MICHELLE MCAULIFFE + BILL FONTANA + JONATHAN MOORE + HAYTHAM NAWAR
Location: UCLA CNSI | Presentation Space (Fifth Floor)
Following an opening reception for Haytham Nawar's exhibition Collective Bread Diaries: A Taste of Protest, join us for our monthly LASER talk! Featuring presentations by:
Michelle Mcauliffe
Bill Fontana
Jonathan Moore
Haytham Nawar
A presentation about Fontana's recent work that explores the image that a sound makes and the sounds that an image makes.
Bill Fontana has worked for the past 45 years creating installations that use sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. These have been installed in public spaces and museums around the world including San Francisco, New York, Rome, Paris, London, Chicago, Vienna, Berlin, Venice, Sydney ,Tokyo, Barcelona, Linz, Manchester, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi.
Dr. Claudia Schnugg is an independent researcher in intersections of art and aesthetics with science, technology, and business, and producer of art and science collaboration.
Her recent work focuses on intertwining artists and art projects with new technologies and scientific research. She has explored effects of artistic interventions on social settings, especially framing artistic interventions and art programs in organizations.
Claudia produces media art projects as well as art and science programs. She also holds workshops, runs research projects, and gives talks about developments on the intersection of art, science, technology, and business.
Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist, and author of several popular books about contemporary art. She has earned her reputation by making the outposts of vanguard art accessible to broad audiences. The current vanguard, she believes, is propelled by environmental consciousness that is not only the defining characteristic of contemporary manufacturing, architecture, science, ethics, politics, and philosophy, it is delineating contemporary art.
A presentation of outstanding wearable technology projects from the School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. From prototype to final design, Anne Niemetz will be discussing design strategies for creative expressions with wearable technology while presenting projects that have been created by her students, including World of Wearable Art finalist garments.
Beyond the Uncanny Valley of the Dolls
Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley
Thursday, February 9th in the EDA at 6PM
"I want to be a robot." - Andy Warhol
In 1919, a year before the word “robot” was coined, Sigmund Freud published an influential essay, Das Unheimliche, later translated into English as “The Uncanny”. The essay and the concept of the Uncanny are familiar to literary theorists and art historians, who have charted its the literary and theatrical origins of the concept through works by ETA Hoffman, Mary Shelley, Karel Capek, and Eric Asimov, its rich history in psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and philosophy, from Jensch to Freud to to Heidegger to Derrida to Cixous to what Martin Jay described as the “master trope” of the 1990’s.
However, the Uncanny remains esoteric and unfamiliar to engineers, designers, and the public. They are familiar with the Uncanny Valley, a related but distinct concept that originated in 1970. I'll describe the Uncanny in plain language, trace its origins back to Descartes and medieval automata, and show how relates to our contemporary human fear and fascination with a broad variety of technologies from AI to cosmetics to robots to Siri to Google Glass to zombies.
