Laura Kurgan is a Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Center for Spatial Research and the Visual Studies curriculum. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013) and Co-Editor of Ways of Knowing Cities (Columbia Books on Architecture, 2019). Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019), at the Biennale Architettura di Venezia (2018), and in the Jerome L. Greene Science Center at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute (2017).

Her lecture will focus a collaborative project: Homophily, the Urban History of an Algorithm, currently on view at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019.  The research focuses on the urban origins of the term homophily, its formalization and proliferation through the algorithmic logics of online networks, and the risks we run when it becomes not just a descriptive model but a prescriptive rule for social life.

Sponsored by UCI Illuminations and the Emergent Media + Design initiative.

Tables with books from the following publishing concerns will be located in the conference center common area for all three days of the conference.

Palgrave Macmillan

Penn State University Press

The Scholar's Choice

University of Minnesota Press

Publisher tables will continue every day until the conclusion of the conference.

Amici Mortem (Friends of Death) is an emerging interdisciplinary alliance of healers, ritualists, artists, activists and writers working together to transform our theoretical and cultural practices surrounding Death in this unprecedented time. One way of exploring this work is developing rituals that can support an embodied inquiry into the unknown. The Compost Devotional Ritual was created with a 3-fold intention; to deepen our understanding of the cycles of life, death, decomposition and rebirth; to honor the myriad beings - living, dead and non-living - that create the soil food web; and to express gratitude and engage in reciprocity with this dynamic process that makes all life possible. Blurring the lines between science, art and ritual, I will guide a group of up to 25 people through an experiential, winding path; providing context and a theoretical background for the practice, some basic science relating to soil, compost and bio-remediation, and then leading participants through a simple but powerful ritual that can be incorporated into the day-to-day relationships between ourselves and microbial, bacterial, fungal and other beings. This work is the result of many years of experience facilitating public and private ritual in a variety of settings, as well as years of practice working with compost (both as a process and a material).

How do we help create projects without reproducing logics of colonialism and capitalism? Extraction — fossil fuels and minerals from the ground, profit from people’s labour, or data from residents and users — works against reciprocity or accountability. As producers of creative projects, research, and counter-narratives what are the issues, concepts, and practices that help us create mutually beneficial experiences and relationships? This roundtable discussion will share experiences in projects where the relationships between producers and users and audience — relational diagrams of power — embody these principles of justice-focused creative practice.

This discussion will use the Diagrams of Power exhibition and book project — which brings together the work of designers, artists, cartographers, geographers, researchers, and activists who create diagrams to tell inconvenient stories that upset and resist the status quo —  as a point of departure. Selected Diagrams of Power participants will join the conversation via videoconference. 

Diagrams of Power includes works by Joshua Akers, Burak Arikan, Josh Begley, Joseph Beuys, Alexis Bhagat, Vincent Brown, Bureau d’Études, Teddy Cruz, Department of Unusual Certainties, Peter Hall, Alex Hill, W.E.B. DuBois, Patricio Dávila, Catherine D’Ignazio, Forensic Architecture, Fonna Forman, Terra Graziani, Iconoclasistas, Lucas LaRochelle, Eliana MacDonald, Julie Mehretu, Lize Mogel, Ogimaa Mikana, Margaret Pearce, Laura Poitras, Philippe Rekacewicz, Sheila Sampath, and Visualizing Impact.

Roundtable discussants will include: Katherine Behar, Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and author of Object-Oriented Feminism; Maya Desai, Chair, Environmental Design, OCAD University and Senior Urban Designer, Moriyama Teshima Architects; David Familian, Artistic Director & Curator, Beall Center for Art + Technology; and  Jane Prophet, Associate Dean for Research, Creative Work, and Strategic Initiatives, Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan.

Sponsored by UCI's Emergent Media + Design initiative.

Over the past decade, the cultural narratives surrounding microbial life have changed dramatically. Scientists have increasingly documented the expansive scope and variety of microorganisms associated with the human body—our microbiome—and their essential contributions to health. In parallel, journalists, artists, and writers have extensively and publicly explored the imaginative possibilities of what it means to be human in a body teeming with microorganisms. To many, the concept of the microbiome upends reductive, antagonistic views of the relationship between humans and microbes, instead revealing that we are superorganisms. In this roundtable discussion, we begin from the recognition that the microbiome is no longer new. Scientists are shifting away from simply identifying microorganisms affiliated with the human body, toward the study of community dynamics amongst the microbiota. At the same time, the human microbiome is increasingly being being instrumentalized. Our roundtable discussion is built around a single question: What is the future of our field? Participants will explore this question from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Discussants include: Adam Bencard; François-Joseph Lapointe; Jennifer Saltmarsh; Kym Weed; and Melissa Wills.

In 1968 Marcel Duchamp and John Cage did a performance called “Reunion.” They assembled a group of their friends to both witness the perform and be part of this celebration. The chessboard for Reunion used cutting-edge technology designed and developed for Cage by Lowell Cross. Reunion is an event without a score. The game works as an indeterminate experience: as a game of chess is played, the moves of the players on the board trigger a composition, and the sound is distributed to eight speakers surrounding the audience. The John Cage Trust recreated the chessboard. Come experience John Cage’s chessboard with a score composed by Alex Joseph Lough. This is a unique opportunity to experience this groundbreaking interactive sound work.

This experimental video and roundtable discussion, created by Karen Finley and Bruce Yonemoto while artists-in-residence at California’s Montalvo Arts Center, touches on the racism of the Center’s founder, James D. Phelan, and brings the story up to the present. Finley’s performance channels Phelan, one of the biggest proponents of anti-Japanese immigration laws at the turn of the last century, which ultimately resulted in the imprisonment of 150,000 Japanese Americans by the U.S. government. The roundtable will discuss racism towards American Asians to our situation today vis-à-vis American people of color.

The designer, the practice of designing, and the products of design are situated in increasingly diverse cultural, social, and economic environments. As design educators, we wish to better understand these phenomena in order to  support the development of culturally inclusive design practices. Current teaching methods generally do not honor cultural diversity as something intrinsic to design excellence. This roundtable will begin with a presentation by the current Graphic, Industrial, and Environmental program chairs at OCAD University—the largest and most comprehensive art, design and media university in Canada—about their attempt to take university-wide guiding principles on inclusion and diversity from a state of vision to one of action in the classroom. This ongoing research reveals several dominant themes across five aspects of studio-based pedagogy that are common to all design disciplines: the setting of the learning space, the assignment structure, the design process, peer/mentor critique, and the assignment outcomes. Invited UCI guests will then respond to this research with an eye towards reimagining design education for the 21st century.

Roundtable discussants include Stephen Barker, Dean, Claire Trevor School of the Arts; Geoffrey Bowker (Donald Bren Professor in Information and Computer Sciences and co-author of Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences); Keith Murphy (Associate Professor of Anthropology and author of Swedish Design: An Ethnography); Valerie Olson (Associate Professor of Anthropology and author of Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth); Julia Lupton (Faculty Director, Illuminations: The Chancellor's Arts and Culture Initiative and author of Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life); Antoinette LaFarge (Professor o Electronic Art and Design and author of Louise Brigham and the Early History of Sustainable Design); Simon Penny (Professor o Electronic Art and Design and author of Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment); Theresa Jean Tanenbaum (Assistant Professor in Informatics and Director of the Transformative Play Lab), Sanjoy Mazumdar (Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy and co-chair, Cultural Aspects of Design Network), John Crawford (Associate Dean, Claire Trevor School of the Arts and Director, Emergent Media + Design), and Ivan Williams (Trustee, UCI Foundation and supporter of This Changes Everything).

Sponsored by UCI's Emergent Media + Design initiative.

Sara Diamond is the president of OCAD University, the largest and most comprehensive art, design and media university in Canada. While retaining OCAD U's traditional strengths in art and design, Diamond has guided the university in becoming a leader in digital media, inclusive design, and sustainable technologies. Previously, from 1995 to 2005, she was the director of research at the Banff Centre, where she created the Banff New Media Institute.  Diamond holds a Ph.D. in computer science and degrees in new media theory and practice, social history, and communications. She is an appointee of the Order of Ontario, the Order of Canada and the Royal Canadian Society of Artists. As we move into a time of algorithmic technologies, Sara's talk will address OCAD U's work to bring STEM, Indigenous knowledge, and other diverse voices together in order to position human and environmental agencies within these equations.

Sponsored by UCI's Emergent Media + Design initiative.

Conference goers are invited to a special reception for artist lauren woods’s installation American Monument in advance of her artist’s talk on Friday. You may also view the show anytime during regular gallery opening hours, which are noon-6 pm, Thurs.-Sat.

In AirLock we are conducting an experimental dramatization of the way in which, given the impending cascade of living system collapse, the earth itself can be considered a kind of airlock - a fragile intermediating zone that can sustain human life within the extreme environment of outer space. Through a layered video design that composites live video feed with archival footage, AirLock proposes a visual algorithm that delineates and muddies the boundaries of four spheres of existence. Actor-controlled media mechanisms realize the elastic scale of the worlds by generating surprising alignments and disjunctions. AirLock divides the stage into four distinct but interconnected playing areas. First, an astronaut floats on life support tether in the airlock of his spacesuit outside the orbiting US-Russian space station. Second, a female RussianCosmonaut is attempting to communicate to this astronaut from an airlock on the space station that has itself malfunctioned. Third, a tense night-time scene in mission control in which a female scientist attempts to keep things under wrap. Downstage of these interlocking scenes is, finally, a “beach” area where the astronaut and his Russian and American colleagues interact in a series of flashbacks that fill in what is really unfolding between the three main characters. For SLSA we will present a 40-minute staged reading of the full text, involving seven actors and easily portable elements of the media design, with the goal of moving on to a full stage production in 2020.

Free but reservations are strongly recommended

Created by director Annie Loui and artist Antoinette LaFarge, Reading Frankenstein is an intermedia performance in which a contemporary scientist named Mary Shelley discovers that one of her failed genetic experiments is running amok in her laboratory, at the same time as the novel Frankenstein is haunting her imagination. Given the autonomy of A.I. and the accelerating scientific possibilities of CRISPR, Reading Frankenstein presents questions about ethics and evolution in an era of genetic possibility. The show is about an hour and a quarter long with no intermission.

Be an image, buy an image. Buy an idea, be an idea. High theory meets the everyday in the mundane of t-shirts. This project expands the possibilities of the self in fashion, self-fashioning, and thought by offering inexpensive t-shirts designed for participants of SLSA 2019. We are offering a t-shirt booth on Friday and Saturday alongside the publishers' tables. The silkscreen printed t-shirts will be designed and made by artists Marina Zurkow, Andy Brown, Krista Davis, and Ron Broglio. The shirts will have brief theory slogans sourced from the conference itself, including ideas from panelists, keynotes, and our own designs drawing from contemporary theorists (such as Isabelle Stenger’s saying “another world is possible”). Proceeds will go to SLSA. Clothes have become the capitalist and consumerist mode of self-fashioning and identity; the products available for purchase determine the parameters for what we can do, think, and be. Why wear Levis or The Gap when you can wear a Tim Morton or a Deleuze?

Shirts will be sold until stock is depleted or until the end of the conference.

This roundtable will be discussing the Lithuania Pavilion's contribution to the 2019 58th Venice Biennale titled Sun & Sea (Marina), which won the biennial's Golden Lion award for Best National Participation. Sun & Sea (Marina) was an experimental opera about climate change by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, taking place on an artificial beach inside a warehouse-like setting. The roundtable will explore the themes of experimental exhibition installation practices, audience interaction, and the political capacities of leisure and banality in the face of global climate crisis.

Each panelist will prepare a short response to the work before the discussion moves into a more free-flowing conversation. Audience members are encouraged to think about the work ahead of time and participate once the roundtable is open to questions.

This roundtable will be discussing the Lithuania Pavilion's contribution to the 2019 58th Venice Biennale titled Sun & Sea (Marina), which won the biennial's Golden Lion award for Best National Participation. Sun & Sea (Marina) was an experimental opera about climate change by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, taking place on an artificial beach inside a warehouse-like setting. The roundtable will explore the themes of experimental exhibition installation practices, audience interaction, and the political capacities of leisure and banality in the face of global climate crisis.

Each panelist will prepare a short response to the work before the discussion moves into a more free-flowing conversation. Audience members are encouraged to think about the work ahead of time and participate once the roundtable is open to questions.

APRIORI is a techno-botanical coven that cultivates revolutionary alliances between plants and machines. Our familiars suggest that this alliance has a history reaching back to at least the 1500s. We work to understand more deeply the ‘nature’ of intelligence, and how the differences between communication and resource exchange are collapsing. The future of humanity is not at stake, but racist capitalist heteropatriarchy is.

For our SLSA workshop, we customize seed packets for participants’ AI – for smart phones, chat bots, virtual assistants, etc. We begin to investigate the specifics relating to the machine learning algorithms inherent in these technologies, and imagine more-than human ecologies that can unravel these proprietary regimes. Participants are invited to connect algorithms to our spell writing application; spells we write together are converted to algorithms and then converted into seed packets. Conversations about APRIORI’s larger mission (above) will thread through the workshop, prompting speculation about human, technological, and ecological survival in the Capitalocene.

One Day / One Box is a workshop in which participants will engage in alternative approaches to archival research: improvisatory, spontaneous, playful. During the workshop, we will take an 'archive dive' into UCI's Langson Library Special Collection, exploring the lives of people whose collections may exist outside our usual areas of interest or research. These interventios will provide participants with new approaches and conceptual frameworks for teaching archival research, designing course projects, and approaching their own research. One Day / One Box is part of "Out of the Archive," an ongoing collaborative project focused on expanding access to materials hidden in 'minor' and less-known archives, often by women and people of color, marginalized both in their own time and now by history. Minor archives can provide first-hand historical accounts in many forms including unpublished manuscripts, autobiographies, diaries and journals, and correspondence, bearing witness to history that is relatively inaccessible to the general public. What might it take for these personal narratives to become public history? Join us for a uniquely free-wheeling session in the Langson Library Special Collection.

(Please meet at the registration desk for this workshop.)

This session will take conference attendees through the process of designing and building an experimental 30’ sailcraft based on Micronesian designs, built on a low budget with recycled materials and mostly unskilled student helpers. The workshop will focus on custom fabrication of components and composite materials, and the skills, tools, and the emergent design process involved.

(Please meet at the registration desk for this workshop.)

This performance-presentation is the first in a pair of Fluxus-themed panels—the third such sequence at SLSA since 2017—structured in the format of 20 seconds x 20 slides. In honor of the SLSA topic, “Experimental Engagements,” this performative research presentation is broken down into two topical threads. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which terminology suggests genetic, but also manipulable linguistic and image clusters. Considered this way, CRISPR offers new ways of understanding the relationships between parts and wholes, between repetition and its opposites, and between metasystems and their many iterations. The vangarde in general, and Fluxus in particular, anticipates some of the more interesting dimensions of this emerging, editable, informationally flexible, materially transformative process. Part One: A Flux Bestiary is a sequence of presentations on Fluxus (and related) artists’ interest in animal hybrids and genetic manipulation. Participants and titles: Dennis Summers: "Max Ernst and the CRISPR Chimera"; Michael Filas: "The Goose That Would Not be Cooked"; Trent Straughan: "What It’s Like to Present to a Bat"; Hannah Higgins: "Larry’s Miller’s Flux Genetics"; Roger Rothman: "CRISPY Dick: Art of the Splice"; Karen Moss: "Exquisite Cadaver in Flux"; and Simon Anderson: "The Soaphorse Opera by Dick Higgins."

Opening Reception for AT THE MARGINS: EXHIBITION

Experimental Engagements in Science, Literature, and the Arts

Viewpoint Gallery. University of California, Irvine

The exhibition runs November 8-16, 2019. Open every day, 7 a.m. - midnight.

How can we visually represent the SLSA 2019 conference theme — and, equally, the extraordinary confluence of work in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, and related fields that SLSA foregrounds? How can we show the wide range of interests among the university researchers, independent scholars, and artists who make up the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts? For this special exhibition organized for the 33rd Annual Meeting, we are addressing these questions with a simple prompt: what is the location of your experimental engagement?

Featuring creative work by: Maria Whiteman; Brad Necyk; Owen Smith; Christel Dillbohner; Elizabeth Stirratt; Dennis Summers; Robert Rhee; Aja Rose Bond; Steven J. Oscherwitz; Yulia Gilich; Yvette Granata; Jason McDermott; Lissa Holloway-Attaway; Abraham Avnisan; Maria Michails; Jiayi Young, Tim Hyde, Jean-Marc Chomaz, and Samuel Bianchini; Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Stéphane Degoutin, and Gwenola Wagon; Jennifer Willet; Rebecca Uliasz and Quran Karriem; Kristine Thompson; Devon Ward; Eddie Lohmeyer; Paul Harris; Enrica Costello; Erika Lynne Hanson; Clea T. Waite; Jonathon Paden; Emilio Taiveaho Pelaez; Kimberly Lyle; Robert Lawrence; Mark Marino and LA Inundacion; Heather Parrish; Rebecca Cummins; Will Hallett; Catherine Griffiths; Nina Vroemen and Krista Davis; Victoria McReynolds; Jesse Colin Jackson; The Speculative Prototyping Lab; Antoinette LaFarge; Margaretha Haughwout, Elæ (Lynne DeSilva-Johnson), Efrén Cruz Cortéz, and Suzanne Husky; and Betty Spackman.

A roundtable discussion focused on the past, present and future of the A in SLSA. Participating artists: Maria Whiteman, Jason McDermott, Yvette Granata, Dennis Summers, Heather Parrish, Victoria McReynolds, Owen Smith, Lissa Holloway-Attaway, Rebecca Uliasz, Quran Karriem, Emilio Jesus Taiveaho, Robert Lawrence, Devon Ward, Clea White, Margaretha Haughwout, Efrén Cruz Cortéz

“Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment” (Tsing). In this workshop, we will collectively imagine future biomes. First, participants will be introduced to speculative design as a methodology, and then cooperatively engage in new ways of imagining living in a new world. Participants will participate in hands-on co-creation of new techno-geographic milieus of the coming world. Techno-geographic is a concept from Gilbert Simondon that encourages an understanding of the technical object in relation to a natural environment. We will use this as a jumping off point for speculating about the future. Through a series of design exercises that speculate on climate futures and anthropocentrism we adapt aspects from speculative design and making use of Simondon’s concept of transduction, the dynamic operation by which potential energies are restructured from one state to another, creating new experiential milieus. Transductive thought allows us to trace processes of differentiation, individuation, and ongoingness. We will consider the transformation of energy, orientations thinking that is not inside/outside, and the framing of a context in which states are not reversible. These ways of thinking about climate futures provide an opportunity to understand complexity, temporality, and decision-making and designing in a world of economic and ecological ruination. We will attempt to operationalize transduction into new experimental practices in order to provide new relational and emergent forms of knowledge-building and sense-making in a design space to understand human and nonhuman populations, infrastructures, and systems. The results from this workshop will be presented in the roundtable discussion (Speculative Design in Climactic Times) and utilized to think about ongoing research and design of a work infrastructure that supports ocean science research.

Please sign up for this workshop here: https://forms.gle/iXE6jRuQr6KTzXhw8 Max 20 participants.

This performance-presentation is the second in a pair of Fluxus-themed panels—the third such sequence at SLSA since 2017—structured in the format of 20 seconds x 20 slides. In honor of the SLSA topic, “Experimental Engagements,” this performative research presentation is broken down into two topical threads. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which terminology suggests genetic, but also manipulable linguistic and image clusters. Considered this way, CRISPR offers new ways of understanding the relationships between parts and wholes, between repetition and its opposites, and between metasystems and their many iterations. The vangarde in general, and Fluxus in particular, anticipates some of the more interesting dimensions of this emerging, editable, informationally flexible, materially transformative process. Part Two: The Spliced Metatexts of Fluxus and the Vangarde examines how language and other metasystems and been conceived along lines similar in structure to CRISPR, the gene sequence that can be subject to an editing process. Particpants: James McManus: “In Advance of …”: Marcel Duchamp’s Titles"; CRaigSaPeR: "Mystory in chance permutations and randomization: re-viewing art history as a CRSPR formation"; Christine Filippone: "Art Systems in Flux"; Laurel Fredrickson: "Rumors, Secrets, and Lies: Experimental Practices in the Arts from the 1960s and the Present, a Sampling"; Chris Reeves: "The Best Worst Orchestra"; Owen Smith and Randy Regier: "20 Slippages through past and present: practice of performative ideation as research, or acting in the flux of Fluxus"; Nicole Woods: "Spacer Sequences in Alison Knowles’s Algorithmic Poem, The House of Dust (1968)"; and Lauren C Sudbrink: "400 Seconds on Vexations".

In this roundtable, we will discuss speculative efforts that rethink both the methods of design and the boundaries of human experience. Three design projects will be used to open a discussion on the value of speculative and experimental practices in envisioning future possibilities. Audrey Desjardins will discuss her work on co-speculation: speculating with people who have a particularly well-suited position (or experience) to imagine futures or alternate presents, specifically around the Internet of Things in domestic spaces. By working with people who live in a boat, a basement suite, a houseboat, a van, a 8-person communal home, an apodment, etc., we ground speculations in actual spaces. Heidi Biggs will discuss her speculative project centered on cycling and climate change. Through their daily exposure to the elements, everyday cyclists are attuned to climate and uniquely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The goal of this research is to facilitate new understandings of climate change to encourage more emboldened, empathetic, nuanced, local and personal understandings of climate change. Michael Beach and Tyler Fox will discuss the results of their speculative workshop, Speculative Transduction. This workshop invites participants to envision climate futures to understand complexity, temporality, decision-making, and designing in a world of economic and ecological ruination. We will present documentation of the SLSA workshop, and connect it to emergent design of a work infrastructure that supports ocean science research.

This is a temporary public art project in which the public is invited to inhabit poetic form by reconfiguring a transparent room-sized inflatable shape. This shape is based on a mathematical structure of the Calabi-Yau manifold known to dissolve boundaries between two subjects while having the capacity of adding extra spatial dimensions during possible transformations between spaces. The project draws inspiration from the type of Japanese poetry called tanka: a 31-syllable poem, with a five-line 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form. Participants are encouraged to go inside the two-dimensional inflatable material and  — by folding, turning, bending, and flipping — discover the shape and potential of bodies in proximity moving together through 31 folds. Proximity sensors placed along the way will respond to bodies coming together. Through the act of reconfiguring the inflatable, the public is “composing” and inhabiting the Japanese poetic tradition associated with romantic love since the 7th century. Poetic form manifested as physical form invites viewers to contemplate the meaning of love in an era of hyper-visibility and accelerated reality. Differing layers of plastic material also allow for varying layers of translucent witnessing from the exterior. A University of California Humanities Research Institute's Horizons in the Humanities project, Love in the Dialectic of Vanity is Jiayi Young, Yogita Goyal, Coleman Dobson, and Wenjie Cao. Engineer: Ye Xiang. Student Intern: Ting-Yu Chang. Project Advisor: Danny Snelson.

Take a walk with Simon Leung and Kimberli Meyer to the Beall Center and experience American Monument, an artwork by lauren woods that examines the cultural conditions under which African Americans lose their lives to police brutality. A participatory inter-media monument, the artwork provides a vehicle for analyzing the complex relationship between the construction of race, material violence, structural power, and monumentality itself. In this gallery visit, which will immediately precede the plenary event "In Conversation with lauren woods,” Leung and Meyer will discuss the work and invite participants to respond.

(Please meet at the registration desk for this roundtable.)

Artist lauren woods will give a brief presentation about her American Monument installation, followed by an open conversation with guest discussants. American Monument is a multi-media installation addressing police brutality and the killing of African Americans by police officers. The centerpiece of the work consists of a grid of 25 record players, each holding a record related to one of these deaths.  American Monument will be on view at the Beall Center for Art + Technology concurrently with the conference.

Sponsored in part by UCI Illuminations and the Beall Center for Art + Technology.

Mark Micchelli and Alex Lough’s experimental piano+electronics duo Teeth & Metals will be performing two works for prepared piano and performed electronics by composers Omar Costa Hamido and Adib Ghorbani. The show is about 45 minutes long and will be followed by a 30-minute panel discussion with the performers and composers.

Free, but seating is limited.

The panel is comprised of doctoral students in UCI’s Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology PhD program. Each presenter will describe their specific experiences, approaches, and different perspectives as both composers and performers, working together to collaboratively create in a studio setting acting as an experimental laboratory space. We will discuss our experimental engagements at the borders of genres and media, blending of roles, and desire to express work that challenges presumed expectations, in both the creation and realization of the works. The panel will specifically address our understanding and interpretation of the term “experimental” in the context of contemporary music-making practices in a research program.

Free but reservations are strongly recommended

Created by director Annie Loui and artist Antoinette LaFarge, Reading Frankenstein is an intermedia performance in which a contemporary scientist named Mary Shelley discovers that one of her failed genetic experiments is running amok in her laboratory, at the same time as the novel Frankenstein is haunting her imagination. Given the autonomy of A.I. and the accelerating scientific possibilities of CRISPR, Reading Frankenstein presents questions about ethics and evolution in an era of genetic possibility. The show is about an hour and a quarter long with no intermission.

This featured session of the Game Studies Stream brings together game makers, scholars, teachers, writers, and players to demonstrate their designs and creations.  Participants can walk around, try out different games, and talk with creators in this remixed "poster session" and "arcade."  Featured games engage a range of perspectives, disciplines, and topics including social media, science and technology, literature, alternate realities, digital humanities, gender and sexuality, metagaming, and environmental studies.

Out of Mind is a fusion of experimental theatre and experimental neuroscience; the project draws on tools of inquiry from both fields to investigate how the brain constructs emotion in depression and wellness. The performance-lecture presents rationale, methods and results of a laboratory study that measured the brain of an actress as she embodied extreme emotion states. This research takes as its premise evidence that emotion is not solely triggered in the brain but constructed through the integration of bodily experience and language. Results instruct the design of neurotechnologies to treat depression. Out of Mind also reflects a reciprocal exchange between scientist and artist: the creation a conference presentation that disrupts the lecture format with creative elements from theatre arts. In doing, the piece comments the process of discovery while highlighting a relational context that is rarely acknowledged in conventional scientific discourse. In both laboratories (theatrical/scientific), Out of Mind has been three years in development. It is produced by Farm Arts Collective (Damascus, PA) and supported by funding from the EST/Sloan New Play Development Fund. The scientific research project is on-going at the Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics, Icahn School of Medicine (NY, NY). The lecture-performance is 45 minutes in length, followed by 15 minutes for questions and discussion.

This panel is devoted to Susan McHugh's Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction, which is the newest publication from AnthropoScene, the SLSA book series. We would like to include an art/performance component but that has yet to be arranged.

Everyone is cordially invited to attend this meeting!

SLSA is presenting this year's Lifetime Achievement Award to Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  A leading theorist of human relationships with machines and with non-human species, Haraway is the author of such influential books as Staying with the Trouble (2016), When Species Meet (2008), The Companion Species Manifesto: (2003), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), and Primate Visions (1989).

Following the presentation of the award, there will be an open conversation with Donna Haraway centering on a short piece of writing by Ursula LeGuin, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," which conference attendees are encouraged to read ahead of time. To create a collective experiential setting, Professor Haraway also invites us to bring along an actual carrier bag and to "think about the worlds contained in that bag." 

Featuring carrier bags contributed by:

Brad Necyk, Edmond Chang, Margaretha Haughwout, Steven Meyer, Lisa Cartwright, Evan Meaney, Efren Cruz, Garrett Johnson, Mark Paterson, Meredith Tromble, Susan McHugh, Kiki Benzon, Jessica Ruzek, Patricio Davila, Carol Stabile, Kate Mondloch, Sherryl Vint, Amanda Stojanov, Alenda Chang, Maya Gurantz, Ethan McGinnis, Aja Rose Bond, Ronald Broglio, Lynn Turner, Joel Ong, Marcel O’Gorman, Dennis Summers, Jane Prophet, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Angie Willey, Danielle Taschereau Mamers, Jonathan Alexander, Helen Burgess, Muindi Fanuel Muindi, Laura Forlano, Bryan Alkemeyer, Chaz Evans, Sean Yeager, Amy Catanzano, Alison Annunziata, Deborah Levitt, David Cecchetto, Katherine Behar, David Rambo, Rebecca Uliasz

In Der Spiegel’s famous interview with Martin Heidegger, he proclaimed that cybernetics is the new philosophy. Many decades later, Heidegger's pronouncement appears prescient. Our age is one of ubiquitous digital technology, media, and algorithms—one in which social relations are rendered as networks, intelligence and cognition are conceived in terms of information processing, and humanity is believed to be replicable as programmable 'artificially intelligent' machinery. While this new age precipitates utopian declarations of connectivity and democratization, there has also been continuous disquiet as to the social and political effects of the cybernetic orientation toward control. How do we evaluate the legacy of cybernetics? In this roundtable panel, we ask: How do we respond to the present ‘posthuman’ condition of cybernetic thought and system-building? Is cybernetic control of humanity being achieved? Are machines, networks, and information necessarily enemies in fights for just, equitable, and sustainable futures? Can we envision or enact new intelligences, new networks, or new (post)humanities? Invited roundtable members not listed as authors include: Thierry Bardini, Phillip Thurtle, Nat Mengist and Desiree Foerster.

The VGA Reader (https://www.videogameartgallery.com/vga-reader) is a peer-reviewed journal for video game practitioners and audiences interested in the history, theory, and criticism of video games, explored through the lens of art history and visual culture. The journal, along with its parent organization VGA Gallery, are examples of a network of new support structures that facilitate conversation and exploration of video game art, documenting and disseminating discourse about the far-reaching influence of video games on history, society, and culture. This roundtable session presents an overview of similar emerging infrastructures aimed toward the development of video game art. What venues, publications, institutions, platforms, communities, and alternative economies exist to support artists making video games and their audiences? Which are currently in development? What kind of constitutions and foundational logics should they take on? What have they already achieved? What practices have developed that are counter-productive for the discipline of video game art? Which have already come and gone and in that case how do we have access to their institutional memory? What can these kinds of infrastructures do to promote inclusivity and education? This session is an open conversation on the taxonomy and review of these kinds of initiatives that serve a similar purpose yet are resolved as very different spaces, texts, and practices.

An Archive of Unnamed Women is a speculative feminist remix project that includes an original, digital archive that juxtaposes two sets of data: (1) photographs of unidentified women selected from the New York Public Library collection of more than 118,000 photographs, and (2) 235 quotes from fiction in which female characters are described by women writers. In lieu of citation information, visitors to An Archive of Unnamed Women are presented with descriptions drawn from a collection of women’s writing about women. Joined with photographs in the database, the resulting narratives relocate the women on the screen as subjects of literary examination. This project, which recovers women left out of the narrative of preservation, is exhibited in galleries and libraries and accompanied by a workshop revealing the arbitrary nature of information preservation. Accompanying the exhibits and workshops is a quilt housing technology to highlight the names of workshop participants. The Quilt of Named Participants is a physical centerpiece that archives named guests and furthers dialogue about visibility and identity when information is collected. This project engages art audiences in exhibition spaces, the scholarly community, libraries, as well as the public in a critical demonstration of problems with archival algorithms. It demonstrates the need for archivists to collaborate with critical race and gender scholars to develop new methods of material organization that circumvents these issues. We have delivered this workshop to various groups of people in 90 minutes (up to 20 people) and 120 minutes (up to 45 people). We need internet connection to deliver this workshop. Please see the PDF for a workshop outline and description.

In this roundtable, six poets will read and discuss work about their engagements with science that was or is considered peripheral to mainstream scientific theory and practice. The participants are Will Alexander, Karen Leona Anderson, Kristin George Bagdanov, Amy Catanzano, Adam Dickinson and Stephanie Strickland. Addressing physics, mathematics, biology, as well as other scientific disciplines, these poets will ask how cultural forces shape and define “the marginal” as well as the ingenious ways that science was transformed by marginal practitioners. This roundtable will also ask why poetry, as a genre sometimes considered both marginal and experimental, is well suited to treat questions of knowledge, power, and speculation at the boundaries, and we'll discuss how poets use such language not just to represent, but to intervene in, the processes of scientific inquiry.  Drawing on everything from early microscopy to contemporary physics, these readings will Involve the audience in a discussion of the embodied, material consequences of “experimental engagements” for both scientists and poets.

This is a roundtable dicusses and disseminates the outcome of Useful Fictions, a week-long symposium and public participatory art project in that took in September 2019, at École Polytechnique in Paris, France. Humans collect and interpret measurements to understand the world and exercise control over chaos. We rely on mechanisms of measurement on the assumption that they establish a truth in which we can believe. However, as traces, proxies, and indices, measurements are fragile and prone to manipulation and misinterpretation. In the context of a complex problem, such as climate change in the Anthropocene, this relationship has become increasingly political. Useful Fictions offered a platform to embrace complex problems by modeling radical openness to research in which tools, laboratories, studios are shared between artists and scientists to expand concepts for ecological thinking. Bridging the divide between urgency and agency, the project gathered a coalition of artists, designers, humanists, and graduate students to work with globally acclaimed climate scientists in their laboratories to build future machines and write absurd fictions.

Useful Fictions features artwork by Imma Bastida, Victoria Vesna, Alexis Tantet, Vera Fearns, Ryan Cook, Guglielmo Zalukar, Tyler Lutz, Jean-Marc Chomaz, Tim Hyde, Stuart Dalziel, Jenny Dalziel, Peter Hoffman, Beatriz Tatiana Avendaño Peña, Nathalie von Veh, Anouk Daguin, Olga Flor, Nicole Vereau-Kraemer, Giancarlo Rizza, Antoine Desjardins, Simone Leantan, Laurent Karst, Jean Menezes, Nathanial Gilchrist, Aline Becq, Gareth Paterson, Jiayi Young, Samuel Bianchini, Ianis Lallemand, David Bihanic, Filippo Fabbri, Jeanne Bloch, Elín Margot, Jacklyn Brickman, Raphaelle Kerbrat,  Manuelle Freire, Aniara Rodado, Pedro Soler, Teresa Margaret Carlesimo, Elisheba Fuenzalida, Matthew Ledwidge, Stefan Laxness, and WhiteFeather Hunter.

This is a generative design workshop where beginners and experts can create computer-generated graphics with thoughtful text and image placements for critical engagement with technology and art-making. This workshop addresses how code can be used as a tool for creating meaning and expressing ideas. Javascript and the p5.js library will be used to introduce several basic concepts such as variables, functions, and randomness.

(Please meet at the registration desk for this workshop.)

Andrea Polli is an environmental artist working at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Her interdisciplinary research has been presented as public artworks, media installations, community projects, performances, broadcasts, mobile and geolocative media, publications, and through the curation and organization of public exhibitions and events. She creates artworks designed to raise awareness of environmental issues. Often these works express scientific data obtained through her collaborations with scientists and engineers and have taken the form of sound art, vehicle-based works, public light works, mobile media experiences, and bio-art and design. Polli holds an M.F.A. in Time Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Ph.D. in practice-led research from the University of Plymouth in the UK.

In Polli’s 2018 book project Hack the Grid, she presents past and current projects that reveal how data visualizations create emotional impact and societal change and engages in conversations with scientists, activists, technologists, and designers. Featured projects include Particle Falls, an artwork and visualization of air quality data, and Energy Flow, a real-time visualization of wind speed and direction installed on a bridge and powered by sixteen wind turbines. In addressing the relationship between energy and environmental sustainability, Polli reveals the power of data visualizations to inspire citizens and change the world for the better.

Sponsored by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society and the Humanities Center.

Conference goers are invited to a closing reception and viewing of BLUE WAVE, the last large-scale multimedia installation of the late Berkeley artist Lutz Bacher.  Produced in the seven months  prior to her death in May 2019, it includes 100 prints, several videos, and other works. You may also view the show anytime during regular gallery opening hours, which are noon-6 pm, Thurs.-Sat.

AT THE MARGINS: POPUP

Located in the Amphitheater, the Arts Plaza, and continuing during the closing Rooftop Dance Party on the 4th floor of the CAC.

This event features video and performance work from SLSA members and UCI art graduate students. Curated by Krista Davis and sponsored by EM+D.

Mark Micchelli and Alex Lough’s experimental piano+electronics duo Teeth & Metals will be performing two works for prepared piano and performed electronics by composers Omar Costa Hamido and Adib Ghorbani. The show is about 45 minutes long and will be followed by a 30-minute panel discussion with the performers and composers.

Free, but seating is limited.

The panel is comprised of doctoral students in UCI’s Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology PhD program. Each presenter will describe their specific experiences, approaches, and different perspectives as both composers and performers, working together to collaboratively create in a studio setting acting as an experimental laboratory space. We will discuss our experimental engagements at the borders of genres and media, blending of roles, and desire to express work that challenges presumed expectations, in both the creation and realization of the works. The panel will specifically address our understanding and interpretation of the term “experimental” in the context of contemporary music-making practices in a research program.

Free but reservations are strongly recommended

Created by director Annie Loui and artist Antoinette LaFarge, Reading Frankenstein is an intermedia performance in which a contemporary scientist named Mary Shelley discovers that one of her failed genetic experiments is running amok in her laboratory, at the same time as the novel Frankenstein is haunting her imagination. Given the autonomy of A.I. and the accelerating scientific possibilities of CRISPR, Reading Frankenstein presents questions about ethics and evolution in an era of genetic possibility. The show is about an hour and a quarter long with no intermission.

The events of 1947, from the birth of the Cold War to the first reports of UFOs, reverberate to this day. Pianist Alan Terricciano explores the year 1947 through the lens of the extraordinary piano music produced that year by Prokofiev, Ustwolskaja, Wolpe, Monk, Talma, Cage and Hovhaness.

Tickets Required, must be purchased in advance.

All conference goers are invited to the closing party for SLSA 2019. It will take place on the top floor of the Contemporary Art Center, whose deck offers superb views of the surrounding area. Hosted by UCI’s Art graduate students, there will be music, food, and drinks for all.