Techspressionist Salon 99 – Floating Questions 🎈

Recorded Thursday, October 2, 2025.
Moderator: Erin Ko – NYC 

As artists and technologists, we don’t just create with tools—we enter into dialogue with the systems that shape our perception. This conversation traces digital privilege, media literacy, and the poetics of creative agency in a hyper-connected culture, asking how artistic practice can illuminate, question, and reimagine the signals that bind us. Salon 99, moderated by Erin Ko, brings together artists whose practices engage with social change, inviting them to share their work and reflect on the questions that shape it.

Guest Presenters:

00:02:10 – Verneda Lights
https://www.instagram.com/vernedalights/

Verneda Lights is a visual artist, photographer, performance poet, author, retired physician and griot of South Carolina’s Gullahgeechee Nation. Her body of work spans from digital to traditional fine art and surface pattern design. Her most recent work focuses on traditional and abstract portraiture as a tool for storytelling and stress management in caregiving settings. Her work has been exhibited at Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art,, Edward M Kennedy Institute, and Harlem Fine Arts Show.

00:19:55 – J Eric Cook
https://www.instagram.com/ad.tumulum/

J. Eric Cook is an artist, educator, and activist who has been actively defending free expression and building community in Washington Square Park since 2016. He is widely recognized as the 6th hardest-working, Living Artist in NYC. Eric’s art can be seen regularly in WSP, as well as on light posts and mailboxes across the world.

00:30:50 – Clara Francesca
https://www.instagram.com/clar_esca/

Proud XRE co-founder and Dame Joan Sutherland Fund Awardee for Excellence in Performance, Clara Francesca is an alumnus of Anne Bogart’s SITI Company’s Inaugural Conservatory, creating and performing work ranging from TV, cinema and stage to poetic immersive multimedia avant-garde. Here’s to art with heart!

00:38:09 – Anne Wichmann
https://www.instagram.com/shes_excited/

Anne Wichmann aka She’s Excited! is a sound artist, performer and curator who wants to connect audiences of all ages and backgrounds with new technologies and with each other. She is one of the co-founders of XRE.

00:46:09 – Naz Karagoz
https://www.instagram.com/duality.live/

Naz Karagoz is a multidisciplinary artist. Her practice focuses on music composition, electronic music, live improvisational vocals, sound design, production, Ableton Live performances, abstract video, projection mapping, digital art surround sound, and installations.

00:49:50 – Susan Detroy
https://beacons.ai/susandetroyartist

Susan Detroy is a fifty year visual story teller with ten series working in the cross paths of digital and analog media. As a print photographer she constructed unique alternative photo prints and ran a business as photographer, and gallery director. Since 2015, using digital camera-phone and iPad editing, Susan responds to unhappy mental messages about aging, initiating her ten year Portrait of a Woman project. Since 2020 Susan is producing multiple films exploring the use of melded AI generated with self portrait characters. Ms. Detroy’s art uses her life experience and natural elements providing the viewer an intriguing journey, bringing a woman-affirming perspective to her inventive and engaging artworks portraying earth and self-love.

01:02:22 – Heidi Boisvert
https://www.instagram.com/hjboisvert/

Heidi Boisvert is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist and academic researcher who interrogates the socio-cultural and neurobiological effects of media and technology. Simply put, she studies the role of the body, the senses, and emotion in human perception and social change through large-scale networked dance and theatre.