BCNM Around the Web March 2022
Check out the great work of our students, faculty, and alumni around the web this March!
Edgar Fabian Frias
Edgar led an online class on "Make Your Own Visionary Art" on Feb.19. The host, Tiffany J. Hopkins, began studying mediumship after moving into her great-great grandmother's cottage in Lily Dale, the world's largest community of Spiritualists. During the pandemic she developed a curriculum to share her process of mediumship for creativity and this series is an evolution to bring in a larger community of artists and mystics. This class was a very special exploration into the practice of visionary art., seeking different techniques of visionary art production. Edgar led them through their visionary process to create their own art.
In addition, tehy shared a conversation on the topic of "Develop Your Psychic Abilities With Art" to teach the audience how to use that space to really hone their gifts. This talk enlightened many people through his sharing of personal experience and viewpoints on physical eyes and mind eyes.
Check their online class here, and their talk on Youtube here!
Ra Malika Imhotep
Ra was the panel curator for an Illuminations Live Panel Discussion "The Performance of Labor/The Labor of Performance: A Convening" in Cal Performances. The panel brought together Black feminist artists and cultural workers to communally explore how the forms and methods of opera, surrealism, free jazz, poetry, and dance help communicate the concerns of radical Black feminism. To explore this topic, in conversation with other Black femme artists, they discussed: What happens when we gather to create out loud, to sound it out in good company? How might improvised creative dialogue disrupt preconceived notions about the relationships between Black femininity, labor, and performance? How do we practice and witness a “Black feminist politic in making”?
To review the panel, please check the video here!
Ken Goldberg
Goldberg was involved in new algorithms that can now compose a 3D scene from 2D images—creating possibilities in video games, robotics, and autonomous driving. He describes it as “It is ultra-hot, there is a huge buzz.”The new approach involves using a neural network to capture and generate 3D imagery from a few 2D snapshots, a technique dubbed “neural rendering.” It arose from the merging of ideas circulating in computer graphics and AI, but interest exploded in April 2020 when researchers at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and Google showed that a neural network could capture a scene photorealistically in 3D simply by viewing several 2D images of it.
To learn about this new trick in 3D, please read it here.
Eric Paulos
Eric shared his viewpoints on "Plastic Dynamism: Delightful Decomposition, Destruction, Decay, Deformation, and Digestive Designs" in the STANFORD HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR. This online seminar was held on 11 Feb.
To learn more about this series of seminars, please visit here.
Beth Piatote
Beth Piatote was featured in the article "UC Berkeley celebrates Mother Language Day, Indigenous tongues" from The Daily Californian.“Mother Language Day is a global celebration of Indigenous languages, and an urgent call to support languages that are endangered,” said campus Native American Studies associate professor Beth Piatote. Her research interests surround Native American and Aboriginal literature, Indigenous Language Revitalization and the Nez Perce language, helped establish the Designated Emphasis, or DE, in Indigenous Language Revitalization, which acts as a graduate minor available to students across disciplines.
To read the full news, please visit here!
Hannah Zeavin
Hannah held several sightful seminars to share her new book, "The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy". In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, Hannah Zeavin shows that, far from a recent concern in the COVID-19 pandemic, teletherapy is as old as psychoanalysis itself. It may be well known that Sigmund Freud routinely used media metaphorically in his theories of the psychic apparatus; this talk recovers the early history of Freud’s real use of media in therapies over distance.
Zeavin tracks the history of teletherapy (understood as a therapeutic interaction over distance) and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. She describes its initial use in ongoing care, its role in crisis intervention and symptom management, and our pandemic-mandated reliance on regular Zoom sessions.
To revisit her seminars, please visit here for the one with Freud Museum London, here for the University of Essex, and here for the Northeastern University!
Jane McGonigal
McGonigal had a Q&A session on how imagination can help us build better futures with Root in Feb.22. Jane will hold a seminar to share her newest book, Imaginable, which she coaxes audiences to dive into the unimaginable as a way to problem-solve, future-plan, and find transformative fulfillment, on March 30 with COMMONWEALTH Club. She uses psychological research to embolden readers and make real the possibilities that are unfathomable—but not for long.
To book the event, please visit here!
Tiffany Ng
Tiffany Ng performs the world premiere of "Melody for Kinyaa'áanii Nos. 1 and 2" by Connor Chee on the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Carillon.
Please visit this video here to see her performance!
Bo Ruberg
Ruberg was featured in the University of Toronto's lecture on Feb.18, on the topic of "Problematic Pleasures in Digital Games and Play". Games, of all the popular arts, are perhaps most inextricably bound up in notions of pleasure, but in spite of the primacy of pleasure, the concept is rarely interrogated in game studies. However, in recent years a number of game scholars have applied intersectional lenses to understand pleasure in all its complexity, challenging both canonical theories of play and celebratory marketing rhetoric. Problematic Pleasures in Digital Games and Play brings four prominent international game scholars into dialogue to critically unpack the diverse and not always harmless ways that pleasure moves us in and through play. Pleasure is not all fun and games, and this unique event will generate new insights and directions of inquiry for game studies and the wider humanities.
To review the seminar, please visit here!