BCNM at SLSA 2021
BCNM alumnus Kris Paulsen and BCNM faculty Jacob Gaboury and Hannah Zeavin presented at the 34th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, which centered on the theme "Energy".
From SLSA:
Energy (etymologically meaning “in or at work, working”) connects us to the most pressing issues of the day: mental and physical vitality or fatigue (individual and collective, personal and political, creative and professional), including in the pandemic; the sources of energy (their extraction, depletion, abundance, and exhaustion; bitcoin mining and computational infrastructures; body energy, its flow, exploitation, alienation, and finitude); scientific theories and creative imagination around the relation between matter and energy (as in electromagnetic, particle, gravitational, acoustic forms of radiation; the living and the non-living, metamorphosis). Submissions are also invited that explore how energy is connected to power, science, and profit, history and war, flesh and labor. Building on previous SLSA topics “Out of Time” and “(Out of) Mind,” in Fall 2021 we also invite you to consider the meaning of having or being “out of energy.”
Check out the full program here!
Kris Paulsen joined the Transduction in Movement and Computing art lounge as a respondent to artist works that consider transduction in networked space. Dr. Kris Paulsen is the author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch and Art at the Interface.
Jacob Gaboury presented at Datafication, Aesthetics, Sensory Experimentation, a panel showcasing recently-published books that engage historically with science and the senses, experimental methods, aesthetics, datafication, and computation. Jacob discussed his newest book Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press). Jacob's archaeology explores the origins of early computer graphics, and the role the technology played in the transformation of the computer from a calculating machine into an interactive medium that shapes and informs our relationship to the built, sensible world. For these three new books the panel will consider the ways our sensorily experienced world has historically been mapped, graphically represented, remediated, and re-imagined through other means.
Hannah Zeavin presented at DeepFake Energies, a panel that thinks about the energies invested and expended in DeepFake phenomena: the embodied, cognitive, emotional, inventive, and other energies associated with creating and consuming machine-learning enabled media (video, text, etc.) that simulate human expression, re-create dead persons, or place living people into fake situations. Drawing on resources from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, media theory, and computational exploration, panelists trace the ways that the generative energies at the heart of these AI-powered media transform subjective and collective experiences, with significant consequences for gender, race, and other determinants of political existence in the age of DeepFakes.