Meghan Elizabeth Trainor on "Art, AI, and Technology"

Head over to Soundcloud to listen to our fantastic conversation with Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and performer Meghan Elizabeth Trainor (not THAT one) about Computational Witchcraft, creating mythologies in order to truly own our places in spaces like tech that are historically unwelcoming to and erasing of womxn and other folxs who have been marginalized (because we have always been there, regardless of the dominant mythologies), using her project Witchcraft Memes to try to spark an interest in STEM for teens and tweens, using nurturance in community as a form of activism, her installation Elektron Oracle form the show Good Witch/Bad Witch at Museum of Museums in Seattle, curated by Bri Luna AKA The Hoodwitch, and much more.

“Meghan Elizabeth Trainor is a Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and performer.  

Trainor’s work has been shown, performed and presented at spaces that include Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona; The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery, Philadelphia; Ask The Robot at The Frying Pan, New York; and 911 Media Art Center, Seattle.  

She completed her Masters at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts/New York University. She has been artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Digital Performance Institute and the Janie & James Washington Foundation.

Her 2014 Pugetopolis Manifesto is included in the Feminist Data Manifest-No Playlist, Compiled by T.L. Cowan with Marika Cifor and Jessica Lapp.

She wrote The Familiar Algorhythm in 2016 which was included in the curated box-set SIGIL, a project of Sharon Arnold’s Bridge Productions.

The Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University commissioned her to create a performative response to the 2016 exhibition Robots Building Robots resulting in an audio piece called Robot Philter.

Her project #meghantrainorwitchmemes was featured in the most recent issue of continent. magazine; APOCRYPHAL TECHNOLOGIES.  

Trainor's work was included in the Danish design, technology & feminism ‘zine Wilful Technologies: Rage & Resilience edited by Madeline Balaam Lone Koefoed Hansen.  

She is currently working on Elektron Oracle, an installation for the Good Witch/Bad Witch show at The Museum of Museums gallery in Seattle. This piece grew out of her talk Witch Science on the Moon that was part of the Salish Sea Anti-Space Symposium in 2019.”

Carrie Redway on "Art and Death"

Autumn is traditionally a season for harvest, and then a season to witness the cycle of death. Our own Halloween in the United States (also known as All Hallow’s Eve and All Saints Day), began as Lemuria , an ancient Roman feast day to banish malevolent spirits. The Incan month which corresponds with our November, Ayamarca, roughly translates to “festival of the dead”. Samhain, is a festival at the end of harvest season, believed to be largely Celtic in origin, in which ancient burial mounds were opened as portals to the world of Death, and most of us have heard of Dia de Los Muertos, a Mexican celebration of one’s ancestors who have died (mostly due to the cultural appropriation of my fellow white women who think painting their faces like a sugar skull is “cute”)—the aforementioned list names just a few of the multitude of ways that humans have celebrated and observed the “dying” of the year and its relation to our own mortality.

In art, death has always been a popular subject, from the abundance of Memento Mori, Danse Macabre, and Death and the Maiden motifs, as well as hundreds of scenes of battle and war, such as Guernica (1937 oil painting on canvas by Pablo Picasso), to famous historical deaths like The Death of Marat (1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David). This segment of Critical Bounds features conversations with artists, writers, and curators, whose work delves into death, sometimes in unexpected ways.

For the first episode of our “Art and Death” segment, we welcome Carrie Redway. “Carrie Redway is a writer, mixed media artist and death doula in Seattle, WA. Her work is inspired by myth, folklore, ritual. Carrie aspires to create community spaces and tools for death education and exploration through writing and art. She facilitates epoch: a writing circle exploring death in nature and cycles. She is the author of the chapbook "Vulpecula", a conversation in poetry with the constellation Vulpecula about death and grief in various forms. She is currently working on a zine series on death topics. Her work has been published in various online and print journals such as Moonchild Magazine, Occulum, Rust + Moth, Spilled Milk, and Really System, among others.”

We discuss Carrie’s chapbook "Vulpecula" (which she reads from), find out just What IS a Death Doula?, and Carrie's path to becoming one. We talk about her connection with her grandmother through her childhood zines about death, Tips for people caring for dying loved ones in person and via distance, A Sacred Passing organization and training communities to do the work that our ancestors used to do, the invisibility of death in our (predominantly Western) culture, and movement as a tool for both grieving and creative processes.