Stefani Byrd

HERE THERE

Here There features work by Artist-in-Residence Stefani Byrd. The project is created in collaboration with composer Caroline Louise Miller and music ensemble Alarm Will Sound. The exhibition includes documentation and stills from an immersive multimedia installation that considers how technologies of film and locomotion reshaped our relationship to both time and space. Using archival and original footage that connect power imbalances to economic structures, the work traces how colonialism and capitalism simultaneously form physical landscape and national identity.

“…My work challenges established power dynamics and reconfigures how visibility, authority, and agency are distributed. I am interested in how imbalanced power structures persist in networked culture, shaping communication and emotional fluency…”— Stefani Byrd

Stefani Byrd is an American experimental media artist working in video, new media, and interactive technologies whose work sits at the intersection of immersive media, labor history, and feminist critique. Her current work focuses on creating psychologically charged immersive media environments that examine topics such as digital feminism, gun violence, and how technology impacts empathy in digitally mediated spaces. Her work has been exhibited at OBLIQUO Gallery (Madrid), Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), SONIC MATTER New Music Festival (Zurich), Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante (Spain), Athens Digital Arts Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, and A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn). Byrd’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and the Columbus Museum of American Art. Byrd is the Founding Director of the Intersectional Feminist Media Lab at University of North Carolina Wilmington.

HERE THERE
Immersive Media Installation (3-Channel 4K Video, 4.1 Surround Sound, and 2-Channel Parabolic Dome Speaker Audio)

About the Work

Here There is an immersive multimedia installation that examines early-industrial railroad sites in the United States to trace how colonialism and capitalism have shaped both the physical landscape and the national identity. The project utilizes archival and newly recorded video and sound to place the connections between historical events and contemporary imbalanced power and economic structures in dialogue. It also considers how the technologies of film and locomotion reshaped our relationship to both time and space, compressing distance and expanding us beyond the limits of our embodied sensorial experience of the world.

The post-industrial United States continues to be in a power struggle over how historical narratives are framed and who gets to be remembered. Here There resists dominant narratives and instead of focusing on “manifest destiny” and “great men”, it foregrounds the lived experiences of laborers, Indigenous communities, immigrants, and those whose lives have typically fallen outside the canonical narrative as an act of historical revision. By reframing railroad sites as contested terrains rather than symbols of progress, the project situates memory, power, and erasure as materially embedded in the landscape itself.

Here There brings together scholarly and lived knowledge through interviews with Dr. Gordon H. Chang, History Professor at Stanford University and author of The Ghosts of Gold Mountain and Dan Stone, retired train conductor of over 30 years from the DeButts Switch Yard in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Stone is also a long-time friend and former colleague of project lead Stefani Byrd’s deceased father, J. Byrd, grounding the work in both scholarly research and personal lineage.