optional, but greatly appreciated — your support helps our organization continue creating thoughtful, community-driven programs like this.
The following schedule applies to both Saturday and Sunday, with different participants each day.
10:00 AM – Coffee and breakfast treats with presenters and visitors.
10:30 AM – Program opens with an introduction to the day’s topics by the moderator.
10:45 AM – Panel discussion featuring the moderator and three panelists.
11:30 AM – Audience Q&A.
12:00 PM – Lunch break.
1:15 PM – Guided exhibition tours focused on the day’s topics. Artists will be present to briefly speak about their work. Multiple tours may run simultaneously depending on attendance.
3:00 PM – Guest artist presentations followed by Q&A.
4:15 PM – Closing remarks by the moderator.
5:00 PM – Saturday only: Presentation by the New Mexico Creative Industries Division.
The way humans build technology and weave algorithms can teach us a lot about society. Tech design often mirrors social, cultural, and political hierarchies in miniature—so when it breaks there’s an opportunity to consider larger fissures. The Day One panelists intentionally throw wrenches in the works, forcing glitches and generating friction to reveal ghosts in the machine.
Jordan Eddy / Moderator for Day One
Editorial Director
Southwest Contemporary
From 2018 to early 2024, Jordan was the director and curator for both form & concept and Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, in the Santa Fe Railyard that challenges the perceived distinctions between art, craft, and design. The gallery’s programming acts as a conversation between many converging disciplines, harnessing the power of contemporary creative practice to shatter entrenched narratives.
As an editor, writer, and curator, Jordan creates and interprets art projects that activate cross sections of the community. His storytelling work concerns material and social hierarchies of the past, and how contemporary artists, craftspeople, and designers are upending them through cross-disciplinary creative practice.
Jaime Herrell
Independent Curator, Museum Specialist, Educator
An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Jaime Herrell is an artist, curator, museum specialist, and educator. Herrell is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) with a degree in Museum Studies. She has held positions at esteemed institutions across the U.S., including the New Mexico History Museum (NMHM), IAIA, Museum of Contemporary Native Art (MoCNA), the Carl and Marilyn Thoma Foundation, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). She has served as the United States delegate for the Indigenous Curatorial Collective (ICCA) and was recently appointed Board Vice President for the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Santa Fe, NM. Within the past year, she has transitioned from her role as associate curator at Ballroom Marfa into full-time independent curatorial work, focusing on developing exhibitions and inclusive programming. Most recently, she co-curated Indigenization, a groundbreaking collaborative exhibition involving Duende Gallery and the Tia Collection.
Alvin Ashiatey
Artist
Lecturer, Yale School of Art
Alvin Ashiatey is an artist, designer, educator, and, at times, an accidental developer or code tinkerer. His work bridges the realms of design and technology, exploring the nuances where both intersect. He teaches in the Graphic Design program at the Yale School of Art. Originally from Ghana and now based in New Haven, Connecticut, his practice is rooted in exploring how creative disruption can challenge the status quo. In his course, Code and Interfaces, he encourages students to design digital tools that challenge conventional technological efficiency. This approach isn’t about rejecting technology but about creating meaningful resistance points that foster reflection and deeper engagement. By examining works that embrace inefficiency, complexity, and deliberate slowness, he invites students to imagine alternative relationships with digital tools—relationships that prioritize human experience over mechanical optimization.
Susie Fu
Artist
Adjunct Professor, California College of the Arts
Susie is a Chinese/American Artist/Engineer. She creates multimedia installations and performances to recontextualize the Human/Machine relationship. She uses machines to investigate alternate selves—identities shaped by oppressive forces to become the {Ideal Daughter, Perfect Wife, Industrious Contributor To Society}. Susie is a CURRENTS 2025 Participating Artist with her work “Artist and Machine.”
Chelsi Cocking
2025 Participating Artist | Illuminate 
Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Chelsi Alise Cocking is a Jamaican-American new media artist, product designer, creative coder, and researcher. The foundation of her practice falls within using computing and media technologies for craft in visual art, design, and interactive art experiences. Many of her projects, while not exclusively, explore the inherent possibilities of understanding the human body and its movement through computing and utilizing that understanding to create updated and novel experiences within interactive arts. The goal of her research and art is to use computing to aid and enhance human creativity and expression. Empowering us with new ways to create and express ourselves through technology and also creating new ways in which we experience art, design, and performance in the world today.
Ranger Liu
2025 Participating Artist | Quantum Romantics
RANGER LIU (they/them) is an artist and astrophysicist interested in using abstract theoretical structures as a tool for communicating subjective lived experience. Their work uses scientific frameworks, including (but not limited to) math, astronomy, physics, and linguistics, to develop physical processes for sonic, visual, and sculptural composition and performance. They frequently use their lived experience as a queer & trans Chinese-American as “source material” for these compositions, producing autotheoretic works halfway between data sonification/visualization and traditional composition. They also use decisions from external participants as choice-based source material, producing a kind of aleatoric composition which manifests the aggregated free will and subjective experience of multiple people into sound, sculpture, and performance.
The pressure to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change in our culture can erode our attention, amplify stress, and fragment our experience of time. In response, Day Two panelists side-step the flow of time by enabling pauses and loops that create alternate experiences of it, through the use of moving images, sonified body movement, and playable sound-producing objects.
Mary Tsiongas / Moderator for Day Two
University of New Mexico
Professor, Experimental Art & Technology and Associate Director of ARTSLab
She is a UNM Professor of Electronic Media in the Department of Art where she founded the Experimental Art + Technology area. She was the chair of the Department of Art from 2013-2016 and Associate Dean of Research at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico from 2016-2023. Currently she is Associate Director of ARTSLab.
She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses human relationships to technology and nature through video and digital imagery. Born in Greece and now based in New Mexico, Tsiongas has exhibited, lectured and curated extensively for the past twenty years nationally and internationally. Mary is a CURRENTS 2025 Participating Artist with their work “Silk + Sound Lab”.
Ross Wightman
Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media
Curator, CCAM Sound Art Series
Lecturer, Yale College
Ross Wightman is a sound artist, composer, and double bassist from New Jersey. He is Technical Manager at Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), where he also curates the Sound Art Series. He teaches media studies, computer music, and composition at Yale and the New School, and leads electroacoustic improvisation ensembles. His work spans microtonality, multimedia composition, and instrument building using 3D printing, robotics, and machine learning to explore performance, timbre, and resonance. As a performer, he focuses on contemporary and microtonal music, premiering works by Raven Chacon and Alvin Lucier, and has performed at international festivals including Darmstadt, Lucerne, and Bang on a Can. Clash Magazine named his work among the “best of the American experimental underground.” Ross is a CURRENTS 2025 Participating Artist with his performance “Fiddle Henge.”
Drew Trujillo
Artist
Chair of Computer Science, The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA)
Drew Trujillo, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (the 47th US state), is a 14th-generation New Mexican with Mexica Mestizo ancestors. Trujillo’s art embodies storytelling by merging dance with custom technology to sonify movement. His creations have traveled to exhibitions across the United States, Asia, and Europe, where he has also presented and lectured, sharing his expertise in video art, animations, and immersive experiences. Trujillo has a diverse career, having contributed to video games, software development, robotics, and immersive entertainment. He earned recognition as a 2021 SITE Santa Fe Scholar and previously served as the Director of Technology at Meow Wolf, as well as a board member at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Trujillo received an MFA in Experimental Arts and Technology from the University of New Mexico in May 2024.
Valery Estabrook
Artist
ARTSLab Manager, College of Fine Art, University of New Mexico
Adjunct faculty, Interdisciplinary Arts, University of New Mexico
Valery Jung (정) Estabrook is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the themes of cultural expansion and assimilation through digital media, sculpture, and installation. Estabrook was born in Florida and grew up on an organic Asian pear farm in rural southwestern Virginia. She holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Brooklyn College and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University. In 2018 she received the Gold AHL-T&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Award, an annual award recognizing artists of Korean heritage in the United States. In 2020 she was a Vermont Studio Center Fellow and the Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow at University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities. She currently resides in Albuquerque where she teaches classes in Interdisciplinary Art and manages the ARTSLab at the University of New Mexico.
Hunter Whitaker-Morrow
2025 Participating Artist | The Emissary: [prayer 1] 
Hunter Whitaker-Morrow is an artist who works in modes of audio-visual performance, video installation, and experimental documentary. His work, both structuralist and conceptual, centers on an exploration of the moving image as socio-historical text and the potentialities of audio-visual constructions to serve as instruments of liberation. Informed by his academic background in sociology & film theory in concert with a breadth of experience working in the TV industry, Whitaker-Morrow investigates the physical, technological, social, and political dimensions of audio-visual experience with a particular focus on Black experience and cultural formations within the context of the United States. He holds an MFA in Film, Video, and New Media from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a dual BA in Film and Media Studies and Sociology from Amherst College.
Antoinette LaFarge
2025 Participating Artist | Walking
Antoinette LaFarge is an artist and writer with a strong interest interest in expanded narrative, feminist techne, fictive art, and ephemeral and virtual media. Her artwork has taken form as new media performance, computer-programmed installations, public interventions, digital drawings and prints, and artist’s books. Her work is often based on historical research and primary source materials, with topics ranging from the Roman Republic to 19th century botanical drawing. As an author, she has written about such subjects as virtuality and its discontents, design and new media, performance, and fictive art. She holds an M.F.A. in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de La Familia, Santa Fe, NM 87501
