Worldbuilding, Archives and Image Making : Guest Artist Workshop with Nancy Valladares
November 5 2025, 5-7 PM
What does it mean to build worlds with images? What can practices of preservation from the past teach us about examining our visual present?
Artist and educator Nancy Valladares, who teaches Design and Technology at Parsons in New York, has explored imagemaking across scales: from the analogue to the computational, to the intimate and the infrastructural. Drawing from her practice investigating photography's ecological footprint, this workshop examines the personal image against the landscape of vast data flows, training algorithms, and an image culture accelerating beyond recognition.
As images multiply and circulate at unprecedented speeds, participants will engage questions of data privacy, digital stewardship, and what it means to archive with intention. When photographs can be infinitely generated and manipulated, preservation becomes both personal and political. We will examine ways of anchoring memory and building histories in an era of post-truth.
Through worldbuilding and storytelling strategies, we'll imagine alternative futures for our digital lives. What could data sovereignty actually look like? How might communities design systems where we control our own images, narratives, and digital traces? By treating the future as a space we can actively shape, participants will move beyond critique toward practices of care, consent, and collective ownership.
This workshop is an open invitation to look closely at what we save, what we share, and what gets taken from us in the process. Open to artists, creatives, writers, or anyone curious about these questions.
Requirements: Bring questions, examples of images you keep, memories of the ones you've lost, and the ones you want to protect in the days to come! $10 for members, $15 non-members. Materials will be provided. Space for this workshop is limited; registration is required. Please contact hkehoe@saag.ca to register.
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