Ambiguously oscillating between lecture and performance, this event will showcase the concepts and techniques behind non-linear animation as a medium for exploring fluid states that exist between artist and muse, self and other, past and present, man and woman, humans and technology, etc. Audiences should expect to be disoriented, inspired, and entertained!.

Erma Fiend (aka Lee Friend Roberts) is a director of surreal stop motion animation. Erma Fiend’s evocative dreamscapes feature real people, sentient objects, and tactile environments. Using a range of clay, putty, and slime in silicone molds cast from his face and body, Fiend's stop motion techniques capture the realistic likeness of the human form to create a uniquely uncanny feeling of aliveness. Fiend is known for documenting his gender transition over the years in hundreds of Escheresque stop motion self portrait loops, which play like Möbius strips in GIF form. In these looping self portraits, Fiend shows the fluidity of embodiment, nonlinear time, and the ambiguous states that exist between past & present selves and the external world. 

Oddly Satisfying presents a series of audiovisual and performance works by artists who work with video as a physical material. “Oddly satisfying” is a label given to viral looping videos that somehow feel tangible to the viewer, eliciting haptic sensory perception that absorbs perception into the screen. The artists presented in this series recognize that physical participation is the basic condition of experiencing media and they respond by instead calling attention to embodied perception.

Curated by Allen Riley, 2025 Curator-in-Residence