LASER Talks at Tempe: Seizing the Moment

The event will be chaired by Bri Noonan and Facilitated by Rachel Bowditch.

When: 23/02/21 at 12:00 p.m. Arizona Time, Find your timezone HERE

Where: Online event, ZOOM link will be provided upon registration

Join us  at 12:00 p.m. (AZ time) on Tuesday, February 21st, where we will explore the Seize the Moment Initiative Seed Grant Faculty research projects we are currently supporting. We will hear from 4  faculty research teams about what makes their projects highlight the moment we need to be currently seizing. 

Through transdisciplinary collaborations in the arts, sciences, humanities, and technology in pedagogy, research, and public engagement, Anthropocene and Turn it Around have been implementing their projects to create sustainable impact outcomes working with communities from a local to global context. 

Seize the Moments Faculty Research Seed Grants provide ASU faculty with the opportunity to apply for up to $10,000 to support collaborative, transdisciplinary research projects and activities that address the intersecting social, environmental, and health crises of the syndemic.

Projects:

AI-mediated Refugee Conversations: Building Documentary-Style Human-Computer Interfaces to Cultivate Empathic Interactive Oral Histories explores the syndemic crises of natural disasters, forced displacement, community clustering, and alienation caused by algorithmic systems have eroded communication and empathy between refugees and the greater public. In response, we propose a humanistic AI-enabled documentary system that allows real-time interaction with refugees in Maricopa County to expand pluralistic definitions of community.

Community visions of the Salt River: collaborative meaning-making through game play is a collaboration that will produce a modular board game that teaches the cultural heritage and natural history of the Salt River. They are partnering with the Phoenix Indian Center, which works with Native youth, to guide the game’s development as a storytelling aide and Native language-learning tool.

Haikeus: Transmuting Ecological Grieving into Action is a team of artists, dancers, scientists, engineers, sustainability scholars, and design technologists are seeking to activate action as an expression of ecological grieving. Haikeus, a performance installation project, will honor our interconnectedness and shared responsibility to nature. Haikeus will premiere at the Nelson Fine Arts Center, ASU in June 2023.

Taste of State 48 highlights, through the creation of a series of videos, the amazing varieties of foods of Arizona that can be used to create a healthy and sustainable future for all Arizonians. Slow Food Phoenix in collaboration with ASU faculty is proposing a solution by creating a 12 part, seasonal and hyper-local documentary-style, media production. Their “Taste of State 48,” production will showcase local, and indigenous foods, while raising awareness for the general public, highlighting actors in Arizona’s agricultural community, promoting local vendors, chefs, farmer’s markets, and growers of traditional foods. They are creating a pilot for a potential PBS show to then create the remaining parts of the 12 part seasonal series.

Speakers Bios:

Nicholas Pilarski is an Associate Professor of XR and Virtual Production at the Sidney Poitier New American Film School, School of Art’s, Media, and Engineering, and MIX Center faculty. He is an award-winning filmmaker who co-creates interactive and emerging media focused on addressing issues related to historicized poverty and class-based trauma. Pilarski makes art that is not “about” communities, but rather “of” them - helping build ecosystems where traditional lines between subject/author, teacher/student, and spectator/producer are intentionally contested and reimagined. By developing technology with the communities he partners with, Pilarski helps materialize alternatives to media structures that often define our landscapes. He has been profiled as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Cinema and his work has been identified as an exemplar of community-created practice by the MIT Co-Creation Studio. The collective he co-founded, Peoples Culture, has work archived in the permanent collection of The Smithsonian Institute and recognized internationally for peacemaking and community visioning around geographic conflict by the Tim Hetherington Trust. Pilarski has also worked as an advisor to the NYC Office of Technology & Innovation and the Center for Court Innovation. His work has appeared in national and international film/media festivals, exhibitions, and publications. Pilarski holds a BFA from the University of Michigan and a MFA from Duke University. Pilarski’s work has appeared in The New York Times, MoMA, Eye Institute Netherlands, U.S. Departments of Interior and Education, Full Frame Documentary Festival, Aspen Shortfest, Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago International Film Festival, MIDBO Documental de Bogotá, Athens International Film Festival, Human Rights Film Festival NYC/Paris/Barcelona, Festival International du Film Pan Africain de Cannes, Ann Arbor Film Festival, DOXA, and is archived in the permanent collection of The Smithsonian Institution: National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Dr. Suren Jayasuriya is an assistant professor at Arizona State University in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. Before that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University from 2016-2017. He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2017 and a BS in mathematics and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012. His research interests are in computer vision and computational imaging, specifically designing new computational cameras and projector systems with machine learning and artificial intelligence to better understand the visual world around us. Relevant to this project, his group previously built a multimodal conversational agent with vision/language capabilities for an immersive theater production. He also conducts research on AI and STEAM education targeted for various students from middle/high school through undergraduate/graduate studies as well as outreach and public engagement. Dr. Jayasuriya has received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP) in 2014, the Best Demo Award at ICCP 2019, the Image Electronics Technology Excellence Award from The Institute of Image Electronics Engineers of Japan in 2021, and the Fulton Schools of Engineering Top 5% Teaching Award in 2019 and 2021. He is a recipient of the 2013 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the 2015 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. His website can be found here: https://web.asu.edu/imaging-lyceum/

Sarah Bassett is a Professor of Practice in the School of Public Affairs at Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, the Co-Director of the Resilient Visions CoLab, and appointed as a Knowledge Exchange for Resilience Learning Enterprise scholar at Arizona State University. She is an urban planner practitioner working on multiscale planning challenges at the intersection of community resilience, disaster recovery, and spatial justice. Her work combines media and technology, placemaking, and policy advocacy to help vulnerable communities respond to and recover from the chronic stresses and acute shocks of climate change and rapid urbanization. Bassett works with organizations and companies including The Brownsville Community Justice Center (Center for Court Innovation), New York City Mayor’s Office, AECOM, Hatch Consultants, and Peoples Culture. Her planning work has been recognized by the American Planning Association and the Federal Highway Administration and she has helped author disaster recovery guidance featured within the Transportation Research Board, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Bassett is recognized for multiple co-created works which have been featured in various galleries, national museums, international media festivals, including in the New York Times, The Smithsonian Institution, and MIT's Co-Creation Studio. Bassett is also a U.S. Fulbright Scholar (Mongolia).

Zoe Gentry is an artist, writer, and undergraduate student studying Environmental Science. Her research is intimately linked with her creative work, which explores the Sonoran Desert region and its many rivers. Lately, she’s been studying the history of damming and diversion in the Southwest, people-plant relationships, and the narratives that settlers form about deserts. Previously, she interned at the Rio Salado Habitat Restoration Area, where she studied monarch butterflies and river restoration. Since then, she’s had a finger in every pot. She’s done freelance illustration work for Mount Saint Vincent University and deviantART, as well as independent fundraising for various organizations here in the borderlands, including human rights and environmental advocacy groups. 

Dr. Michele Clark is a plant ecologist and the project manager for the Urban and Stream Ecology Lab and the Earth Systems Science for the Anthropocene (ESSA) Graduate Scholars Network. Michele leads the ESSA network to equitably address environmental challenges and to re-envision a just and inclusive graduate education system. Michele is co-PI and manager of the Racial Equity in STEM award titled “Immersive, Interdisciplinary, Identity-based Team Science Experiences for Indigenous Graduate Scholars” funded by the National Science Foundation. In her research, she studies the plant-human relationship and uses ethnoecological approaches to explore how people understand and relate to environments undergoing rapid ecological change. She is passionate about addressing representation in STEM and leads faculty and graduate student sessions in the Mutually Enriching Mentorship program. 

Mary Fitzgerald is a professor and the artistic director of dance in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre. Her creative practice includes contemporary modern dance choreography, performance, dance filmmaking, and socially engaged arts. She was a member of Kei Takei’s Moving Earth for nearly ten years, performing and teaching internationally. She also has danced with A Ludwig Dance Theatre, Fred Darsow Dance, and several independent choreographers across the United States. As a choreographer, community arts practitioner, and dance filmmaker, Mary creates works ranging from large-scale trans-large disciplinary projects to intimate portraiture. Her projects have explored a range of issues around sustainability, urban development, and land use in desert cities. Over the past six years, much of her research also has focused on dance, women, and aging, investigating ideas around cultural attitudes towards the aging body, dance and wellness, and sustainability of the body-environment. Her work has been presented throughout the U.S. and abroad and has received funding from such organizations as the Japan Foundation, Ministry of Culture in Mexico, National Endowment of the Arts, and Arizona Commission on the Arts. Mary’s written publications on socially engaged arts, and women, dance, and aging have been featured in several journals and books, including Dignity in Motion: Dance Human Rights and Social Justice, Journal of Dance Education, and Dancing Across the Lifespan: Negotiating Age, Place, and Purpose.

Scott Cloutier (we/us/our) is an Assistant Professor and Senior Sustainability Scholar in the School of Sustainability and the College of the Global Futures. We founded and direct the Sustainability and Happiness Lab (Happy Lab)(link is external), and the Sustainable Neighborhoods for Happiness™ (Happy Hoods) project, where our research interests center on understanding when sustainable outcomes and happiness coincide.

Galina Mihaleva is an Associate Professor in the School of Art. Her work and research deal primarily with the dialogue between body and dress, driven by the idea of having both a physical and a psychological relationship with a garment as a responsive clothing - wearable technology. Her art and design work has been shown in festivals, galleries and museums across United States, Asia, Central and South America and Europe. In 2007, she was nominated for the best design award at Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. Galina received the Rumi award in USA and the first place at the Tiffany’s Paris fashion week in 2016.

Joan McGregor,professor of philosophy and senior sustainability scholar, has been working on justice food systems including the problems facing indigenous food systems for over ten years. In 2016, she led the successful Dinner 2040: The Future of Food which was a collaboration of humanities and arts scholars with community leaders in the Valley. She organized with Rebecca Tsosie at the Heard Museum an all-day workshop on indigenous food systems in 2012. She has collaborated with Julian Vitullo on projects including one of the first Humanities Lab courses on sustainable food systems. McGregor is now the chair of Slow Food Phoenix which will bring a depth of knowledge about the Arc of Taste and other projects that Slow Food USA and Slow Food International are engaged in.

Born and Raised in Arizona, Amber Sampson is a trained professional Chef, currently earning her Masters in Gastronomy from Boston University. She studied race, class, and consumption at Harvard University, brought ancient bread to life with fellow Anthropologists from Yale, and was awarded the prestigious US Government’s Gilman Scholarship for archeological research with Arizona’s O’odham Nations. She currently works at the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, as the Indigenous Foodways Facilitator, and with the Arizona American Indian Tourism Association. Heading up our “Taste of State 48,” team, her food-based connections to Arizona, fuel every step of this project. She is currently a board member of Slow Food Phoenix. Sampson has spent her career cultivating trusted anthropological relationships with the indigenous, local, and native communities in Arizona. Keeping the goal in mind to use Arizona’s rich gastronomic past, to create a more sustainable food future.  

Facilitator Bios:

Rachel Bowditch (PhD) is a theatre director and a Full Professor in Theatre in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design. She is author of three books, On the Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man (Seagull/University of Chicago Press 2010), Performing Utopia co-edited with Pegge Vissicaro (Seagull/University of Chicago Press 2018) and Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives from the Field co-edited with Jeff Casazza and Annette Thornton (Routledge 2018). She is currently working on her fourth book, The Rasaboxes Sourcebook: Inside Richard Schechner's Performance Workshop, under contract with Routledge with Paula Murray Cole and Michele Minnick (expected publication 2023). Her scholarly work has been published in TDR (The Performance Review), Performance Research, Theatre Topics, the Journal of Media and Religion, Ecumenica, and Puppetry International as well as book chapters in Festive Devils in the Americas edited by Milla Riggio and Paolo Vignolo, Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man edited by Samantha Krukowski, and Focus on World Festivals edited by Chris Newbold. She regularly presents both her scholarship and theatre research at theatre conferences nationally and internationally. She was a fellow at the Harvard Mellon Institute for Performance Research in “Public Humanities,” in 2018 and was featured as one of the “Top 100 Creatives,” by Origins Magazine in 2015. Websites: https://rachelbowditch.com/ and https://vesselproject.org/

SPONSORS:

The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 50 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks