Artwork and documentation from the residency
Residency of 3 Artists that Learn About Technology
The Glitch Lab is a social practice art residency developed by the Edgelands Institute and the NOTICE Coalition to explore the intersections of surveillance, emergent technologies and the futures of youth justice through community-engaged projects and participatory art. Under the leadership of Dr. Chelsea Barabas and Rian Crane, the 2025 Glitch Lab brought together Houston-based artists Jack Morillo, Sol Díaz-Peña, and Billion T. to examine how technologies—such as AI-powered cameras, student monitoring software, and vape detectors—reshape the meaning of safety and discipline within schools.
Over the course of five months, the Glitch Lab fostered collaboration, dialogue, and creative resistance, questioning the narratives that position surveillance as a solution to educational challenges. The program highlighted how these technologies often reinforce racialized and ableist systems of control, disproportionately affecting Black, disabled, TLGBQIA+, and other marginalized youth. By merging art, research, and community organizing, the residency transformed Friends Gallery in Houston, TX into a space of experimentation and civic engagement. Through installations, workshops, sound experiments, and storytelling, participants reimagined how socially engaged art can expose systemic harm while amplifying youth and community voices—offering new ways to envision digital futures grounded in care, equity, and justice. The residency culminated in an art show hosted by Friends Gallery in Houston from October 22 to November 9, 2025, showcasing the works created throughout the program.
Jack Morillo is an artist and poet from Houston who facilitates Teen Council at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His work explores the unintended uses of space, disidentification, and the surreal as tools for resistance.
View Portfolio →Sol Diaz-Peña is a Cuban-Mexican-American transdisciplinary artist, educator, and organizer. Their work moves across painting, photography, and collective practice, drawing from Zapotec Indigenous traditions, queerness, and migration to explore how identity is shaped, remembered, and reclaimed.
View Portfolio →Billion Tekleab works through breaking language, sound making, cartographic studies, and performance to make visible the ephemera of Black life, displacement, and the African diaspora.
View Work →Chelsea (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin. She is researcher and strategist who works across communities, advocacy networks, and public institutions to confront technological harm and build collective futures.
Learn MoreRian (he/they) is a post-disciplinary performance artist interested in Black diasporic rebellion as an anti-thesis to borders, gender, and prisons. He collaborates with other artists and communities to counter isolation, individualism, and the hyper-productivity of end-capitalism.
View Portfolio →Preview of artwork and documentation from the residency