PRESENTATIONS
Media, Arts and design (MAD):
What if we can be heroes, just for one day?"
BREAKING THROUGH THE SIGNAGE: PORTALS TO A NEW QUEER ART ARCHIVE
May 4, 2024Event Description: Building upon the groundwork and foundations laid by the 2022 MAD Conference, the 2024 edition seeks to further explore the role of media, arts and design in addressing the pressing challenges of our time, simultaneously aiming to delve deeper into technological innovations. This year's conference, to be held online on Saturday, May the fourth, 2024, places a distinct emphasis on the human aspects and elements, specifically tapping into the potential of individuals within the MAD community to enact meaningful change and leave a lasting impact on the world.
ACM SIGGRAPH SPARK: Queer Digital Art Now
Augmented Reality Wayfinding Solutions for Queer Art Beyond the Museums
March 22, 2024 Event Description: This SPARKS session brought together artists, technologists, experimentalists, and scholars from queer and queering perspectives. Together as a moderated panel we discussed how contemporary and modern queer art challenges gender and sexuality norms in local and global contexts. We welcomed discussions emerging from the fringe, working in retrospective, introspective, and futures that amplify, critique, subvert, and speculate together.
MACAA Conference: Satellite: The Artist and Educator as Orbital Connectors
Augmented Reality Wayfinding Solutions for Queer Art Beyond the Museums
March 21, 2024Event Description: Invisible orbiters dispersed among the sky watch, collect, and report back on what they have witnessed. Artists and educators are satellites set on a polar-orbiting path, observing slivers of the world at a time, collecting data through tuned instruments, and sending out signals for others to intercept and interpret. We facilitate the linear to curve, distance to shrink, and information to transfer. In a world where distance is growing physically, politically, economically, and ideologically, artists and educators position themselves in the information space. We provide data points in an attempt to provoke, inspire, and transform the pieces of the world we interact with. We are a network of satellites distantly collaborating to build a higher resolution image of our world.
Abstract: Amorphous is an add-on queer augmented reality learning experience for art galleries and museums, consisting of an identity and wayfinding system and a digital archive. This system involves labels displayed near artworks on gallery walls that act as a portal to similar or related works, and blends seamlessly into traditional museum settings. Within this reimagined digital space, an organized network of queer artworks and artists can be used for onsite wayfinding and/or offsite exploration. I describe the research and design process, as well as the outcomes of this creative exploration that combines new technology with an easy entry point for designers, developers, and users. I discuss the curation and development of our starter collection with 100 queer artists and the initial internet survey with young queer participants, which revealed overwhelmingly positive results. In this presentation, I also share many of the unique findings we found during our testing. Educators and beginners that wish to implement these new technologies in the real world with practical applications, working with or without students, and under limited time constraints will find them useful.
AIGA Design Conference: #TheViewFromHere
Untangling Impermanence: Exploring Potential for Mindfulness in Interaction Design for the Aging
October 13, 2023Event Description: A groundbreaking virtual experience that pushes the boundaries of what a design conference can be. The theme was "Margins," and exploring the uncharted territories of design.
Abstract: We are living longer but are we living better? World Health Organization projects that by 2030, 1 in 6 people in the world will be aged 60 years. Yet interactive technologies have been slow to catch up to the needs and wants of this growing group of users. Their distinct yet diverse perspectives are challenging to embrace for designers, especially younger ones. I describe student works from a research through design project in my interaction design classroom, seeking to untangle the complex yet universal experience of aging, allowing both the users and the designers to envision a more connected world that anticipates our ever changing bodies, thoughts, and feelings. I elaborate on how mindfulness is at play in the conceptualization and design of each application in order to help users find communities, stay on top of their self care, and connect better with their families. Through sharing these results as well as contextual and technical considerations, I shed light on a slower approach to user-centered design for digital products that anticipate our lives as we age.
New Media Caucus New Member Showcase
January 27, 2023
Event Description: The NMC showcase is a series of rapid-fire, 6-minute presentations by NMC members. It has proven to be an excellent forum to get to know the work of other new media artists and scholars in a lively atmosphere. Several spots are reserved for graduate students currently enrolled in MFA or Ph.D. programs. Due to the short presentation slots, presenters may only present one work, rather than a retrospective of their careers. Presentations will be chosen by application.
Contact Symposium, Ammerman Technology Center For Art And Technology, Connecticut College
Small Aspirations: Designing A Fortune Telling Webvr Experience For First-time Immigrants.
November 11, 2022Event Description: Contact is touch and affect; it is a means of forming communities and collaborations; it is a vehicle for contagion; it is a place, an action and an interface. The participating artists, technologists and scholars in CONTACT address a wide range of topics in their work: from climate change and sustainable food systems to space exploration, social protest, communal healing rituals, forgotten histories, the non-human world and material culture. They do this through algorithmic music performances, interactive installation, herbal medicine workshops, textile design, immersive theater productions, participatory dance performances, worldbuilding and mindfulness workshops, poetry, wearable sculptures and much much more.
Second Annual Resilience, Resistance, Renovation, Rebirth Conference, Northern Arizona University
Inadmissibility: Translating Immigration Policy Updates In The Pandemic
Mar 31 – Apr 1, 2022Event Description: COVID-19 forced us to adapt and create a new normal as we go. Considering how the pandemic has changed us, what is normal now in the STEAM fields of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics? None of us are the same as we were in early 2020. Tell us about how this pandemic has shaped your ideas. It could be a response to the virus, maybe about the isolation driven by the lockdown, or some other issue brought on by the pandemic. What has happened to your work, research, and lives that would not have happened without the interruption of COVID-19? How did the pandemic spark that innovation, cultural change, poem, industrial design, theorem, performance, medical discovery, or whatever you and your team have discovered? Looking ahead, where do you see yourself taking this idea?