The expansion of technology has infused STEM principles, engineering and scientific methods into the artistic process, blurring the boundaries between technology and art. This has also created new modes of collaboration among different disciplines and learning communities. Artists, makers, and researchers increasingly share expertise, interdisciplinary knowledge, and authorship. These new creative partnerships offer exciting opportunities to expand our own perspectives, but the entry point for these partnerships is not always readily apparent. The symposium explores the potential of education to bridge the gap between art and technology, bringing together disciplines and communities through new modes of collaboration.
Session One: Emerging Spaces - Collaboration in Making
Although remaining largely visual, art has expanded to include tactile, interactive and experiential modes of expression. Artistic collaboration has expanded as a result. As artists, educators, technologists, designers, scientists, human beings, how do we navigate new opportunities to listen to and learn from each other? How can we learn from humans, machines, codes, and objects in ways we haven’t imagined before?
Session Two: Collaboration with Machines
How can collaboration extend beyond the human to involve technological infrastructures and machines as we enter a new age of computing? How do we meaningfully partner up with artificial intelligence? How do artists and educators deal with the rapid influx of emergent technologies such as AR and VR? Where does computationality end, and what lies beyond? What relevance does this have for art and design classrooms and studio practices?
Schedule
12:30-1PM Registration
1-2:30 PM Short presentations: 7 short presentations, 10 minutes each. The speakers from Session One will address emerging spaces enabling interdisciplinary collaborations mediated by technology. The speakers from Session Two will address various issues related to Human-Machine collaboration.
2:30-3PM Breakout Sessions: Each presenter would lead a small discussion in a separate room. Attendees could join any discussion freely. Feel free to go in and out of different discussions, while being mindful of the shared space.
3-3:30 PM Coffee Break
3:30-4:30 PM Workshops & Maker Sessions: Hands-on making sessions featuring technology as creative practices.
4:30 – 5 PM Plenary Session with Reports
5 – 6 PM: Macy Gallery Closing Reception - On Collaboration
7PM: Gallery Closed
Speakers For Session One:
1. Marisa Jahn
Associate Professor, The New School
Bio: An artist, filmmaker, and educator of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, Marisa Morán Jahn founded Studio REV-, a non-profit organization whose public art and creative media with low-wage workers, immigrants, and teens has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art Forum, BBC; showcased at The White House, Museum of Modern Art, PBS; and awarded grants from Creative Capital, Tribeca Film Institute, Sundance, NEA, and more. She has taught at Columbia University Teachers College, The New School, American Museum of Natural History, and currently at MIT’s Department of Art, Culture, and Technology (her alma mater).
Title: Co-Designing Creative Technology
Brief: "Co-Designing Art and Creative Technology" mines examples from transmedia artist Marisa Morán Jahn's socially-engaged practice in which she engages low-wage workers, immigrants, youth, and women in producing public art and media about timely issues. Key projects include the literacy and public art project El Bibliobandido (a masked, story-eating bandit who terrorizes little kids to offer him stories they’ve written), Video Slink Uganda (experimental films slipped or “slinked” into Uganda’s bootleg cinemas), Contratados (a Yelp! for migrant workers), an app for domestic workers that CNN named as “one of 5 apps to change the world,” and CareForce One Travelogues a Sundance-supported docuseries for PBS/ITVS released online for free in Spring 2018.
2. Zoe Logan
Lead Designer, EdLab
https://cargocollective.com/zklogan/Design-1
Bio: Zoe is Lead Designer of EdLab, a research, design, and development unit at Teachers College, Columbia University, run out of the Gottesman Libraries. Zoe spent a decade in architecture before a love of open source hardware and 3D printing brought her to a creative technology degree at ITP, NYU where she focused on assistive, user-based design. Before coming to Teachers College Zoe was an Environmental Designer at IBM, a 3D printing engineer at Shapeways, a construction worker, a pastry cook and an avid carpenter.
Title: Art Exhibition and Collaboration at the Library
Brief: How do you collaborate on art within a library? The Gottesman Libraries have several art spaces where student work, commissioned work and archival materials are exhibited throughout the year. The newly-opened Smith Learning Theater hosts interactive "Learning Events" with customized material designed to enhance the learning experience. The EdLab design team, lead by Zoe Logan, endeavors to enhance life within the library by engaging actively and passively through art and design. Recent exhibits include Ziv Schneider's "The Art of Living" an AR exhibit that combines TC history and the immigrant experience in America and "Future Textile Library" a collection of garments and examples from Wearable Media Studio.
3. Liza Stark
Multi-disciplinary artist
Bio: Liza Stark is a designer, educator, eTextile practitioner, and multi-disciplinary artist based in New York whose work explores how craft, technology, and play impact how we learn as individuals and communities. Currently, she teaches in the MFA Design + Technology program at Parsons and is a research fellow at the t.LAB in the Brooklyn Design + Fashion Accelerator at the Pratt Institute. Past adventures include designing the Wearable Technology + Fashion Campus curriculum for Girls Who Code, leading the community team at littleBits, designing games and playful professional development at Institute of Play, and facilitating many workshops for all sorts of people on electronics, eTextiles, design, and games. Her work has been shown at the Wassaic Project, the International Symposium on Wearable Computers, NYCxDESIGN Week, Moulins Paillard, Maker Faire, Open Hardware Summit, CIANT, the Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interfaces Conference, and more.
Title: eTextile Spring Break - Crafting Wicked Communities
Brief: ETextile Spring Break is part residency, part conference, and part dinner party. Held in April of 2018 at the Wassaic Project in upstate New York, this event created a space for intermediate and expert electronic textile (eTextile) practitioners to convene in person and exchange knowledge. Over the course of a week, 20 artists, engineers, designers, researchers, musicians, hackers, weavers, print makers, machine knitters, and more came together to share their work, reflect on the field, learn new techniques, make together, and cook for each other. As a practice that combines tools, materials, and methodologies from electrical engineering, craft, material science, textiles, computer science, design, and interactive media, eTextiles thrives on adapting, testing, and remixing techniques from other fields. This event and other similar ones propose an alternative model of community-based learning. Like the practice itself, the event disregards disciplinary boundaries in favor of experimentation and values process over product. This talk will describe the history and outcomes of the event, along with a reflection on the model and organizing process.
4. Jaehyun Kim
Resident Designer, NYSCI
Jaehyun is an MA student in Design and Development of Digital Games at Teachers College. She designs and produces digital and non-digital games and playful experiences for children. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she devoted many hours to game-making. Prior to diving into the world of game design, she studied film-making in South Korea.
Title: Designers in Residence program at NYSCI
The Designers-in-Residence (DiR) program has been created to infuse innovation and current design principles, thinking and insight into New York Hall of Science’s Explainers. Collaborating with Explainers is the cornerstone of the residency. Explainers are high school and college students participating in NYSCI’s Science Career Ladder program by working on the museum floor, while receiving mentoring, professional development and career preparation opportunities. Explainers bring a love of learning and communicating STEM to younger audiences in NYSCI. Three explainers and Jaehyun explored how we can use virtual reality and augmented reality for developing public program in the museum.
5. Rosalie Yu
Creative Technologist, Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Columbia University
Rosalie is a creative technologist at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University. She was previously a Tech Resident at Pioneer Works, and a Research Fellow in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Rosalie uses alternative capturing techniques and immersive media to reflect upon photography, archives, and personal experience. Her recent projects have framed these concerns within larger cultural narratives like the long, exploitative history of colonial sugar production and the complex dynamics of physical intimacy in East Asian culture.
Title: Alternative Capturing Techniques for Creative Expression
Brief: Creative uses of 3D capturing techniques to explore the limits of perception and memory, to reflect upon archiving practices, to transfigure everyday experience through rituals, and to interrogate the process of capturing depth in photograph.
Speakers For Session Two:
1. Sherone Rabinovitz
Software Engineer and Educator
https://cofounderslab.com/profile/sherone-rabinovitz
Bio: Sherone is a blockchain implementation consultant for solutions in Supply Chain, Real Estate, and the Art Market, Smart Contract Development - Ethereum EVM, Solidity. He is the founder of iOS Learning Labs, providing expert onsite Training and Courseware on iOS App Development, Programming in Swift, and Programming in Objective-C.
Title: Blockchain Art: Immutable, Programmable, Trustless Creations
Brief: Blockchain Technology, most often associated with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and what seems like a whole slew of new and highly-speculative Crypto-Currencies, has - perhaps surprisingly - already had a profound impact on the Digital Art world. With its Immutable Ledger, Trustless nature, and Open Source programmability, Blockchain Technology spawned a brave new world of collaborative possibilities for artists and technologists - the likes of which we have not quite seen before. In this talk we'll take a quick look at some examples of work from this brave new world.
2. Andrew Corpuz
Creative Technologist
Andrew is a gamer, design generalist, and creative technologist who loves using technology to express the complexity and chaos of our living world. He uses his upbringing as a classical musician to combine precision with the messiness of generative art. As a result, Andrew enjoys providing creative workshops since they act as a space for students to bring unusual explorations to fruition and connect them to their daily lives.
Professionally, he has worked on the design and implementation of healthcare MOOCs and was a coordinator of the Thingspace for several years. Andrew is now working on his dissertation on the aesthetics of games for social change.
Title: Games for Change, Simulation, and Aesthetics
Brief: Amidst the popular institution from Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom that our world may be a simulation,
how can human and machines collaborate to better understand the richness and complexity of reality?
This presentation will discuss the many ways in which games have attempted to portray our rich world and its potential futures through simulation by looking at a few games as examples. Games for change have tackled complex global issues whether it be refugee crises, environmentalism, or interconnectivity. What are the suggestions and aesthetic notions of such games? What impacts have these games had on players?
3. Nitcha Fame Tothong
Creative Director, Anyways
Nitcha is a New York-based multidisciplinary designer, and artist whose work ranges from material sculpture, frame-by-frame animation to custom electronics. Her work focused on cross-medium pollination, and the juxtaposition between digital and analog that inform each other, practices in visual language as well as physical media both in craft material and electronic computation. She holds a B.F.A. in Visual Communication Design from Rangsit University and an M.F.A. in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design.
Title: Sensory Consciousness
Brief: Nitcha’s currently research concern is at the intersection of sensory experience and conscious experience, reframing the unconscious habits created by contemporary technology’s impact on daily life. The whimsical interaction and uneasy can disrupt social convention that creates unmindful and bring awareness.
4. Pamela Liou
Artist, Technologist, Educator, SFPC
Pamela Liou is an artist and technologist living in Brooklyn, NY. Implementing immersive technology, analog video circuits, and custom hardware, her work examines creative efficacy and ornamentation as tools for self-actualization and the negotiation of the self in spaces both physical and virtual. Liou was a keynote speaker at 2017's Open Source Hardware Summit where she debuted her invention DOTI, a programmable desktop jacquard-style loom. She was a resident at Eyebeam, Museum of Arts and Design, and DBRS labs and recently performed live visuals for choreographer Jonathan Gonzalez's piece Obeah at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. She currently teaches creative technology at School for Poetic Computation and Parsons School of Design. She studied at the Dramatic Writing Department and Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts.
Title: Loomed Memory
Brief: Textiles and computation have concurrent histories throughout human civilization. The loom played an integral role as a tool for expression and utility, becoming one of ancient world's most enduring metaphors across a wide expanse of cosmologies. Through understanding the technological processes of weaving on a loom, students gain the tools they need to decode the visual language of textiles as well as a tactile understanding of material logic that underpins early examples of computation such as the jacquard loom to core memory, hand-strung ferrite cores that represent a single bit of information.
Workshop Leaders
Imani Whyte-Anigboro
Fashion Designer, Maker
http://imaniwhyteanigboro.com/
Bio: Imani Whyte- Anigboro is an MA student studying Art & Art Education with a concentration in Creative Technology. Imani has a background in Fashion and Accessory Design including but not limited to Ready to Wear, Evening Wear, Costume Design, Handbag and Shoe design. Imani is using her time at Teachers College to develop and explore mixing fashion and technology through video games, robotics, and wearable tech. Developing Fashion- Tech programs for children and youth in her Harlem community.
Title: Fashionable Circuits
Brief: In this workshop you will learn about soft circuits and make our own fashionable soft circuit design project. You will have the choice of designing the front of your own pillow or designing the front of your own coin pouch with the art of your choice and jazzing it up with LED lights using standard short circuits. All the tools you need will be provided for you and when you go home you can put any finishing touches you like on your project.
Dylan Ryder
Educational Technologist, The School at Columbia University
https://dylanmryder.wordpress.com/workshops/
Bio: Dylan Ryder is an Educational Technologist at The School at Columbia University, the University’s K-8 laboratory school in New York City. His goals are to help students use technology safely, responsibly and creatively - with particular attention to engineering, computer science and creative technologies. Always pursuing innovative pedagogy, Dylan has published articles on teaching computer programming to young students and served as a K-12 CS standards writer for the CSTA. Dylan is the recent recipient of a CSTA Teaching Excellence Award and his personal research interests include machine creativity and post-privacy art.
Title: Technology by Artists, Musicians, Poets and Dancers
Brief: Making and computer programming are exciting mediums for creative expression. Programming is also more now accessible than ever with new tools designed to engage young learners, creative artists and performers. This workshop will survey prominent works of creative technology artists (e.g. Sol Lewitt, Harold Cohen, Brian Eno, Eric Rosenbaum, etc.) and segue into hands-on, New Media Art activities with computer programming and accessible technology tools. Activities provided will be in the block-based programming language, Scratch. No prior programming experience required.
Nicholas Sadnytzky
3D Modeling Designer and professional trainer
Bio: Nicholas is a life-long New Yorker, a Bennington College graduate who is also an Authorized Rhino 3D Trainer. His education is guided by a holistic Renaissance Ideal. Recently he completed a digital model of TC’s Macy Gallery. In 2013 as part of the Digital Stone Project he created a sculpture Injustice to Destruction that was exhibited both in Italy and the U. S. As a member of the Global Masters Development Program he witnessed the true face of “Extreme Poverty” which reinforced his determination to use art as a tool for improving lives. For 9 years he performed with the Dicapo Opera Theatre Company. He enjoys sharing his knowledge of the world of digital 3D modeling, animation (stop motion and digital), sculpture and data visualization. His secret passion is helping the monks of New Skete socialize their German shepherd puppies.
Title: Augmented Reality
Brief: Augmented Reality is revolutionizing how we interact with the world around us. Let us explore together the ways in which Augmented Reality can enrich, empower, and add fun to the learning experience. In this workshop we will build a simple Augmented Reality app using Unity and Vuforia (plugin) for the iOS platform.
