BCNM Around the Web October 2021
Check out the amazing work of our faculty, students, and alumni around the web this October!
Edgar Fabían Frías
Edgar featured in a 24 hour virtual performance festival in conjunction with Printmaking Professor Andy Kozlowski's exhibition, Routine Maintenance, for UNF Gallery. The virtual performance festival featured local, regional, national, and international artists whose work ranges from video, sound, performance, poetry, and expanded media.
Learn more about the performance here!
Keith Feldman
Keith appeared at UC Berkeley Asian American Research Center's Symposium in Honor of Michael Omi on the Occasion of His Retirement to speak on Raciality, Relationality, and Community-Engaged Scholarship. The symposium was held in honor of Michael Omi's retirement in June 2021 and features his colleagues and former students discussing his work and its implications in the academy and community. The schedule included panels such as Honoring Michael Omi: Racial Formations and Racial Formation: Theoretical Interventions.
Learn more about the event here!
Ken Goldberg
Ken's Alpha Garden was one of multiple of his projects featured in ICCC '21, the 2021 International Conference on Computational Creativity. His featured artworks included a live garden tended by a robot controlled by over 100,000 people via the internet, a 1/1 millionth scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, and award-winning short documentary films about robots and Jewish identity.
Learn more about the exhibition here!
Hannah Zeavin
Hannah joined the conversation on how therapy has expanded from lying on a couch talking about your childhood in Oprah Daily's How to Find the Right Kind of Therapy For You.
Read the article here!
Hannah also discussed the intersection between therapy and computation in Auto-Intimacy: Algorithmic Therapies and Care of the Self, a colloquium hosted by UC Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society.
From the event description:
“Auto-Intimacy: Algorithmic Therapies and Care of the Self” engages with therapeutic and psychiatric treatment by algorithmic automated therapies. Zeavin interrogates what therapy becomes when the traditional therapist is replaced by a computational actor. “Auto-Intimacy” opens with an overview of very early attempts to write a responsive algorithm which modeled a therapeutic relationship and addresses changes in automated therapy over the past fifty years. At the earliest moment of experimentation with automated therapies, two strains of work emerged: the simulation and detection of a disordered mind in the hopes of automating intake, diagnosis, and psychological education, and the simulation of a therapist toward the dream of automating therapeutic treatment. Zeavin will then move to a brief discussion of the politics and “gamification” of contemporary psychological applications such as “Ellie” and “Joyable” and “iHelp,” which attempt to assist persons with a wide range of mental health disorders in managing their behavior and moods. These applications, which are frequently offered by employers to employees, collapse the categories of wellness, stress, labor management, and mental health care.
Learn more about the event here!
Ritwik Banerji
Ritwik appeared as a guest for The Ohio State University School of Music to present a virtual lecture, "Undesirable Humanness: An Ethnography of the Uncanny Valley".
From the event description:
In this talk, Banerji argues that the uncanny valley is often a result of the machine’s rather accurate reenactment of disagreeable behavior the human interlocutor has encountered in past interactions with fellow human beings. To do so, this talk focuses on Banerji's work with an experimental ethnographic methodology in which he has designed virtual performers of free improvisation and subjected these to the critique of human improvisers in Berlin, Chicago and San Francisco. While most accounts of the uncanny valley assume that revulsion at the nonhuman simulation of humanlike presence stems from the mechanical quality of these objects, the ethnographic materials presented here suggest that the true object of disgust may not be the machine, but the other human beings. Similarly, though the uncanny valley is taken as the system’s failure to conjure humanness, the speaker suggests that the sensation of revulsion arises from the irony that these humanlike technologies often do succeed in accurately producing human presence that violates the human interlocutor’s conception of sociocultural norms.
Learn more about the event here!
Grace Gipson
Grace featured as a speaker for a collaboration with Georgia State University's African American Studies Department, the Faculty of the African Diaspora Organization, and the Auburn Avenue Research Library's Freedom School Lecture Series: Making Our Stories Visible": Humanizing the Black Experience through Television.
Jane McGonigal
Jane took part in the Child's Play Charity's first ever Pediatric Gaming Technology Symposium as the keynote speaker and designer.
From the event description:
The Child's Play Charity event will host a gathering of like-minded groups and individuals to discuss practices and what’s next in the high-growth fields of gaming technology within the realm of pediatric healthcare.
The Pediatric Gaming Technology Symposium starts off with a very notable figure in gaming. The keynote speaker and designer, Jane McGonigal, will launch the event in an inspirational session that denotes the therapeutic aspirations of their cause. The symposium’s ultimate goal is to get more hospitals and groups to become a part of the Child’s Play Charity list of volunteers in an effort to raise awareness around the positive effects of gaming in pediatric medicine. Many notable gaming companies sponsor the charity, including Xbox, Bungie, and HumbleBumble.
Learn more about the event here!
Trevor Paglen
Trevor featured in the Flagpole's September Art Around Town article for his exhibition, "Trevor Paglen: Vision After Seeing" in the Athenaeum. The exhibition explores the limits of human vision and the rise of automated vision technologies such as surveillance cameras and high powered telescopes and will be available through December 1st.
Check out the article here!
UGAToday also wrote on Trevor's exhibition in their article, Athenaeum opens in downtown location.
From the article:
An exhibition of photographs and a video by internationally renowned artist Trevor Paglen opened Sept. 9 and remains on display through Dec. 1. “Trevor Paglen: Vision After Seeing” presents essential questions on the differences between vision and seeing. Exploring both the limits of human vision and the rise of automated vision technologies such as surveillance cameras and high-powered telescopes, Paglen’s work probes the long history of seeing, while also reflecting on the kind of “seeing” done mostly by machines.
Check out the article here!
Trevor recently joined fellow artist Hito Steyerl for a conversation on their respective exhibitions at SJMA: Factory of the Sun and Beta Space.
Watch the conversation here!
Bo Ruberg
Bo featured as a speaker for Hidden Conference 2021. The three day conference included panels such as Facism, Surveillance, and Art, The Monstrous Body, and a plenary session led by Bo.
Learn more about the event here!