Event Info

Fold, Spindle, Mutilate is a free-to-all arts festival that explores the idea of default settings: buttons, conventions, and directives whose artistic applications exceed their intended purpose. We take inspiration from the instructions that accompanied early computer punch cards; the injunction “Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate” was originally created to ensure the machine readability of paper media but was later appropriated as a protest slogan resisting forms of technological standardization, computerization, and datafication. Through a series of workshops, installations, and performances, this festival’s participants likewise fold, spindle, and mutilate a range of default settings to explore the artistic and political possibilities of obfuscation, juxtaposition, and fabulation.

Event Program (Order May Change)

• 11:30am–12:00pm Registration
• 12:00pm–1:00pm Facial misrecognition mask workshop (Gloria Chan Sook Kim, UCR)
• 1:00pm–1:45pm Radiant Center sound installation (Hanz Kuzmich, UCSC)
• 1:45pm–2:45pm Beyond the Frame: Erasure, Photography, and Speculative Poetry workshop (Wenxin Tang, UCR)
• 2:45pm–3:30pm KASSIA SOUND ICON film screening (Noah Amir Arjomand and Brett Umlauf, UCR)
• 3:30pm–4:10pm Video projection of durational performance after-lived (Lynne Marsh, UCR)
• 4:10pm–4:40pm Experimental film installation (Laila Shereen Sakr, UCSB)
• 4:40pm–5:00pm Closing remarks

Event Details

• Location: UCR ARTS (3834 Main Street, Riverside, CA 92501)
• Time: 11:30am–12:00pm registration, 12:00pm–5:00pm program; please feel free to join at any point during the festival.
• Registration: free and open to the public; RSVP here.

Presenter Bios

Fold, Spindle, Mutilate is curated by members of the “Defying Defaults in Technology and Culture” University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Multicampus Faculty Working Group. Based at the University of California, Riverside, this working group includes scholars, artists, choreographers, musicians, and other practitioners from across the University of California system and beyond.

Gloria Chan Sook Kim (Associate Professor, Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside) is a scholar of visual culture, media studies, and science and technology studies. Her research works across histories and theories of vision, computation and culture, environment and technology, and infrastructure and systems. She is the author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War Against Emerging Microbes (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), and her research appears in the journals Discourse, Configurations, the Journal for Consumption, Markets, and Culture, ASAP/J, as well as in other edited volumes.

Hanz Kuzmich (PhD Candidate, Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz) is a Belarus-born, Los Angeles-based artist working across transmission arts, media installation, and performance. His practice tunes into the acoustic and electromagnetic environments of borders and carceral sites, developing a trans, diasporic listening methodology oriented toward abolitionist horizons.

Wenxin Tang (MFA Student, Creative Writing, UC Riverside) is an emerging writer and international student. She is the recipient of the Maurya Simon Award in Poetry, the CHASS Carpenter Award for her visual poetry project, the Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship, and a Gluck Fellowship in museum education in service of UCR ARTS. Her work has appeared in The Citron Review and West 10th.

Noah Amir Arjomand (Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside) is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and media scholar working across documentary, narrative, animated, and experimental forms. He is currently in post-production on a short fictional film about an analog photographer’s travails in the age of AI and producing a documentary about the local “fixers” who assist foreign journalists in Mexico, building upon his book Fixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Brett Umlauf (Visiting Specialist, Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside), praised for her “luminous yet earthy” performances (New York Times), is a singer whose multisited slow-musicking project HAZELNUT ROAD earned her a Fulbright Fellowship to Greece and Turkey to research 9th-c. poet-composer Kassia of Byzantium. Currently, she is preparing a modern edition of the only motet collection by 17th-c. nun composer Rosa Giacinta Badalla.

Lynne Marsh (Associate Professor, Art, UC Riverside) is an artist whose practice questions the status of the image through mediation, technology, and production. The ideas central to Marsh’s research include offstage space, production-in-production, affective and cultural labor, music as a framing device, and the Brechtian revealing of the mechanics of cultural and theatrical production. A unique publication, part reader and part artist monograph, She Moves Me: Performance, Moving Image, and Lynne Marsh’s Lens, edited by Sylvie Fortin and co-published by Inventory Press and PRESS ENTER, will be available in November 2026.

Laila Shereen Sakr (Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara) is an artist and scholar whose work merges digital arts and media, feminist decolonial thought, and critical AI to interrogate power, memory, and technoculture. Through her long-running R-Shief media system and exhibitions such as Capital Glitch (Qualcomm Institute, 2021), Dis-Assembling the Cloud (Lagos Biennial, 2024), and Rosetta Stones Resurrected (Diriyah Art Futures, 2025), she explores data as material and metaphor, using algorithmic disruption to reveal global entanglements. Her book Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford University Press, 2023) situates Arab digital cultures at the vanguard of media theory.

Amy Skjerseth (Assistant Professor, Music, UC Riverside) is a scholar of popular music, media, material culture, and technology. Her book Preprogrammed: How Electronic Presets Changed Music and Media (University of California Press, 2026) explores how predetermined settings on 1930s car radio up to today’s Auto-Tune and deepfakes have influenced not only music and media but also the cultural and political systems we often take for granted. She is also coeditor of the Routledge Companion to Voice and Identity (2026). Skjerseth is currently Principal Investigator of the “Defying Defaults in Technology and Culture” University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Multicampus Working Group.

Rory Fewer (PhD Candidate, Music, UC Riverside) is an ethnomusicologist, composer, and DJ whose research explores the intersections of popular music, queerness, materiality, and affect, particularly as they culminate in the vernacular practices of nightlife. He is currently working on an ethnography of queer rave collectives in Bangkok’s underground electronic dance music scene. His writing has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, and Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture.

Program Details

Created during a residency at the Nida Art Colony, Radiant Center draws from two months of field recording on the Curonian Spit, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose unique dune ecosystem is bisected by the Russian-Lithuanian border. The work uses radio receivers, hydrophones, and contact microphones to capture transmissions and vibrations propagating through sand, water, soil, trees, and border infrastructure, tracing how security apparatuses and environmental forces co-constitute this freighted terrain.

In Beyond the Frame: Erasure, Photography, and Speculative Poetry, we will experiment with two preexisting forms—found text and photography—and explore what happens when we “mutilate” their default settings. In the first part of the workshop, we will erase or black out portions of found texts, allowing what remains to reconstruct what was originally said, or to reveal what was left unsaid. In the second part of the workshop, using an existing photograph as an anchor, participants will disrupt its apparent or “default” meaning through writing, erasure, layering, and attention to its visual contours. How might writing over, around, or along the outlines of a photograph alter what the image appears to say? What new narratives, perspectives, or worlds might emerge when we write into what the photograph cannot show?

A venerated saint writes a list of all she hates. A brilliant composer pens hymns that endure for twelve centuries. A humble nun outlines the ideal monastic life. Kassia is all of these women. KASSIA SOUND ICON is a pilgrimage, a journey in five scenes (“icons”) exploring perspectives on the earliest woman composer with extant works, 9th-century abbess Kassia of Byzantium, a.k.a. Saint Kassiani.

Presented in this festival as a video projection, after-lived unfolded over three days as a durational performance. Performers worked through gestures learned from a motion-capture animation archive: they embodied, repeated, reoriented, and endured them. Each performer trained with an avatar generated from a digital scan of their own body, set in motion as if possessed. The title after-lived names a condition in which systems persist beyond their declared obsolescence, continuing to operate even after their logic has been exhausted. In this state, gestures survive their contexts. They loop, mutate, and return. The body becomes the site where these loops are absorbed, tested, redirected, and possibly exited.