N. Adriana Knouf
Assistant Professor of Art + Design, College of Arts, Media, and Design, Northeastern University
As both a media scholar and media artist, I’ve found SLSA to be one of the few academic venues that really values the varied natures of my practices. I’ve come to the conferences on a regular basis since 2007, and consider SLSA to be one of my “must-attend” conferences of the year, not only because of the multifarious intellectual conversations that happen, but also because of the people that I meet that turn into interlocutors and friends. If elected to the member-at-large position I would like to further highlight the work done by artists and scholar-artists, building upon the already excellent exhibition program and artists talks. As a queer transgender woman I’d also want to work to elevate the work of other trans SLSA members, especially queer and trans people of color (QTPOC). I am currently an Assistant Professor of Art + Design at Northeastern University, in Boston, MA, and previously worked in the Cinema and Media Studies program at Wellesley College.
N. Adriana Knouf (she/her/hers, sie/hir/hirs) is a media artist and scholar researching noise, interferences, boundaries, and limits in media technologies and communication. Her current research project, tentatively entitled "The Xenology Notebooks," is a transmedia, transdisciplinary corpus expansively considering the “xeno”. Her first book, How Noise Matters to Finance (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), traced how the concept of “noise” in the sonic and informatic domains of finance mutated throughout the late 20th century into the 21st.
Her current artistic research explores queer and trans futurities on earth and in the cosmos. Projects include Enredos Sónicos/Sonic Plots, a collaborative sonic exchange between the US and Cuba; they transmitted continuously / but our times rarely aligned / and their signals dissipated in the æther (2018-present), a 20 channel sound art installation with speakers made from handmade abaca paper and piezo electric elements, with sounds collected by custom antennas from satellite transmissions; and PIECES FOR PERFORMER(S) AND EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENTITIES (2017-present), event scores laser etched into handmade translucent abaca paper.