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[ANN] Meet the '21/'22 0x Salon Research Residents

As you might be aware, the 0x Salon recently opened a Research Residency programme based in Berlin at Trust. Meet our five incoming Research Residents!

Published onOct 19, 2021
[ANN] Meet the '21/'22 0x Salon Research Residents

Image generated by VQGAN+CLIP from a recent salon conversation.

As you might be aware, the 0x Salon recently opened a Research Residency programme. We announced two vacancies, to be based in Berlin at Trust where we spend our days epistemic trespassing and evenings discoursing, poeticising, GANonmyising, radio play improvising, memeticising and card game developing.

With around 48 hours to go before the 7th September deadline for applications, we had around ten applications and were happy to choose from those very high calibre candidates. Then something happened that we did not expect. The floodgates opened, in part thanks to some high-profile signalboosting from some illustrious friends - we are so grateful for the loan of their megaphones!! When the dust settled, we counted forty-five stellar applicants and a serious headache in how to move forwards.

We went over all of the applications very carefully, which took a long time as many of them extremely detailed. We wanted to keep the application form as open as possible and had no prescription in mind for our 'ideal' resident. We don't like letting people down, and this first stage was really difficult for us. We created a short-list of fifteen, prioritising those who are - or will soon be - in Berlin with a view to bringing in more diverse perspectives, interests and backgrounds to help us navigate and steward the next phase of the 0x Salon’s development. We wrote thirty individual messages to applicants who would not progress to the next stage, and were heartened that so many wrote back expressing their appreciation for a personal message as well as a number taking up our invitation to join our Discord server.

With our shortlist of fifteen in place, we scheduled a series of video calls to get to know our candidates better. It seemed inappropriate to choose based on a bunch of text entered into a starchy form, after all the salon is at its heart a human endeavour! Over a couple of days we spoke with the final thirteen (two dropped out due to overcommitment elsewhere) and had a wonderful series of conversations with them. Making final decisions proved to be incredibly difficult though. We were simply blown away by so many of them! As we are keen to get 0x Salon events going in London before long, we decided it would be nice to have a presence there. But we also wanted to have an increased level of activity in Berlin! In the end, found it impossible to pick only two...

With all that said, we'd like you to e-meet our five incoming Research Residents!

Our London contingent are Martina Cavalot and Anna Engelhardt, spending most of their time within the 'Brextopian Horizon' with eastward visits for events and projects. Chloê Langford, Catherine Leigh Schmidt and Alice Yuan Zhang will be taking up residency positions in Berlin over the coming months and nestling into the Trust and 0x Salon communities.

Expect to meet them at salon events from now on, and we can’t wait to share the project-based activities they get up to on these pages and further afield as we start to hatch online and offline plans for winter and 2022. We are so excited to see what comes of all this as the 0x Salon finds its feet in (fingers crossed) a non-pandemic situation for the first time in its history.

More on our Research Residents:

Martina Cavalot

Martina is a researcher and writer currently based in London. She’s a researcher at The New Centre for Research & Practice and a co-organiser of design collective Evening Class. Her practice is concerned with the materialism of computation and traverses issues of abstraction, vision, and extraction by focussing on the concept of the site as a critical point of entry. She recently contributed to “Riptides of the Mind” as part of a collaboration with NSPDOS, which was presented at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2021).


Anna Engelhardt

Anna Engelhardt is a Russian media artist and writer whose research-based practice explores post-Soviet infrastructures as a form of politics. Comprising texts, videos, websites, and digital platforms, her investigations take on multiple forms of media and distribution as they develop over time. Her project Circuits of Truth (2021) explores cyberwar from the perspective of user verification, and was commissioned by GARAGE Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Produced using deepfake technology, her video essay Adversarial Infrastructure (2020) investigates the colonial violence of the Russian Crimean Bridge, and was shown at Ars Electronica, 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Vancouver International Film Festival and Kyiv Biennial. Anna's writings have been published in Mute Magazine, Strelka Magazine, Journal of Visual Culture, and the European Review.

Chloê Langford

Chloê is an artist and programmer who makes video games, performances and digital art. She co-runs the collective and game label ‘Fantasia Malware’ and works at the Brain Simulation Section at the Charité Berlin. Her recent works include Sylph Web, Orchid Collector and The Life of Saint Fiona Bianco Xena.

Catherine Leigh Schmidt

Catherine is an artist, designer, and cleric. Her work is grounded in Christian mystical traditions, particularly Quakerism, that see individual spiritual practice as synonymous with anti-capitalist political action and community care. Her current research investigates Western esotericism and land-based religions of the European deep past through rave culture. Catherine works as a consulting astrologer and is teaching an Astro Basics course this fall.

Alice Yuan Zhang 张元

Alice is a migrating artist, educator, and community weaver. She hosts socioecological entanglement in layered realities across digital browsers and AR as well as embodied exercises and in-person exchanges. Her research-based participatory practice traverses interconnections of ancestral remembering, speculative pedagogy, and networked solidarity. Alice is the co-founder of virtual care lab, an open assemblage of people learning to trust each other in remote connection.

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