PNCA Graduate Symposium 2021: Speculative Futures
November 01, 2021
November 19-20
Hallie Ford School of Graduate studies (HFSGS) at PNCA is pleased to announce the 2021 Graduate Symposium theme: “Speculative Features.” This symposium will consider how contemporary artists render algorithmic harms visible and imagine speculative futures optimized for just outcomes. The two-day event will facilitate conversations on the ethical, environmental, political, social, and economic impacts of artificial intelligence and machine learning for artists, designers, makers, writers, researchers, and cultural workers.
Featuring the work of Amelia Winger-Bearskin, an artist who innovates with technology to make a positive impact on her community and the environment, and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, a scholar and curator exploring the intersections of algorithmic justice and visual art, Speculative Futures explores how artificial intelligence shapes political imaginaries of what is yet to come.
SCHEDULE:
Friday, November 19
6:00-7:30pm - Keynote: Amelia Winger-Bearskin
7:30 pm - Exhibition Opening Reception
Saturday, November 20
12pm - Virtual Exhibition Walkthrough with Curators
2pm - Generative Prototyping and Art Making with Machines, Make+Think+Code Workshop with Megan McKissack
5pm- Keynote: Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Keynotes will be Livestreamed
Live Captioning Will be Provided
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist who innovates with artificial intelligence in ways that make a positive impact on our community and the environment. She is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is the inventor of Honor Native Sky, a project for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture:Honor Native Land Initiative. She founded Wampum.Codes which is both an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation. Wampum.codes was awarded a Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio from 2019-2020 and was featured at the 2021 imagineNative festival. She continued her research in 2021 at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF) . Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an artist, writer, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. Her work is concentrated in media studies, visual culture, and West Asian diasporas. She is a 2021 Mellon Professor in the Practice at Occidental College, where she is co-curating the exhibition “Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI” at Oxy Arts with Meldia Yesayan. She is an Associate Director of Research at the Berggruen Institute, and an Associate Editor for Noema Magazine. Prior to this, she held a two-year teaching appointment in UCLA's Department of English. Her book, Algorithmic Bias Training, or, Lectures for Intelligent Machines, is forthcoming in 2021 from X Artists’ Books.