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Asha Tamirisa [she/her/hers] works with sound, video, film, and researches media histories. Asha has performed at venues such as the ICA Boston and Bitforms Gallery (NYC), has given talks at institutions such as the University of Michigan, Mount Holyoke College, and Oberlin College, and has held residencies at The Media Archeology Lab (Boulder, CO), Perte de Signal (Montreal, CA) and I-Park Foundation (East Haddam, CT). Asha’s work has been mentioned in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics and the 5th Edition of Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture. Along with many colleagues, Asha co-founded OPENSIGNAL, a collective of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic music and art practice. She now works with the organization TECHNE. Asha has taught sound and media art at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Girls Rock! Rhode Island, and Street Level Youth Media in Chicago. Asha holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia and an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Bates College in Maine, USA.



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CUT | 2018

digital, 11’



VITARANA | 2018

super 8 film to digital, 6’ 47”

“Vitarana” in Sanskrit means transference, though somewhat ambiguously: gift, remnant, but it can also mean passage or to cross over. This film animates an assemblage of matrilineal garments as they approach the brink of inheritance. The present as gift or granted object blurs with the temporal present, a past given presence, a passage to a past that will never be full known. The visual connections, contrasts and emphasis on surface establish the material as an imperfect conduit, invoking their actors while leaving us to wonder what lies beyond.





VANISHING POINT | 2018

slide projector, digital, 8’ 18”

Projector slides, the actual ephemera of a personal loss, point to the ephemerality of images in memory as one attempts to recall how things once were. These slides become a vehicle for making contact with the past; a bridge,however precarious and blocked, for surveying a meandering and sometimes dissolving memory.




RECORD | 2018

digital video+phonograph, 5’ 47”






LOSSY RECOLLECTIONS | 2018

16mm to digital, 6’ 35”

The present moment makes the idea of the digital synonymous wit improvement and permanence. However, encoding and decoding digital information modifies its object, causing data loss. Dwelling in a celebratory and confounding place of imperfect transmission and nonlinearity, “Lossy Recollections,” embraces digital regression, using obtuse compression techniques to generate colorful artifacts. The source materials are excerpts of degraded 16mm film - for instance, film that has rotted, or has been bleached away.