BCNM Around the Web June
Check out the amazing work of our faculty, students and alumni around the web this June!
Abigail De Kosnik
Gail was recently a keynote speaker at University of London's FanLIS 2021: Building Bridges. In this half-day, interdisciplinary symposium exploring the intersections between fandom, fan studies and library and information science, Gail spoke on archiving, librarianship, and futurity among pirates and fans.
From the event description:
The theme of the event is "Building Bridges: exploring interdisciplinary intersections between fandom, fan studies, and library and information science."
We invite all who have an interest in the ways in which fandom, fan studies, and library & information science overlap. Examples include the ways in which fans create, organise, disseminate, classify and preserve fanworks; the publishing of fanfiction as mainstream literature; fans as citizen journalists; or the beta-reader as editor. This symposium will contribute to the nascent interdisciplinary dialogue, by bringing together scholars from fan studies, LIS and beyond, to find commonalities, inspire new conversations, reveal hidden and unexpected intersections, and suggest new methodological approaches that will enrich the current discourse of fandom and fan practice.
Learn more about the event here!
Gail was also a participant of the ÉCRAN TOTAL exhibition, a physical exhibition featuring the works of Jean Baudrillard, Adam Basanta, Charlie Doyon, and more.
From the event description (google translated from French to English):
Presented at the UQAM Design Center in Montreal, the ÉCRAN TOTAL exhibition - in preparation since the end of 2018 - welcomes, for the first time in Canada, the photographs of Jean Baudrillard, placed in dialogue with the works of Adam Basanta, Charlie Doyon, Clint Enns, Mishka Henner & Vaseem Bhatti, Penelope Umbrico and Xuan Ye. In the company of outstanding thinkers of images and digital technology, conferences, round tables and workshops question the different roles and places of the screen in our daily social and cultural practices and reflexively extend the experience of the exhibition.
ÉCRAN TOTAL offers three distinct experiences and mediations. The first is a very “real” physical exhibition in the Design Center. The second is
outside - around the Center and the third experience is the gradual remediation of the exposure here online.
Check out their website here!
Sonia Katyal
Sonia was a participant of UC Santa Barbara's 2021 Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate Series. This year's debate investigated the regulation of big tech in "Taming Titans: How Should We Regulate Big Tech?"
From the event description:
Experts on law and technology will debate how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft should be regulated. Are they 21st-century trusts? Guardians of free speech? Threats to our privacy? Do they impede or fuel innovation? Join us for a lively discussion of the role big tech companies play in our lives and the role they should play in the coming decade.
Read more about the event here!
Celeste Kidd
Celeste was invited as a roundtable panelist for NERL2021, also known as A Roadmap to Never-Ending Reinforcement Learning.
From the event description:
Humans have a remarkable ability to continually learn and adapt to new scenarios over the duration of their lifetime (Smith & Gasser, 2005). This ability is referred to as never ending learning, also known as continual learning or lifelong learning. Never-ending learning is the constant development of increasingly complex behaviors and the process of building complicated skills on top of those already developed (Ring, 1997), while being able to reapply, adapt and generalise its abilities to new situations.
There are several facets to building AI agents with never-ending learning abilities. In this workshop, we identify key themes including open-ended learning, cognitive sciences, developmental robotics, perceptual and temporal abstractions and world modelling.
Learn more about the event here!
Katherine Chandler
Katherine recently spoke at Film and Media-CWC Colloqium Series in "Unmanning: A Roundtable".
From the event description:
Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare studies drone aircraft built and adopted by the United States military from 1936 to 1992, examining the prehistory of contemporary drone vision. It intervenes in media studies to show how the platform—long before the contemporary war on terror—used television, aerial photography and video to create a field of war. Detailing this prehistory, what emerges is a story of failure, the impossibility of seeing and the orchestrated performances that create an objective aerial view and an enemy target.
In our discussion, four scholars of media, technology and war will address the book’s arguments and the author will respond.
Learn more about the event here!
Alenda Chang
Alenda, as the author of the book "Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games", was interviewed in Deutsche Welle's article Video games get serious about climate change.
From the article:
Alenda Chang, author of the book "Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games" says players can learn about the human impact on the environment by witnessing different scenarios of how their actions impact their world.
"Games force us to interact with the system, and they produce feelings," Chang said. "Players do things and can feel guilty because of their choices. Or they can feel the flash of success when things work out in the game."
Chang attributes the trend toward more eco-based storylines to both the needs of younger players and the priorities of new designers.
"Young people see climate change as something that informs who they are as individuals," she said. "Organically what's happening is that this new wave of game designers is bringing these interests with them."
Read the entire article here!
Grace Gipson
Grace recently participated in Art Design Chicago Now Program's The Past and Future of Comics.
From the event description:
The future of comic books belongs to Black women. In many cases drawing on Afrofuturism to tell their own stories, Black women comic book artists and writers are redefining the genre and innovating new ways to think about identity, race, and gender. Join Black future feminist and pop culture scholar Dr. Grace D. Gipson and Chicago cartoonist Bianca Xunise (Say Her Name) for a conversation about the history and future of comic books in Chicago and the real superheroes of the genre: Black women authors and illustrators, and their protagonists.
Watch the event recording here!
Jane McGonigal
Jane recently led a live-online training called IFTF Fast Futures: Foresight for Beginners in 90 minutes.
From the event description:
IFTF Fast Futures is a 90-minute, introductory-level online learning experience that will teach you how to get started with your own creative foresight.
Foresight is the ability to think effectively about how the future might be different, so you can prepare for anything, and start to make changes in your own life, and in society, for the better.
Learn more about the event here!
Trevor Paglen
Trevor's work, A Thousand Flowers, is currently on display in East Hampton's Pace Gallery until June 27th.
From the Martin Cid Magazine articles:
Pace Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition that looks at the ways in which a wide range of artists from the early 2000s to present day use the language of minimalism and abstraction to distill complex subjects into forms that reveal new frameworks of meaning, revelation, and resistance for the here and now... Showcasing a wide range of media as well as outdoor sculpture, Hiding in Plain Sight examines new modes of abstraction that hold references to specific histories, entities, and contexts within the formal dimensions of the work. Like vessels that carry information from one site to another, the artworks in this exhibition manifest the complexity of modern life in forms that conceal their subject matter through aesthetic intervention.
Trevor Paglen: A Thousand Flowers will feature artworks from a number of the artist’s recent series exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning and comes on the heels of the artist’s solo exhibition, Bloom, at Pace’s London space in 2020. Paglen is a multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates techniques from investigative journalism, engineering, and experimental geography alongside sculpture, video, photography, and installation. This solo presentation inaugurates the gallery’s exclusive representation of the artist in New York.
Read mor about Pace Gallery and Trevor's feature here and here!