On view through May 2026 in ATA’s Galleries: short films of legendary video artist Copper Giloth
Copper Giloth, Modeling the Female Body
Also on view:
Ballyoid Cardioids (1979)
Skippy Peanut Butter Jars (1980)
AS I SAID (1980)
Childhood Logic (1980)
Alphabet Song of A Young Girl (1986)
The Red Table (1986)
Modeling the Female Body: A Survey of Computer Generated Women, 1980-1993 (1994)
Gallery hours: 2-5pm on Sundays in May
or, request an appointment to view: alex@atasite.org
Copper Giloth‘s Feminist Computer Art explores a formative decade in the work of artist Copper Giloth, tracing her pioneering contributions to early computer art. After encountering computers while working as a welder in Massachusetts, Giloth pursued graduate study at the University of Illinois Chicago’s groundbreaking Electronic Visualization Lab, becoming part of the first generation of Chicago new media artists. During this period, she also embraced feminist liberation politics, which became central to her emerging artistic approach.
Focusing on the late 1970s through the 1980s, the exhibition highlights Giloth’s experimental integration of video and computer graphics, emphasizing her innovative use of programming as a creative medium. Her works investigate the expressive potential of code, foregrounding elements such as the glitch, repetition, and the generative possibilities of early programming. Through these strategies, Giloth transforms digital systems into sites of visual and conceptual exploration.
Crucially, Giloth’s engagement with emerging technologies constitutes a feminist practice. Working within a field historically dominated by men, she asserts authorship over computational tools while challenging assumptions about gender and technical expertise. Her use of code as an open, generative system resists fixed hierarchies and embraces multiplicity, aligning with feminist commitments to collaboration, process, and the destabilization of authority.
By revisiting this pivotal era, Copper Giloth‘s Feminist Computer Art underscores Giloth’s influential role in shaping the language of early computer art and affirms the lasting impact of feminist perspectives within technological practice.
–Helena Shaskevich,
Artists' Television Access
Weekly Newsletter
Coming Up This Month
Monday, June 8, 2026, 7:30 pm, classic-editor
A Time and Space Machine: Abigail Severance & Lori Goldston
Program:
Shot entirely in public spaces, Abigail Severance’s recent work plumbs the politics and promises of witnessing through a lens, tenderly wrestling with our apocalyptic anxieties. From trains and elevators to tourist traps and quiet nightscapes, she explores how entropy and surrender might stir radical imagination. In imagining what comes after the anthropocene, what could it mean to consciously surrender human authorship of the global landscape? What promise do the wild, rewilding, and wilderness hold for uncertain futures?
With live accompaniment by cellist Lori Goldston, the program begins with Public Square (2026), a collection of moving images that propose a “documentary choreography” to feel how time passes as people occupy, resist or claim public space. The second part of the program includes two of Severance’s recent train films (You Recall the Night Train & You Are A Time Machine, both 2025). In an experiment toward possible world-makings and un-makings, we find a train is both soothing and sinister, both body and apparatus, a rocking, syncopated animal, a time and space machine.
Door 7, program 7:30, approximate duration 60 min.
Abigail Severance
A Los Angeles-based artist, Abigail Severance makes films and other images about nostalgia, flawed history, and queer thought. Her films exist between documentary, fiction, and abstraction, using moving image as a meditative practice for contemplation.
Abigail’s films have shown at Sundance, The Broad Museum (L.A.), Studio Museum Harlem, HBO, MIX LGBT Festival, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among other venues. Her work was included in the 2018 Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA and her first short “Pump” (1999) was featured in the New Queer Cinema retrospective at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Abigail has received a Fulbright, a Film Independent fellowship, and a CalArts Research & Practice Grant for “We the Devoted,” a near-future narrative about borders and labor made collectively with its ensemble cast.
She is currently at work on a video & photo series “You, An Archive,” which draws together radical queer imaginaries and the intelligence of natural systems (forests, glaciers, oceans). She has been faculty at the CalArts School of Film/Video since 2009 where she also served as Dean 2019-2024.
Lori Goldston
Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography.
Current and former collaborators and/or bosses include Earth, Nirvana, Mirah, Jessika Kenney, Ilan Volkov, Eyvind Kang, Stuart Dempster, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Jherek Bischoff, Malcom Goldstein, Steve Von Till, Lonnie Holley, Cat Power, Ellen Fullman, Maya Dunietz, Mik Quantius, Embryo, O Paon, Tara Jane O’Neil, Natacha Atlas, Broken Water, Ed Pias, Christian Rizzo and Sophie Laly, Threnody Ensemble, Cynthia Hopkins, 33 Fainting Spells, Vanessa Renwick, Mark Mitchell, Lynn Shelton, and many more.
Her work has been commissioned by and/or performed at the Kennedy Center, Sydney Festival, Cineteca Nacional de México, Tectonics Festival, Frye Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival (TBA), WNYC, The New Foundation, Paris Fashion Week, Northwest Film Forum, On the Boards, Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Jewish Film Festival, Bumbershoot, Crossing Border Festival, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Joe’s Pub, the Stone, University of Chicago, and venues large and small throughout North America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe.
Monday, June 22, 2026, 7:00 pm, classic-editor
Studio 26: Fantom Classroom of the Art Institute
A free seminar, investigating the 16mm experimental films in the collection of the SFAI Legacy Foundation and Archives.
Saturday, June 27, 2026, 8:00 pm, classic-editor
Possibly Puppets
Monday, June 29, 2026, 7:30 pm, classic-editor
Rewards Program: “an army of lovers cannot fail”; revolution, rivalry, and queer existence
A three-projector celluloid meditation live-scored by improvisational trio Rewards Program: “an army of lovers cannot fail”: revolution, rivalry, and queer existence. Visuals in special collaboration with musician and artist Kati Mashikian.
Bios:
MILES LASSI is an interdisciplinary artist based out of Oakland, CA. As a musician, he has performed in over 150 cities throughout North America, Europe and Asia with many different ensembles ranging from the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall to national broadway tours like Ain’t Too Proud, Dirty Dancing, and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. Miles is dedicated to creating new media and has done so at the New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theater, deYoung Museum, Joyce Theater, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, A.C.T., SXSW and Snap Studios/KQED.
SKYWAY MAN is the alias of keyboardist, songwriter, and producer James Wallace. Based in Oakland via Richmond, VA, and Nashville, TN, he has released seven albums and composed music for Film/TV, including Joe Pera Talks With You (HBO). Over the past 15 years, he has toured extensively across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, performing at festivals like Bonnaroo, Pickathon, SXSW, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and Wilco’s Solid Sound. He has collaborated with Abigail Washburn, Langhorne Slim, Erin Rae, and Maya Hawke, among others. Brittany Howard once named his band a favorite local act in Rolling Stone, and his work has been featured in NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and Stereogum. He’s produced 20 full-length albums for other artists, including Bay Area musicians Mikayla McVey, Milk for the Angry, and Pancho Morris. Over the past few years he’s developed a practice of live instrumental film scoring using keyboards and sequencers.
ELLIE VANDERLIP is a San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker, performer, and educator. She received her MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 2022. She is a co-director at Oakland’s Shapeshifters Cinema, on the board of directors at San Francisco’s Cinematheque, and maintains a studio at Artists’ Television Access. She has hosted filmmaking workshops with the Exploratorium, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the University of San Francisco, and lectures at St. Mary’s College and San Francisco State University. Her primary focuses are found footage experimental documentary, material cinema, and expanded cinema performance. Her work has screened nationally and internationally, including at San Francisco DocFest and Belgrade’s Kinoscope Festival, and has upcoming writings about alternative archives in Found Footage Magazine.
Window Installations
Tuesday, June 30, 2026, 4:09 pm, classic-editor
Quinn Keck: Irrational Symbolic Thinking
Irrational Symbolic Thinking
On Display in June
An irrational number is a never ending, never repeating decimal. An imaginary number exists1 and creates a complex system that explains observed phenomena.1, 2 Equations are symbolic representations of concepts, abiding metaphors,2 ideas, dreams,3 and thoughts.
It can be tempting to imagine our skulls to be like the walls of the gallery – blank canvases to house our autonomous creations. Like the gallery wall and Plato’s cave, our minds and bodies4 have contexts that determine possible interpretations of shadows on the wall, obscuring which questions are “unreasonable” to ask.5
But let’s peel back a few layers? After all, knowledge is a collective pursuit.*
A detailed full proof here:
“Answers and Explanations — Do “Imaginary Numbers” Really Exist?” by Philip Spencer www.math.toronto.edu/mathnet/answers/imaginary.html.
And for some other helpful explanations:
https://www.reddit.com/r/askmath/comments/z4qxsk/can_anyone_explain_what_imaginary_number_are_what/
2 See Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s discussion of abiding metaphors and science in her book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie.
3 Srinivasa Ramanujan is regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time and the“the man who knew infinity,” as the film with the same title tells. He figured out the equations in his notebooks through mysticism, his faith and dreams.
4 The mind/body split that may seem natural or common sense to people in the Western philosophical traditions is not so universal and has been pushed back upon by many. One place to start is Julian Frazier, PhD’s article “Indigenous Wisdom Reveals the Truth about the Mind-Body Connection”: https://medium.com/@julian.frazier.phd/indigenous-wisdom-reveals-the-truth-about-the-mind-body-connection-c8c5ec1b0451
5 For more on what questions are reasonable and unreasonable to ask, see the paper: Cognitive Sociology: between the personal and the universal mind by Eviatar Zerubavel, published by The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology.
6 Nataille Wynn, ContaPoints, in her video essay “Conspiracy” makes this excellent point.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teqkK0RLNkI
More on her work: https://www.contrapoints.com/
Artist Bio
Quinn Keck (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates concepts in sociology, physics, technology and philosophy. Working across printmaking, artists books, creative coding, and installation, their work discusses memory, perception and grief through questioning the manifestation of systems. They have been an instructor and printmaker in residence at Women’s Studio Workshop, Kala Art Institute, and Zea Mays Printmaking and their work has been shown at Gray Area, Root Division, the Richmond Art Center, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair. Their process is one of constantly iterating on new and old images, just as we all are a series of imperfect versions of ourselves improving each iteration but never fully finished.
About Artists' Television Access
Artists' Television Access is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) artist-run
screening venue and gallery located in the heart of San Francisco's Mission
District. ATA is supported in part by Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel
Tax Fund, The Christensen Fund, individuals members, donors and volunteers.
CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF EXPERIMENTAL MEDIA: Join ATA as a member and receive exciting gifts, including the 2008 DVD compilation, T-shirts, and free admission to screenings and more! Artists on the 2008 DVD compilation include: Yin-Ju Chen, Mike Rollo, Marthaxiv, Sam Manera, Wago Kreider, Federico Campanale, Paul Clipson and Carl Diehl. http://www.atasite.org/membership/
How to Reach Us:
Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia Street (at 21st)
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 824-3890
ata@atasite.org
Gallery is open before and after screenings for viewing.
Screenings start at 8pm unless otherwise noted.
Directions: Take Bart to 24th Street Mission. Walk 1 block east to Valencia and 3 blocks north. ATA is located between 21st and 20th Streets.