Charis welcomes E. G. Crichton in conversation with Alexandra Teixeira Riggs for a discussion of Matchmaking in the Archive: 19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 Encounters with Ghosts. Including 25 pages of vivid images, Matchmaking in the Archive documents this monumental creative project and adds essays by Jonathan Katz, Michelle Tea, and Chris Vargas, who describe their own unique encounters with the ghosts of LGBTQ history. Together, they make the archive come alive in remarkably intimate ways. This event is co-sponsored by The Digital Media graduate program at Georgia Tech.

Though today’s LGBTQ people owe a lot to the generations who came before them, their historical inheritances are not always obvious. Working with the archives of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society, artist E.G. Crichton decided to do something to bridge this generation gap. She selected 19 innovative LGBTQ artists, writers, and musicians, then paired each of them with a deceased person whose personal artifacts are part of the archive.

The Digital Media graduate program at Georgia Tech provide students with a foundation in digital media design and making, a theoretical background in digital media, and the opportunity to practice what is learned in studio courses, labs, and research. We focus on the socio- cultural context of digital media making, where graduate students learn to make with meaning.

E. G. Crichton (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist living in Richmond, California. Her work has been exhibited and presented in Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Great Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, and across the U.S. Crichton is a professor emerita of art at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served as artist-in-residence at the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society from 2008 to 2014.

Alexandra Teixeira Riggs (she/they) is a Ph.D. student in Digital Media at Georgia Tech, concentrating in design research, queer media studies, and critical archives scholarship. Their work focuses on using interactive storytelling methods to explore both past and present notions of queer community, identity, and belonging. She combines queer methods and design research for both tangible and screen-based interfaces to challenge dominant technologies and offer alternative relationalities in both on and offline space. They are currently working with Dr. Anne Sullivan and Dr. Noura Howell at Georgia Tech. For her current research, she is also working with archivist Morna Gerrard in the Gender and Sexuality Collections at Georgia State University.

This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage

Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we begin this new way of connecting across distances.

By attending our virtual event you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to info@chariscircle.org immediately.

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Matchmaking in the Archive: 19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 Encounters with Ghosts--E. G. Crichton in conversation with Alexandra Teixeira Riggs