Salon 99 // Floating Questions 🎈

Hi, everyone. It is Thursday, October 2nd, 2025, and welcome to the Techspressionist Salon Number 99. The topic of the salon is floating questions, and our moderator here today is Aaron Koh from New York City. My name is Colin, and I'm a Techspressionist. So Erin tells stories through a mix of traditional art-making methods with new technologies, often to address our complicated love-hate relationship with technology. Classically trained in fine arts with 20-plus years of experience as a game and app developer, her practice builds on hybrid approaches to art, sculpture, video, sound, written word, music, and performance, with reality-expanding technologies viewers can opt in or out of.

Colin Goldberg

So with that, I'm going to pass the mic over to Aaron.

Take it away. Alright, thank you, Colin, and thank you everyone who's here. Really, thank you for the amazing lineup of artists who have agreed to share their work and their thoughts on… The subject today, which is essentially, discussing digital privilege, media literacy, the tension between the joy and responsibility of creative Agency in a hyper-connected culture. We are at a very strange moment in time. Today's Yom Kippur. This does not escape me a day of atonement in a world of distress.

Erin Ko

And I'm really asking, floating questions. I really want to ask how artistic practice can illuminate question and reimagine the signals and the manipulative forces that bind us, because I feel like as Techspressionists, as people who touch media, make media, can parse media, we are in a unique position. So, everyone I've invited today is someone who really blows me away with the amount of activism that is present in their work and social consciousness, and you all approach it in different and courageous ways, and I'm very grateful to hear from all of you.

Erin Ko

I would like to, ask, Vernada to go first, if that's cool. Verneda Lights is a visual artist, photographer, performance poet, author, retired physician, and griot of South Carolina's… oh, I'm gonna.

I like you.

Go ahead.

I'm like, GET!

Okay, nation! Goa, people! Body of work, I think that's so cool, and I hope you speak on this. Her body of work spans from digital traditional fine art and surface pattern design. Her most recent work focuses on traditional and abstract portraiture as a tool for storytelling and stress management and caregiving situations. And her work has been exhibited at Albrecht Kemper Museum of Art, Edward M. Kennedy Institute, and Harlem Fine Arts Show. Please take it away, Bernada.

All right, thank you very much, Erin. It's my pleasure to be here today to speak on.

Arts, activism.

And, to identify myself within this genre, this spectrum of artists, my work is at the intersection of… Digital art, AI, and social justice. And looking back on my life, in preparing for this session today, I… began to understand the extent to which I've been an arts activist all my life. You know, I was one of those kids that… Integrated the high schools in the 70s, 60s, and 70s. And, came face-to-face with the Jim Crow South. I live in South Carolina. I grew up in South Carolina.

Verneda Lights

And, so we were confronted with the changing United States. And when I was in high school, I started to write poetry. And to remain distinguished as a scholar within that integrational set. I wrote poetry in order to explain myself to my classmates, because I was definitely a minority, and I began to distinguish myself as a writer while in high school. Then, while at Bryn Mawr College, I had to explain myself to my environment, and poetry became my instrument.

Verneda Lights

People understood and could accept. Criticism when presented in a poem, and I found that very useful.

Okay.

And I started a magazine called RAW, The Black Literary Magazine is currently in the, Rare Book Collection at Emory University. So then, while at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, I formed a… Theater group called Ricky Lysand Gillian Brothers Band. And reperformed. So that I could pay for my med school books. So that was my way of supporting myself. And also making a statement to the city, which is Philadelphia, and the world at large, that The arts had a definite place in our holistic medical education.

Verneda Lights

Then, in practice years, I used Poetry, and then sacred music. As a healing instrument. And it was something that helped to integrate The science of my life into my community while serving a function that I found essential was just the role of the healer. So then we… Come to the 2000s, the turn of the century. When the world was changing, we were confronted with the post-apocalyptic United States. After 9-11. And digital instruments then became my way of Adjusting to this change, and also finding a different skill set other than medicine. I had, stopped my practice and decided to reconfigure my skill set in order to face this changing world, and, ran into this stinky little program, Paint.

Verneda Lights

That I found very accessible and fascinating. I wasn't even digitally literate at that point in time, so it was my introduction to the computer. So digital art has played a very, very, very important role in my life over the last 25 years. And then in 2022, I encountered AI. And I was like, wow, here we are. I mean, I was introduced to digital art as accessibility, and then I had to… Encounter other aspects of digital art. Which was AI. But AI was something that was really… familiar in a way that I did not like.

Verneda Lights

I encountered, familiar demons. White supremacy, Sexism, ageism, ableism, you name it. It's there. Because ontogeny recapitulates biologiny. The thing that's created? Must bear the fingerprints of the one that created it. So let's take a look at, what I saw when I first encountered AI. Okay….

Verneda Lights

I'm gonna try to shoot you.

Verneda Lights

Okay….

Verneda Lights

Okay… Alright, do you see my screen?

We do.

Okay. When I started off in 2022, I encountered this image. I typed in you know, to… certain stock phrases to get a feel for what AI was about in terms of their visual vocabulary. I wanted a baseline for what it would do on its own. And I typed in, you know, simple phrases. Like, Black woman, which it really turned out bad, and so I tried Beautiful Black Woman, and… got this. Okay, so we see here a distorted face. We see an instrument that is not capable.

Verneda Lights

Of rendering a coherent. That face. And it's been trained on millions upon millions and per millions of images, but yet its concept of eyes, facial symmetry, nose, mouth, etc, is just thrown when taken out of the White context. So, I tried other prompts.

Like…

Black Lives Matter. And I got this. Where we have this, semblance of, like, the… Police siren and crime scene tape. That's configured into something that is a quasi, guns cap. Okay. In here, We have Black Lives Matter. This is AI Night Cafe. And we see, again, the distortion The incompetence. If someone, if a human being was joined this as part of a, practice evaluation. When I was in medicine, I would have this person get worked up for dementia.

Verneda Lights

Okay, he said it's demented, and it's demented… Biologically, neurologically, it's just… bad. And then here, and I said, okay, well, let's see what it has to say about women. So I put down a simple word, queen. Okay, well, not surprisingly, EI also has problems with women in general. So, it's not just Black women that it struggles with, it's… the gender itself. So, I saw immediately that I would have to… Wrestle with this new instrument. It was in this ascendancy, and becoming more and more popular, and I understood the significance of it.

Verneda Lights

And the power of its ability to express. So, I decided to work with it, which is very exhausting. In order to train it, because the thing is about AI, you can't run away from it. If you… Starve it of your input. You will never be represented. Okay? Never. Because it, by definition, will work with what it is being fed. That is the information. That it takes as reality and shapes it. Okay, so… In the process. I didn't start off right away working the faces, because you saw the distortion and the… The extent to which it was just off.

Verneda Lights

So… I… worked with the project I started called Caterpillar Dreams. It's a fable about a young girl that, a young black girl. Who, encounters a butterfly, has a conversation with the butterfly, And decides to… The butterfly and the girl's conversation is overheard by a caterpillar. Who is inspired by what they have to say, and decides to become a hybrid being. It's just… it's a genetic destiny. Based on, what… It understood to be said by the girl and the butterfly.

Verneda Lights

So, here we have… a part of the Metamorphosis image, of caterpillar genes. We see the formation of the arms and the legs, and here we see that the AI, when not being confronted with, race question or cultural differences. Is able to begin to delve into creating something that I would consider beautiful. Okay, meaningful, artistic way. And this is the second image where the butterfly… you see it's acquiring more human-like features while still maintaining some aspects of being a butterfly. And this project, by the way, was, published.

Verneda Lights

And, by Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. And, I presented it at the Yale Ultra Space Symposium, Back in 2023. And this is one of the last images where the butterfly is very definitely taking on human form.

And…

And… Somebody has.

Is this a… is… I'm sorry, I… and so this is a book? This is a narrative that you're building? Or…

This is a project, and it is comprised of 12 images, and the images and the narrative associated with it was published by… in the Yale Ultra Space Symposium printing volume.

Beautiful.

Was published in 2024. But the presentation at Yale Ultra Space Symposium was in 2023. That's beautiful.

I… we have about maybe 3 more minutes, so that everyone has time to speak.

Okay, so here we go, with, black dandies. Okay, there's a lot about AI that is, prophetic. In a way, it's a seer, and by the way, we have… AI that is… Foreshadowed in things like scriptures, like in the New Testament, where you have, Python, which is the language that we use to create generative AI. Python is the name of a spirit of divination. That followed the Apostle Paul in the New Testament. So, I think it relates to that more than what they're saying it relates to, but let's move on.

Verneda Lights

And this is, part of my, Black Dandy series. It's a time-traveling tale, and I'm using speculative, fiction and Afrofuturism as a way to approach the resistance in presentation of Black presence and Black future… Black past that, we are experiencing now, culturally.

It's in the technology realm.

So here, also, is a regressive photo of a of my grandmother's speculative fiction. Portrait of my grandmother, whom I encounter in my time-traveling journey.

None.

Using regressive prompts, and I think she even looks like me, and I tested it with my cousins, and they said, yep, she's one of us. So, anyway… That's her sister, And this is… my sister, Bess, who was an opera singer.

Thank you.

Denied a career as an opera singer because she was Black, and so I… using speculative fiction and AI, I recreated my sister's dream and had her dressed up for a night at the Metropolitan Opera, and the Met Gala specifically. And I did a series based on that. Okay, this is one of those images. And this is the last of the, the series, A new series is called Baptism. Like…

Mentioned that I use sacred music.

In my artistic, forays. And also for personal renewal. And I use the baptism ritual, which to me is very sacred, and this being Yom Kippur, why not share it? You know, here we have…. One of my more recent paintings done this year, AI Midjourney.

Verneda Lights

Another….

Verneda Lights

And another….

Verneda Lights

And this is beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you.

I think… Oh, thank you. Wow, those are amazing. Kate's…

Yes.

Oh, there we go.

Yes, this is me, y'all, and my journey, and I have, you know, there are many issues. Surrounding what's going on with AI, and there are things that are, restrictive regarding what you can do with Black history. So I made a list of,. Objective AI? Instruments, and also, put, got some information about, tools that we can use to keep ourselves safe from being scraped by, you know, unscrupulously scraped by, AI instruments, and they're used for developing, things that we can't really benefit from.

Verneda Lights

So…

Some… I was gonna say, I love that. Let's, if you could share that, we could talk about it more at the end, that would be fantastic.

Yeah, I'm in the process of sharing it now.

Okay thank you. Thank you, that was amazing. Beautiful work. Verneta, there's a really wonderful interview between her and Colin that was done in, I think, 2023, that I'll suggest you check out. It's really great. I got a Comprehensive idea of your work. Very impressive stuff. Thank you. I would love it if Eric, were to speak next. J. Eric Cook is an artist, educator, and activist who has been actively defending free expression and building community in Washington Square Park since 2016. This is his 10th anniversary here, doing that. He was widely recognized as the 6th hardest-working living artist in NYC. Eric's art can be seen regularly in Washington Square Park, as well as on light posts and mailboxes across the world.

Erin Ko

Please welcome Eric.

Well, hi everybody, thank you so much for having me be a part of this panel. I am humbled and flattered. My journey as an artist and activist, started as a troublemaker and provocateur when I was young. In high school, I fought the, in the theater club, I fought against the principals so that we could have matinees for the students, when they tried to eliminate those. And, I also impeached the French club president and took over so we could go to Disneyland. That, you know.

J Eric Cook

Morality-wise, maybe not so great. But, technology-wise, I used to be a graphic designer 30-some million years ago, and I started with PageMaker and Quark and all that stuff. Back in the day, I was doing production design for newspapers, and so I got very keyed into words. I was, at that time, also an actor and a producer and a writer, and just trying to run a theater. And so, my technology sort of got stunted as I went more into production and theater, and away from that, and I did that for about 30 years, and in, 2012, I had a mild traumatic brain injury, I fell off of a wall onto my head, and my whole life changed. I mean, I walked away from it, but I was no longer interested in all the things that I was interested in, and I sort of fell into a creative black hole that my wife helped me out of, and I, ended up being a painter. I started with watercolor, and I moved into printmaking, and I'd like to share some of that with you now, as we go into… here we go.

J Eric Cook

Let's see, what do we got? Here we are. Can y'all see this? So, I'm just gonna pull up some of the stuff here. Let's see… whoops. Some of my older stuff. Here we go at the top. Oh, I had it all numbered and everything. Here we go. So, this is, one of the first pieces that I did. Carving out of linoleum. How do I move these doors? Did I just hit the button? Oh, there we go. It's my, Washington Square Arch. I've been an artist at Washington Square Arch for, Washington Square for about 10 years.

J Eric Cook

And I just ended up there because they had a bathroom, and it was a beautiful place to be. And, until the pandemic, it was a very peaceful place to hang out. And after the pandemic, it was still peaceful, but there were about 10,000 more young people in it, and that upset the balance of, what people were appropriate. Oh, this is from my series of, NFTs. My… this is sort of a statement against NFTs, in that they were all hand-drawn, unique, individual pieces, and I think I did 5, and mine was Side Eye Store.

J Eric Cook

As opposed to, like, the, 8, whatever, and all the crazy things. And then I'm not sure… oh, this is, a little picture, from my, work in Washington Square Park. It's just a quick thing. This is a picture of me with my bell and my sign, saying, we are living art, stop suppression, in 2023, mainly because of, The change in the drug rules, the legalization of marijuana, and it was so poorly carried out, it ended up being massive amounts of drug sales in Washington Square Park, and it took over the number of artists in the park, and it created a severe imbalance. And the authorities decided to handle that imbalance with the most violent tactics possible, and came in, starting July 15th with massive force.

J Eric Cook

Conflating all the artists with, drug dealers, and, so, after a couple of weeks of taking severe abuse, we all banded together, formed a little community. I assigned myself a spokesperson to the group because, as anybody who does community organizing knows, very… nobody wants to take the lead on anything, and very few people want to do the actual work. So… so, starting July 30th, we had a… I'm trying to scroll down… here we go. Is that working? No.

J Eric Cook

So, starting July 30th, we had a rally that had about 300 artists and community members that came out. Konami, was one of the speakers, we had a number of speakers, and I wish I could get this to scroll down here, but I can't. And, we laid down, what we considered to be the law, that we were no longer gonna take the abuse, and we were gonna stand up and, and fight. And that took a lot of forms, and the main thing about it was that it had to deal with being very creative, because we're just artists out there, musicians, buskers, fortune tellers, fashion designers, and we don't really have any weapons, and we are faced with a regular onslaught of people who have not only tear gas guns, but the ability to detain and arrest us. And so, we had to ride a fine line of being supremely annoying without being totally illegal and having everybody lose their livelihood every day. And so we set up a couple of regular things. One was a Wednesday, what I called a 6 at 6, where we would walk around the circle.

J Eric Cook

My main weapon of choice was, a bell from the Third Avenue elevated line from, way back 100 years ago. It's, super loud and very annoying. And, we started going around the circle on Wednesdays, ringing that bell, letting everybody know that we were not gonna take the trouble anymore. And as during the day, when the police would kick out the artists, I would go and ring the bell right in their face, call forward the public, and a lot of times, the public came to the aid of these artists and saved them from being detained, confiscating their work and everything. In fact, I was threatened with, arrest.

J Eric Cook

For using my bell on a couple of officers who said that it was illegal to follow them around through the park, annoying them. Luckily, I was being filmed while I was doing this action, and they looked ridiculous.

Do you have video that you're trying to access? If you, like…

Yeah, I'm having a hard time scrolling. Oh, here we go, now it's going down.

Yeah, or like, try stop share… okay, you got it. I was gonna say, if you try to… if you stop sharing, and then scroll and share, you might be able to access it.

That's a photo from me from the main action there. Oh, and this is, also, I took to branding a lot of our actions, so the, there's the… this is a little sticker that we did for the Wednesdays 6 at 6, or the 4 at 4 in the winter, because it was cold. Butterfly arch, and, here I am at one of the sixes. You can see the bell, right up in my face there, and some of the flyers that are the big posters that we used. We generally got, you know, maybe a handful of people to walk around, and, I would walk around ringing the bell, and I would just yell out, I am living art. You are living art.

J Eric Cook

We are living art, and people would call it back, and it was a beautiful expression of joy and power, I thought. Oh, this is, one of my early watercolors. I build a machine for making art in Washington Square Park. It spins forwards and backwards at about 350 miles an hour. I build it as a way to engage, people in the park here. This is a new piece of piece I have, Fuck Cancer. Surprisingly, one of the most popular pieces I have out on display in the park.

J Eric Cook

I, regularly, every day, in fact, when I'm in the park, I give out free stickers. A lot of them have, I won't say political, but community messages. The fountain is filthy. This is a way of letting people know that we can have a clean fountain in the park if they just took the effort for it. This is a pastel of Herbie Hancock.

We Are Living Art poster.

Spun Art of, Trump. And, some spun art from Grogu. Cute Kitty. In the pandemic, those of us who stuck around New York City, I'm sure, felt all of this, and this was sort of the way I expressed that. Another sticker from the park, because if you live in New York City, you know there is just no place to go. And, Pro Row, another piece that I've done now. And then, a year ago, almost exactly, the Rangers started a whole new, program of elimination, where they just came in with a dozen rangers and cops, and every day would kick out everybody from the park.

J Eric Cook

And, so, they were… let's see, this is October 2nd. On October 2nd, they were, arresting, Erjon for just showing his art there. This is also another surprising… not so surprisingly popular piece here. And then I did a series of mermaids for the Mermaid Festival, some funky ladies. And then, these are, pieces that I painted of the Washington Square artists. On a 100-year-old, sheet music. This was a piece I did for the Zillion, Zillion guitar rally that we did. And, there's me yelling at everybody.

J Eric Cook

Yeah, I think I'm just about out of time, but.

Sign up.

You know, it's… the main thing for me is, if you fight, you will win. And it's not gonna be easy, and it's super exhausting. But you just have to find a way to make it work within your life and your lifestyle. And I don't know that I've done that, but I really continue working and fighting every day. Thank you so much for this time.

Thank you so much, Eric. Yeah, I want to talk more, definitely, at the end. Everyone should go visit Eric in Washington Square Park and talk. With him, and check out what he's doing. He's an incredibly interesting person. Yeah, thank you. I think, next, I would love to invite Anne and Clark. I don't know if you guys were planning on speaking together, because you often collaborate. It's sort of how I invited you, or if you wanted to speak separately, but, I feel like this is a good transition into…

Perfect.

So…

Yeah, we're going to talk about shared projects, but one after the other. Clara, do you want to start up?

Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, and then we'll jump in for the last one, yeah. Erin, permission to rock and roll? Is there a… Rock and roll.

Baby!

Amazing! Hi everyone, my name's Clara Francesca, and I'm Gemma Chatima Tova for those practicing today. I'm calling in from the Munsee Lenape lands in Queens right now, and whilst it might be performative for me to say that. In the spirit of the work we all do, I'm encouraging folks, especially those of us who appear white, to research missing. And murdered Indigenous women and, Black women, particularly underrepresented in the workspace community. Okay, and with that said.

Clara Francesca

Anne and I are part of XRE, the Extended Reality Ensemble, and we are the co-founders of this ensemble collective. We're very, very proud to work with people like Erin and other collaborators. And the core of XRE has always been doing multinational XR… in the technical sense of XR, Artist Tech Collective, and we're a curatorial team. So we do… we have that banner, and then inside that banner, we have projects. And one project I'm talking about today is this piece that we created called Letters Without Borders.

Clara Francesca

Which, sorry for my typo there with journeys, which… was asking this question, what are the similarities that we share across borders, across time and space, across cultures and nations and journeys? And stories, and we did a few versions of Letters Without Borders, and there are a few more to come, and all of them have a common thread of this conversation around borders and those conversations that I've got there on the slide. There's an immersive element to all the versions of Letters Without Borders we've done.

Clara Francesca

And then there's always a marriage of the analog with the technology, which became very central to all of our XRE works. And I would say, underpinning all of this is every XRE work is asking a question around how do we coexist alongside our differences as humans? Can we? Whether that means we give space to something, or stop engaging with something. Or connect and deepen an understanding and conversation. So, Letters Without Board is the source idea kind of was birthed from a question for me as an Australian migrant family to Australia, now a migrant to New York City, and North America spaces that we call that now, and these are my grandparents with my aunts there in the photo.

Clara Francesca

And when they migrated to Australia, they were receiving severe racism. And yet they had come from, occupied Italian Eritrea when the Italians invaded Eritrea, and they were very horrific to them and the local people there. And then when Italy was, expelled from Eritrea, and they came to Australia, the irony was that as decades went by, my Italian family that had suffered tremendous racism at, sort of. The more wider side of the conversation, or in turn being horrific to often a very Muslim-leading conversation side, and being really cruel to the next wave of migrants, to Australian refugees.

Clara Francesca

So the question became, How ridiculous and horrific this behavior is, not just in my personal family. But the irony being that when we move across time and space and borders, we're often sharing the same stuff. We often write back to family members, we love them. We might migrate because we're trying to find access to funds to send back to home, or maybe we're privileged migrants, or colonizers, or refugees. What does this mean when we move across time and space?

Clara Francesca

And isn't it… it's weird that often our cores are saying the same thing to our family members and loved ones, and why can't we see that in one another more often alongside our differences? So then Anne and I… Anne, who'll speak in a moment, and I started sort of playing with what could this version of Letters Without Borders be, and the first version we did was at Culture Lab. You'll see here, these are migration boats that a collaborator, Alvaro from Colombia, did for us. So the audience walked… so the performance we did at Culture Lab, the audience walked through these migration boats, which I found very, very moving, and then they watched a projection piece of artwork that had fused tech together within Migrant stories, and then we migrated the audience from the front door to all these spaces in this immersive way. People could get private poems that had been written about their migrant story, given a prompt.

Clara Francesca

And have that typed up, and you see at the back wall there, there were giant poems that had been put up as well, talking about migration and movement and letters without borders and what things we want to say to loved ones. And then the audience culminated in a room where you see this is a collection of different photos from different angles. It was a performance theatrical piece in the round. We had three poets speaking in Italian, Mandarin, sorry, and Spanish, and there we have on it, on the DJ poetry there with a child participating with this.

Clara Francesca

Device called the Platronica to create this sense of different sounds and stories and the commonalities alongside the diversity. And then underneath the audience's chairs was paper and pen, and the audience could write their own little Haiku or mini-poem about their experience of Letters Without Borders, and then as they left, and this is me doing a sample of it, we did a program with Experiments with Google, a product that Bill T. Jones's company created, where you speak your poem, and very simple body sensor, the poem gets captured with audio caption, and then sent to your phone as a GIF, and now the audience had this GIF that they could send to their family members and friends and continue this ever-evolving conversation. I'll keep… wrap this up, because we're moving out of time. We did a version of Letters About Borders at Manifestyle in Berlin this year, which was spectacular. It built on this theme and this idea.

Clara Francesca

We collaborated with Spatial Media Lab to make this immersive performance space, so the audience came in. It was in two parts. The first part was audience listening to the speakers, where we had stories in multiple languages of people's journeys across borders, and then you saw these lights in the bottom right-hand corner that you see there. These lines and these borders were fluctuating throughout the performance, and then they came together and created this lung, this rib cage that you see on the ground there that our colleague built for us.

Clara Francesca

And then, as that's happening, the audience member in the second part could engage with this Platronica device, where everything was censored with electrics to trigger sounds that are common with all humans. Laughter, claps, every single sound, and built with the audience members. It was all live human stuff. Created this incredible music, and none of the music was, not of human body, which was, I think, quite spectacular and beautiful, and here you see people playing with the gear here to create this sort of sensual experience, and then the performance was on a loop, and it started up again.

Clara Francesca

We are all migrants on our way back home, because the audience was asked to write the things that they were inspired to write on the wall as that was happening, and this is to give you a sense of the breadth of the festival. I'll hand over to Anne for our next two projects.

Awesome, thank you so much. I am going to briefly talk about our project called Aurora. This is a digital monument here by Will Pap Meimer, Aurora is basically… oops, let me… Okay, okay. Aurora basically is based on the status quo of our monuments. So, 90% of public sculptures or more in our cities and towns are white men. And the idea was to create a new balance, and of course, it's pretty expensive, and pretty time-consuming and very hard to just build new monuments, and we thought, oh, digital art can really speed up the process, and it's such a beautiful medium to make a change. So the idea was to bring gender-expensive AR monuments into the space and pair them with the physical sculptures to tell a story and to start conversations. And here, you can see the monument for Angela Davis, Mr. Backlash by Erin. Erin Ko, she was the first artist to get on board, which I was super grateful for. It was just really amazing.

Anne Wichmann

So, with Clara Francesca here, with Katie Payton Hofstadter, and with Nang Lei, we co-founded the Aurora Network, a network of digital monuments, and the question that we were posing was, why are there more horses than women and gender-diverse artists on the pedestals? And we were starting to collaborate with artists from all of the globe, from very different communities, and that was it's just really, really amazing. We started in New York City.

Anne Wichmann

And we talked to a couple of city council members who were, like, actually really fond of the project, yet nobody wanted to publicly support the project. And so we did it anyway! And fortunately, all the artists were on board, and were just generously spending time to create these monuments. Here are three examples. You can see Lowe's and Apache Warrior with Columbus at Columbus Circle, M by Bryce Burrell with Meredith Drum, and Cassandra with Washington at Union Square, created by Eva Davide Dover and Sharon Enlam.

Anne Wichmann

And Sue Rowe created Hattie Anderson to be paired with General Sherman on Grand Army Plaza. The second exhibition that we did was in Munich, and the Cultural Council actually supported us, but a lot of physical statues, is what I learned, are not on city public landscape, but on private properties, because of some private organizations or foundations owned those. And those foundations were not happy about our project when we reached out, and they would not want us to put up Signs with the QR codes to the digital monuments, and so we found workarounds. We parked bikes, next to those monuments, and we just put up the signs on the bikes, so that it was not on their property, but on the bike. Here you see Ada Loveless and, Lucy Mering.

Anne Wichmann

Lucy's by Ankashiman and Ada Loveless by Joan Goh. And then, like, a really big success, in my opinion, was that the AR intervention, hashtag Juliet2 by Tamiko Thiel, became a part of the city landscape in Munich. It's a very controversial statue that is a port, like, that is up in the city center of Munich. People touch the breast of Juliet Capole because they think it, brings them luck and better sex. And so Tommy Coutille created this AR intervention with all these Juliates as warriors surrounding the physical statue to protect her.

Anne Wichmann

This is up for 3 years already, and it's going to stay up, which is great. And we also brought digital monuments to the other cities in Germany. The city of Warrens just bought the exhibit, because they really want to keep the exhibit permanently in their cityscape, so that is really, like, a huge, huge success for us, and Berlin just reached out, so that's also great. And then we wanted to talk, actually, about one last project that we did very briefly, and that is about beauty.

Anne Wichmann

Clara, do you want to take over again?

Yeah, I mean, I think we'll bet on this one, but, You Are Beautiful was the name of this piece that I am really proud we took and we've done a few times, and it touches actually a bit about what our first speaker was talking about, too, in terms of, like, the bias inside of AI. When we… did the experience… sorry, Anne. So, it's an interactive performance about the biases of graphic AI app, as it says here, and it combines performance art with state-of-the-art multimedia installation under the influence of AI.

Clara Francesca

Because it's heavily, heavily, heavily white, male. Western-influenced, for sure. And the next slide, do we… oh, yeah, let's go to the… next one. So, the audience members find themselves in Aurora, in this universe that Anne was passionate about creating that I'm glad we went with. And the motto, The Truth Lies in the Eye of the Beholder, was sort of played on repeat as the audience came through the space. The audience had to do participatory action.

Clara Francesca

In unison, as you see here. And then they, we simulated them creating their own internal biases to have their own team. So one team was Team Triangle, and one team was Team Circle, and on the mask that you see here, that was our way to not attack any audience member personally for how their face looked, because we were about to open up the floodgates of what AI considers beautiful and not beautiful, so it was a safe, inclusive way to do that, where it sort of naturalized and neutralized everyone. But on each of the masks was a circle or a triangle, and so these two groups emerged, and Anne and I sort of played these officers in a very… Authoritarian, scary way to get each group to compete with the other. And as this audience is going through these stages that we're taking them through, they then go to one of the final stages where they're plugging into the computer the words beautiful human and ugly human. And I feel always very guilty, actually.

Clara Francesca

There's a huge bias, and there's a… I mean, I find it quite dramatic, but like we saw in the early discussion, you type in the word beautiful human, and quite frankly, according to me, the computer should crash and could say, no, cannot compute this. Instead, this really, feminine, young, white Asian leaning, which I think has a lot to do with white male fetishizing Asian conversations, which we can get into later. Kept popping up. On repeat, like, there wasn't any exception to this in the early days when Anna and I were working on this, and anytime Ugly Human came up, you see the image on the side denoting other Racial, racist demographic stereotypes there, too. And the point we wanted, really, for the audience to have was this immersive performance theatrical show experience where it costs them something. They are now a part of the understanding that them Plugging in the words in this computer to get these generated AI images out are now complicit in this conversation, and it's their collective Western data that's been put in these programs.

Clara Francesca

To continue the bigotism we see in the world. So I love this conversation we had earlier about, let's start plugging stuff in the programs to change that conversation and see what happens in the world. And I'm sure I've missed things, if you want to… share any other pointers?

No, great, no. I think that's amazing. Thank you very much, everybody. Okay. Let me stop sharing.

Thank you so much. Awesome work. I hope we have time to talk. Okay, everybody's doing great, though. Naz, would you go next, and present your work, please?

Let me shine my skin….

Naz Karagoz

Okay.

Naz Karagoz

Can you see my screen?

We can.

Beautiful.

And I didn't read… I stopped reading bios in the interest of time, but… but I guess I'll say Naz is a multidisciplinary artist. You're just out of Sarah Lawrence, right? And… you're into music, performance, installation, all of the things.

Yes.

Yeah, sorry, it's an informal intro.

Oh my god.

Anyway…

I was gonna talk about it as well.

Okay, talk about it, I'm sorry, I thought you were gonna launch into shit.

I can also launch them. I mean, I feel like once I start talking about this installation, it's… all gonna come together. I decided to talk, about my work.

And sorry, is this… do you want this recorded, or should we pause the recording now?

I will, I will tell you.

Okay, you will not forget. Okay, good. Yeah. I'm sorry, keep going.

Oh, thank you. So this… I decided to talk through this, because I think this had a lot of elements. That was very special to me, but… This was my, Multimedia installation that I was working on for, like, 4 months, and it incorporated projection mapping, AI-generated work, sculpture work. And performance art, and also live recording and live sound design, as well as singing. And I have been sharing… so, this is, like, a mind simulator to me. I'm really interested in reality and making machines and simulations to sort of turn the cube and look at the sides from different ways.

Naz Karagoz

And… I haven't been able to share the Turkish side as much, so this… this is, like, a simulation of my mind. The Turkish side, which is, like, the input. The reaction to that is the anxiety, eroticism, shame, all, like, the mixed emotions, and then the lucid dreaming and mindfulness as, like, another technological, like, revolt, like… as a form of, like, trying to find some, like, Balance between that. But I haven't been able to talk about the Turkish side as much.

Naz Karagoz

Online, but this is a little video.

Naz Karagoz

-Oh.

Naz Karagoz

Yeah. Okay, I think you can pause it now.

Well, that was amazing. Oh, that's gonna be very, yeah. Mysterious for people who didn't attend live. Thank you so much for sharing that. You said something that, again, will not be in the recording that I just want to repeat, so it's in this recording. You said, what can you do when you can't really talk about it? Which I love, and I think it's something we need to think about ourselves. Susan, would you like to go next?

Yeah, I'll go… I'll go next, so, just FYI, I've been sick, I am sick today, but I will… if I start coughing, I'm gonna stop talking, but, I come to, I come to the digital art world with a strong background in photography, primarily black and white.

And I also, come…

I'm a, long time… Life of, social activism, Such as, worked during, the Vietnam War, Also, Establishing, a… Food co-op. That's still going after over 50 years. I also have served On neighborhood, community councils. During COVID, I was, on the… what's called the Whitaker Community Art Team, and we made, pieces reflective of the COVID experience, and… as a group, And, so I, I bring… those two pieces together in a particular….

Susan Detroy

That I've been doing since, 2015. And… I put together… I started working on this before I got sick, but… so I'm, I'm not gonna apologize, it's just the way… the way things go. I'm gonna go to my… I did a keynote, share, so I'm gonna share.

Susan Detroy

Alright. I am going to my keynote presentation. Hmm. Alright. So, since 2015, I have been using my own face to create art, and I started initially calling it a series, but it is so big that now Portrait of a Woman is a project with multiple series. I think I'm… I'm just gonna leave this slide up for a little bit. Maybe I'll read it. Storyteller. I live in Oregon. And I work in digital representation, and I used my own experience in the world I live in, offering my lesbian aging perspective.

Susan Detroy

From the natural world, political events. And, female aging all impact me. And, in a world filled with global strife. I want to elevate and reflect our commonalities and allow for self-reflection, caring, and peaceful action. So, my primary themes are love of self and our land, plants, and animals. And my tenure project of a woman, project intertwines these topics. So, I have pieces with each of the slides. And on some of them, I have put… Approximate dates of when they were generated over the 10-year period. This piece right here was, generated in 2025. I… Take pictures of myself.

Susan Detroy

Initi… anyway, these are some early pieces that are, the one on the right. It's most… is digital, but the one on the left is a… Crossover between, hard copy, and then digital generated. And I did more of that in the past, alright. These are two pieces generated in, entirely… that are entirely digital. Using my own base once again. And, I….

Susan Detroy

So, 10 years of self-portraits, yeah. So, it's a real-life project. And for a decade, I've turned the iPhone camera towards myself. And this all started from…. Experience standing in front of a mirror in my bathroom here in my house, and I had…. Uncomfortable experience looking at myself and realizing how old I looked. That's… that's in quotes. And, it sparked these really… these unwelcome and harmful thoughts, and… I would say within 24 hours, I realized I came back.

Susan Detroy

I sort of came back from that experience and woke up and thought, oh, I'm an artist! Hello, Susan, I could use my skills to share and possibly reshape my experience. So, partly.

Susan Detroy

For myself? As I share it, it becomes for others. So, it drew me to utilize my personal aging experience as my primary theme. And, to change my own beleaguered thinking. And, birthed the longest and, biggest project. And I'm… I would say, I'm under no illusion. Those feelings, they still exist. That I… you know… just… go forward. You have to ignore it and go forward. So, let's see, from this deeply uncomfortable relation emerged a decade of digital photographic edit imagery. These are some early pieces.

Susan Detroy

In the beginning of the project, I gotta take… I gotta drink some water.

Susan Detroy

In the beginning, I didn't have, of course, the awareness that I have now. Of the length of it. And I also…. Wasn't as clear in my intention Of what I was communicating. But, as… the artist that I am. I just keep going. That's just part… that's one of my characteristics as an artist. I just keep going. So, I was photographing and manipulating, and I began using some natural world… Elements? And, this, this is some,. Examples of that. The two pieces on the right have been I want to say that some of the most popular, and when I say popular, I mean because. Some people… And I have conversations about them, I sell them as cards also. So, self-portrait, and the natural world. Project.

Susan Detroy

Tells the story of aging. Sustained and motivated by the natural world. I look to nature to feel alive, Whole and calm. I capture and convert. The world I see layering my own face and personalizing my world.

Susan Detroy

These pieces are… Before and a little bit into COVID. The pandemic times.

As you can see, I am…

Fascinated by the melding Of my own face. With the natural world. In part of the project, with the natural world elements. All my work, past, present, and future, is influenced by who I am, a woman living in the USA culture, life experiences. From childhood to now are my… our topic. Identity as aging women evolves as I recognize and live in The erasure, discounting, and trivialization of the older female voice. My goal includes offering a bigger, more robust, and varied presentation of women aging.

Susan Detroy

These are, over the past few years, and moving closer to now, I decided to put all the blue together, because it looked great together, I think. These are a mixture of pieces. The one in the foreground is, A little snippet of some AI work I did with, A couple different, I think that was a dream before…. That's a whole other series that's connected to this project, but I'm not going to talk about today. My art is who I am. Revolve… evolves from my lived life.

Susan Detroy

In all phases of my art career, I've used what I feel, see, hear, touch, and live, leading me to reach for a tool to share my experience. My DNA compels me to express myself through art. I'm excited by the visual world. And want to share my experience. I'm inspired by what happens inside and around me, and this includes living as a woman, lesbian artist in the USA culture. And these are newest pieces? That either ha- were… Have been exhibited as hard copy pieces.

Susan Detroy

In Florida and in Oregon. The one on the left. And the one at the upper right are pieces that I generated into, hard copy prints. And, have been shown either just as the print, are framed. And this is the… Actually, the piece on the left is the newest piece I made. While I was sick, while I've been sick, and the piece on the lower right is called Am I the Target? And these pieces do have names, but I was too sick to put the names with everything. But I do know that one's called Am I the Target? And it showed in them.

Susan Detroy

As a hard copy framed, artwork in Southern Oregon. For the Northwest Biennial. And… These are some of the digital apps that I use to generate the work. That, expresses my, theme of Portrait of Women. And, that's the end of my keynote.

Thank you. You sound really sick. I feel bad that we made you talk for, like… but, but thank you, really wonderful. Pers- very personal work. Cheers.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much.

Last but certainly not least, Heidi? Are you… Ready?

Yep, boom here, still.

You're still there?

Thank you, everybody, for sharing such beautiful work. I'm gonna pop my deck up.

Heidi Boisvert

Alright, so I'll just do a little intro, and then move on to some work, just, like, the why of the work. So, hi everybody, I'm Heidi Boisvert. I'm an interdisciplinary artist, experienced designer, creative technologist, and also an academic researcher. Most of my work, looks at interrogating the social, cultural, and neurobiological Impacts of media and technology. Simply put, I say the role of the body, the senses, and emotion, and human perception, social change.

Heidi Boisvert

In addition to being an associate professor of AI in the arts at the University of Florida, scary place, I'm also the founder and creative director of Future Perfect Lab, and part of what I do is harness the power of pop culture, emerging tech, and more recently, I've been doing a lot of neuroscience research. To ignite social change. So for the past 15 years, I've dedicated myself to transforming toxic narratives through playful and imaginative experiences, with the single aim of building a more just and pluralist society, one in which everyone not only belongs, but thrives.

Heidi Boisvert

In my practice, I catalyze this change by engineering social justice messages for mass appeal. Through a multi-pronged feedback loop consisting of these kind of, like, playful and imaginative creative experiences, as well as empirical media effects research. But both of those practices are supported by co-creation workshops with community, as well as building open source tools. So today I'm mostly going to talk about the creative side, some projects, and in terms of the creative side, mostly I'm working with, you know, co-creating projects with community, through different types of multimedia experiences.

Heidi Boisvert

And sometimes I work with also, like, media influencers as a way to kind of put the face of the issue into a larger public consciousness. And I use all different types of touchpoints, sometimes together and sometimes separate, such as, you know, games, VR, AR, transmedia storytelling, web, theater, dance, and, you know. I guess mediums that haven't been invented yet, kind of always trying to poke into the dark a bit. So in the past, this could take the form of, like, an alternate reality game to promote human rights, featuring celebs like Victor Garber here. This was played over 12 weeks, and it touched upon various issues, from miscegenation to a whole bunch of… things. Or it could be, like, an animation to raise awareness around the unfair immigration laws by teledeporting Spock. Or it could take the form of, like, a location-based augmented reality app to change perceptions around homelessness while actually putting individuals into actual homes and building kind of infrastructure for that. So, oftentimes, the tools are kind of like a promontory for larger discourse.

Heidi Boisvert

However, after making this work for many years, using web and mobile devices, I kind of had a crisis of faith, and I began to worry that the very tools I had been using to positively influence hearts and minds to cultivate what I saw as empathetic engagement were actually harmful. So, while we're not yet full-bodied prosthesis, like augmented cybernetic humans tethered to cables like Major here, from Ghost in the Shell, our dependence upon intelligent technology is a slow form of violence, rescripting our nervous systems and quietly taking over our cognitive and affective faculties, quite literally changing the structure of our brain.

Heidi Boisvert

So I guess I was concerned that we were becoming humans, we're becoming, like, APIs run on scripts and protocols, and I somehow felt responsible. So, to tackle this, I'm not going to go into this very deeply, you're welcome to take a screenshot. I decided to go back and get a PhD, essentially, to conduct my own empirical research into the neurobiological effects of media and technology. And these are just some of the things that I discovered in the research in terms of, literally, our brains, you know, the gray matter in our brains are actually shrinking, and we have a lot of difficulty, I'm sure many of you who are teachers, can attest to this. It's hard to read social-emotional cues.

Heidi Boisvert

And there's an increase in, kind of, emotional dysregulation. So, a lot of the technology is affecting key areas in the brain, the amygdala and the hippocampus, which is responsible for emotion regulation and the production of knowledge schemas, like how we make meaning in the world. So I started to, like, map these kind of processes and how we've moved from, like, external colonization in space to internal colonization, like, taking over people's affective and cognitive faculties.

Heidi Boisvert

So, I guess what I'm trying to establish is, like, a lot of my work is sort of like a subversion, or a shadow discourse, or in conversation with this as a… as a response. So, what was interesting is that, you know, many of these, there's, you know, well, where did it come from? First of all, you know, we have, like, the whole history of cybernetics, and the way in which we're using computational systems today, and how they're actually baked with an ethic, that is around rejecting the body, regulating our emotions, and canalizing our senses.

Heidi Boisvert

Right? So I start to look at, kind of, like, these interwoven, Societal, kind of social forces, so from Madison Avenue to, like, the DSM to, like, cybernetics, and the way in which, you know, culturally, we're kind of living in a cybernetic, legacy. So, my belief is we've moved a bit from, like, presence, mutation, and randomness, to the absence, the hyperreal, and the pattern. So, part of my approach in making work is really thinking about the way in which the only way to have a conversation about, you know, our technoculture At the same speed of technological innovation, as Carolyn Jones notes here, is by actually taking up these technologies in the service of aesthetics, by actually making work to subvert them.

Heidi Boisvert

So, for me, I guess I first turned to, like, large-scale network dance and theater. As a way of… as a counterpoint. And this particular piece. It's called Radical Signs of Life, and it's a large-scale network performance, and I see it almost as an antidote to intelligent technology. So I started to bring, like, people into intimate, immersive physical spaces to explore the role that the body plays in social change by employing DANS almost as a 3D experimental sandbox.

Heidi Boisvert

So, through responsive dance, radical attempts to externalize the mind's non-hierarchical distribution of thought. Music is generated from dancers' muscles, blood flow via biophysical sensors that capture sound waves, from the performers' bodies, and then data essentially is triggered on these, like, screens here, based on biological algorithms, so it creates these complex neural patterns. And then they're projected onto multiple screens. The other piece here is that you can't see as above, there's a bunch of connects, and the audience can, like, interact real time to create, like, a non-linguistic communication.

Heidi Boisvert

But the piece was really kind of like a… almost like a challenge, in a way. It kind of revealed this legacy of cybernetics I'm talking about, and… it was a way of awakening an urgent need to insert the body and affect back into technology before it further embeds us… it's embedded inside of us. So next, I wanted to kind of, like, apply what I learned, from Radical into, A piece about more focused on social justice. In the pop culture space. So I collaborated on Beware of the Dandelions with Complex Movement, which is a Detroit collective. The goal of the immersive theater project was to teach social justice movement building.

Heidi Boisvert

Through complex science, through a sci-fi parable, the work integrates a data-driven narrative with game-based collaborative problem solving, communicated through live hip-hop and DJ performances. Essentially, the participant players control a 3D game engine, which is mapped into this 24 by 12 foot sentient pod, and the players are spatially triggering real-time story content. Consisting of data visualization, surveillance cameras, systems communication, and embedded clues and puzzles.

Heidi Boisvert

So, after that, I want to realize that a lot of the work, that I'm doing in the social justice space is actually rooted in epigenetic trauma, in that our bodies are actually archives of story. So, Walking Wounded served as both a living lab and a multimedia performance, transforming trauma through movement, sound, and imagery generated, once again, from the performer's somatic and autonomic nervous system. So the idea was to try to give expression to unspeakable, personal, inflective experiences of trauma, through bio-adaptive play. So in a lot of these works, like, I use, kind of, custom biosensors that I build, that read your autonomic, somatic nervous system, environmental data, different types of data, lots of data.

Heidi Boisvert

I guess, is kind of, like, my jam. So, I know we only have a limited amount of time, so I'm just gonna jump ahead here. So I guess in addition to some of the large-scale dance and theater. Work. I also, co-curate a live performance series, so during COVID, we ended up moving online to this, like, 3D space called Nowhere, but we started it at the new museum in New York. And I co-curated this with, Kat Mustacia, and the goal, really, of the performance series was to explore, like, our complex relationship to the digital, and look at the many ways that, like, interactivity, games, robotics, and wearables, and AI and other digital technologies inform, like, new practices in performance, but also the ideas many of the artists we'd invite to the salon were also using the tools as a form of critique, or what I might call, like, applied media theory.

Heidi Boisvert

So, yeah, so I guess there was that, and then Kat and I decided to start making, work as well, once kind of, like, you know, COVID, emerged. But most notably, one of the things that I think hold on. Oh my god, I can't believe somebody's here in a sec.

So, what's amazing to me in this group of incredible artists is how many of the…

Okay, weird. I mean, like, there's nobody in Florida, like, I live in isolation here.

And the one neighbor calls. Okay, sorry about that. IRL.

Good dog.

And Roz, you're right.

Okay, so this is, Lizardly here, which is a piece that kind of emerged out of… was birthed, sort of out of COVID. And it's essentially, it's like a live mixed reality play that I co-created with Kat, as well, that explores AI environmental collapse and interspeciality. So the staging interfaces like VR and real-time motion capture. And machine learning to create this kind of vivid portrayal of hybrid humans in a post-human world. So, basically, you know, these guys, they're performing, and then real time, the lizards are kind of… it's real-time data that's, you know, being projection mapped through Unity in a VR headset.

Heidi Boisvert

For the audience. So, but the other thing is we have this other character called June. And she's kind of like this antiquated, repurposed smart home, who influences the characters' surroundings through their gesture. So she's using, like, Mimoo gloves, with flex sensors, and I also use InteractML in Unity to trigger changes both in the game environment as well as, like, the sound and, like, lights in the theatrical. Context. So, also during COVID, I… we incubated Embodied this thing called the Embodied Intelligent Shared Future with Sydney Skybetter and Melissa Painter. Sydney's a choreographer, and Melissa's an immersive artist also.

Heidi Boisvert

And the idea was to kind of, cultivate a brigade of movers and inventors, world builders and game designers, in an attempt to kind of reawaken our collective sense of embodiment. And again, this is sort of my… I'm really interested in sort of, like, the somatics of trauma, so the idea was to respond to the fact that our bodies carry intergenerational trauma, they're surveyed, they're controlled, and they're often spun out of control by our dependence upon technology.

Heidi Boisvert

But the idea here was really to just kind of bring a group together, of 100 people to a public space like the Los Angeles Music Center, and to co-create this kind of new choreographic gameplay experiences across multiple generations, using both, chalk drawings and AR. The chalk drawings served as kind of like the markers. And then also built this, like, massive 100, kind of OSC bridge, where we were able to gather data from 100 phones of participants doing these kind of movement exercises to generate live audio and visual system outside.

Heidi Boisvert

So, the audio, there were a bunch of speakers in the trees in the plaza, and so we created this, like, spatialized audio experience, essentially like a performance of 100 people, collectively. Doing this, but it was really about bringing intergenerational communities together, to talk about… well, some of the imagery is focused on environmentalism, so… sorry, I don't know how… if I'm over, I'm just gonna…

That's okay. Last two, is that okay?

Cool, thank you. So, yeah, so for many years, and in fact, we're remounting this show in Chicago at the Goodman, in March. But for about 4 years, I was working as a technology director and designer for Theater of the Mine, which is this kind of, like, immersive journey inside this 15,000 square foot, warehouse. We're, exploring how minds see and create the world around us as participants traverse these kind of unique environments and try on different types of sensory experiments.

Heidi Boisvert

So the, piece is, co-created by David Byrne and Marla Gwankar, and it's based on a series of, like, neuroscience experiments, and kind of told backwards, like a Gertrude Stein novel. And I was basically responsible for developing, like, all the tech to run the show, and that supported the show, including, like, 16, you know, livestream VR stations that were broadcast. And then I also ensured that, like, the set, lights, sounds, and physical objects, like, demonstrating the scientific effects.

Heidi Boisvert

Actually worked. So, in order to do that, we had, like, you know, 7 groups going through the show at any given moment, every 15 minutes, so I basically had to create a custom show control system, built in, like, Python to automate and trigger all the environmental cues. Which was a lot of stuff, like 20 Raspberry Pis and a mile of cable. But, I think I'll probably close on this one. So, but more recently. And I guess I'll say the last one was really… the piece was really about kind of challenging our sense of perceptual reality. And part of, I guess, my belief is that, you know, our nervous system, is kind of like the interior architecture of, like, how we… you know, process current consensual reality. So I think, to some extent, I think the piece is still very relevant, as we relaunch it in our current social-political climate.

Heidi Boisvert

So most recently, I've been collaborating with the Transforma theater group on BioAdapted, which is a reenactment investigatory documentary with actors actually portraying real people and scientists, paired with humorous, kind of eerie, fictional pieces about what our future might look like if AI propagates in unethical ways that don't serve humankind. So the work was inspired in part by the research and the tools I build for the limbic lab, which is something I'm not going to talk about today, which is, kind of like an open-source biometric lab and AI system. And the goal of that is really to, like, isolate the narrative ingredients that move us to ag.

Heidi Boisvert

So the lab appears in various scenes, but I also did… was the technology director for the show, and I designed, again, a bunch of, like, custom, like, OSC bridges to send data from a brain-computer interface. An EEG headset to a haptic vest, and, you know, weird stuff like that, which controlled the choreography, for a couple of scenes. And then I also built this custom avatar using facial recognition, so that in the grand finale, the audience basically puts ChatGPT on trial, in real time, by the audience, and they kind of can interrogate him, around, sort of, the ethics.

Heidi Boisvert

But the goal of the piece is really about, Investigating and interrogating and educating while delivering this kind of unique, kind of science-enhanced experience using tech. And I guess the only other thing that I think is important to this discussion is, you know, after the show, we… as it travels, we host conversations. With, to look kind of prismatically at people's hopes and fears surrounding AI. And then, we also built out a media literacy program that travels with the show, so it's like a workshop that happens, like, when we're in different communities to allow people to use the tools and to understand how they're impacting their very particular communities.

Heidi Boisvert

So I think I'll end there, just cause… Yeah, a little bit.

About me.

Hopefully that wasn't too over.

That was awesome. Thank you so much, Heidi. Your work always blows me away. Yeah. Everybody, I feel so grateful. Once again, that's how I started, that's how I will continue to feel. I just feel so grateful to be connected to all of these people doing amazing work that is… Activist in nature, but humanitarian in nature. If we have time, I'd like to just throw out a few questions to our guests, and we'll just talk as long as we can talk, I guess. Thank you for everyone for attending as well. This I kind of focus towards Eric, Nas, Verneta, but is kind of open to any of the guests.

Erin Ko

How do you approach making work or taking actions that can land you into a case of conflict, like an instance of conflict? Is this something that you think about, or when you're making this work or taking this action, is it something that is more intuitive and impulsive and felt in the body? First.

I, I perceive… Where there's danger. You know, and being a physician, For over 40 years. I am… Very much well acquainted. With… How to navigate danger, And how to know when to stop. And how to proceed with caution. In… all in service of, life preservation. So I approach my art much the same way, especially when dealing with AI, because AI is fraught with danger because of our current, political circumstances. Anti-wokeness is now mandated. For, all AI here in the United States.

Verneda Lights

And, that makes it dangerous for people who… Or outside of the… White, male, heterosexual. Paradigm.

So when you talk about feeling… knowing when you feel in danger, there's different ways to feel it. It's interesting you went straight to AI, because I think of maybe, like, Nas, who feels like she could be arrested, or Eric, who actually feels like he could… I've seen… he's sort of like, Eric, I think you undersold a little bit the confrontations I've seen with the police in the park wanting to do you bodily harm.

How do you guys navigate that where you feel like there's different ways to be in danger, right?

So… Yeah.

For AI, the danger is… being, stealthily… Disassembled. And erased. While you are… Experiencing your presence. You know, so it's psychological, vast psychological danger. There's contamination of the, visual vocabulary. And I showed you some of it, but it's far… far exceeds what I showed here today. So the danger of AI is, psychological, and spiritual.

You know.

And it may soon spill out into the, physical world. I mean, I found out earlier this year that, our government sent letters to… every nation that does business with the United States Embassy, and to the businesses likewise in those countries, to have them sign on to the anti-DEI policies and postures of the, current administration. And if they didn't sign on, they can't do business. With whatever it is they're doing, and we feel that in the art space.

Verneda Lights

You know, international art space.

I'm gonna jump in and respond, Aaron, what you were asking about the, the danger in the physical space here. Yeah, I probably did undersell it, a little bit.

Yeah, you said?

Starting in 2023, actively, artists were being beaten in Washington Square Park. And I mean physically beaten, held down, knees on necks, the detentions were not friendly. And, and anytime that I was stepping out with the bell or anybody else who was with me, The risk was real that I was gonna be arrested. Now, I'm an old white guy, and I try to use what privilege I have that I'm aware of. To support the community. And so, I know that when I go out and I can ring a bell, there are places I can go and things that I can do that the people I'm supporting either for whatever reason, are not able to do.

J Eric Cook

And the threats are very real, and that's why I take it so seriously. I may come off a little flippin' light, but what I'm dealing with is a real oppression and a real suppression of expression. And we've been going through it, I mean, forever, but I deal with it directly in the park, but what I'm dealing with directly in the park as everybody's been saying, we're seeing across the social spectrum, whether it's digitally, or at work, or everything here. Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert are probably the biggest, highest profile, censorship thing, but every… you know. It's very hard to decide to take action and stand up, not just for anybody, but for yourself. And, what I find is it's easier the more times you do it.

J Eric Cook

You, you find a comfort in strategizing to find your own power. I mentioned that, the police have guns and tasers and the power of the authority, and all… you have to dig in to find, you know, I don't have a lot of money, I don't have a lot of resources, and I don't have a whole big community of support. And so, the things that I've tried to work on are really about building community and working… you know, I surprise myself that we've worked with the police, with the city of New York to try and find solutions on this, as much as we've been stymied.

J Eric Cook

But, and the agitating is everything. Annoyance and agitation is risky and dangerous, and I can't encourage it enough from anybody who's listening to this.

I guess, I guess, yeah, you're touching upon the thing that I always struggle with is the… the tightrope walk between the danger and the activism. Like, how much you can push. We still have freedom of press here. Like, we can still post stuff, we're not gonna get arrested for it. We can still say. Lots of things. I'm not gonna say it now, because who knows what happens in 5 years, whatever. I don't know. AI absolutely changes everything.

Jobs.

There… sorry?

Well, I mean, I'm in Florida, right, which is your.

Urine?

USA.

Yay!

You know, people are actually losing their jobs for speaking out on.

Exactly.

Content, you know, that is not in alignment with the administration. And I think part of, like, the practice here, which I'm wondering what we do as, you know, as artists become dissidents and academics become dissidents here. You know, what it… you know, I think it's more about, like, the art of withholding, to some extent, and building kind of, like, underground mycelium networks, I don't know what that looks like. We're talking about maybe cooperative servers, where communities are paying for… you know, we need different methods of organizing and communicating, I think. So, here in Florida, you know, one of the, I guess, things what we had done was called FLOAT, which is Floridians about Floridians thinking about protest environments as artists. Like, how do artists function within this social-political climate?

And, you know, one of the ideas was around having, like, speakeasies.

You know, or these types of spaces, are there other kind of, like, portals we can jump through to do organizing? I'm not saying not do the stuff on… you know, activism on the street and having things that are public, but I think other strategies as authoritarianism kind of takes A stronger hold here, are going to be required in, like, trying to understand the context of other countries within these you know, similar… conditions. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to jump in there.

Something. That, no, that's, Yeah, Eric said, we don't really have any weapons at one point during your presentation, because you're saying you're going up against the cops. Yeah. But everyone here who has presented, everyone here who's a maker has really… The finest weapons. Weapons, if they are that, to speak to Heidi's point, there's so many different ways we can communicate, all channels of activism are valid, but I feel like… really, the question is the balance between the relationship between the personal and commitment to the collective, and our abilities to parse and make media.

Erin Ko

And, I think it was actually during Heidi's culture hacking, right? Because this kind of slow violence that is happening. Through… Technology and capitalism. And the forces that are shaping things, they're all kind of aligned, so…. I have another question, that's for the artists who work with a lot of physical Media, whether it's dance or interaction, like Anne and Clark, they have a lot of immersive, interactive, like, participatory pieces. Heidi, you do a lot with the body. Naz, you build installations, lots of people. How much… like, what's the difference? And actually, Eric, again, like, you engage with people.

Erin Ko

In what ways do you guys feel that having a physical presence to your work changes the effectiveness? Like, I think, like, both routes can be effective, but I personally feel like The body is a great way to internalize and connect, and I'm just wondering what your experience with that is, if you find it more effective, differently effective, etc.

Erin Ko

I don't know. Ann… Anne and Clark? Are they… are you guys still here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Actually making people go through the motion of answering to Big Sister and trying to become beautiful, like, do you feel like that has… more impact than if you… Made something that was less physical for them, less participatory.

We do in the lens that we sort of have been using this term a moment ago in this year, of joyful confusion, which at the core is just in the roots of, like, basic 101 performance art, committed the laughter, sort of stuff. But this idea that the audience come into a space not knowing one another in this space, and maybe some of the bias Anna and I have in our work is to bring that audience together in an active way, even subconscious, and I don't have the neurological, physiological backing to support this, Heidi, but I'm happy to read more and look at what we're doing. But that… through the joyful confusion, the audience comes in not really knowing what Anne and I are asking them to do. They get a bit perplexed, it shakes them up, and then they find friendships and community in doing that. I love Anne to speak… Butterfold.

Clara Francesca

But one of the first projects she and I took together to Austria was, a piece called Inescapable Entanglement, where I was… really moved that we ended up having all the audience literally flock with me. They followed very basic gestures with movement to face, and then they touched the plant wave that was connected to a tree to get the tree to talk. And all these folk that, you know, would resist getting to know one another and come from different backgrounds, very, very heavy science backgrounds, were not engaging together, all of a sudden were. So, I think there's power in that, because then it speaks to the underneath that the pieces are that we're making.

Clara Francesca

Anna?

Yeah, I, I think the experience for audience members is more intense if they are actually interacting and doing something physical, at least in my opinion. I'm a sound artist and musician. And I've also played a lot of concerts, and that's great, and people come, and you present, and they have a great time, yet it is so… absolutely different if people come and then they interact, or even they are invited to become the artist, to create something together.

Anne Wichmann

Because it shifts the energy of the room to a certain type of togetherness that nobody signed up for, yet it kind of seems to just happen, and I think this is a very powerful tool. And this is why we also try, for all our shows, to be very… like, very, very accessible and open to people from all types of backgrounds and ages and communities, so that we can actually invite People in. People, period. No matter who. So that we see, like, tiny kids playing with 75-year-old people, and they look at each other, and then they're just doing it.

Anne Wichmann

And also, like, from our experiences. The phase after a show is over is very different if the…

Audience was a part of the show.

Like, the conversations are much more intense, and people have, like, this urge to actually talk about it, rather than, hey, yeah, I've been to this concert, it was great, right? And that's kind of it, but if you have, like, these interactive experiences. Yeah, I, like, it really fascinates me. And then, on top of that, honestly, after we came out of the pandemic, I have the feeling that people long to touch. And they long to be together, and so, like, I started working with these very basic MIDI controllers that just work with skin conduction, because people just love that. It's so easy to do. They can touch the stuff. They can touch each other and create circles and play together.

Anne Wichmann

And that just… yeah, that… Makes my day, like, to see that.

M… Yeah, 100%. I mean, I also feel like we're starved for… we're at a deficit for connection and empathy, in an analog sense, and it seems to me this is something that everyone today is interested in, who's presenting work. I also wonder, because, everyone here is making pretty personal work how much people feel like the call to activism is actually a choice. I think it's obvious. No, some people, definitely some people in the group, it's not necessarily a choice, right? Your life circumstance… Demands that you examine reality, the status quo question, and rebel. And, I just wonder how many people feel like… who presented today feel like they could be doing anything else.

Erin Ko

Or be happy, content, just making work that wasn't socially engaging.

Well, I would.

You actually did say that to me the other day, that you didn't want to do it, but you had to, because the cops were harassing you and everybody, and, like, you were the guy.

I told the cops… the cops and the rangers at the very beginning of this, I said, all I want to do is sit on my chair and hang out in my comfy cushion. But I was driven to… because I knew once they started picking on one person, one artist, one musician, it would go all the way around, and sure enough, it did. And so, I jumped in the fray because I had to, because everybody had to. And, it changed my entire work. A lot of the stickers that I have out, I never would be putting stickers out about Unfucked the park, or things, you know, really the butterfly, revolution, all these things that we did to brand it, to bring the community in. And just to add on the physical thing, the ringing of the bell in the circle is a call out to the community, and when I go around, I really… I have a large voice.

J Eric Cook

And it fills the circle, and so when I call, and I don't know if anybody's been there, but when I call it out, you can hear it all the way around the park. And when I make the call, I am living art, you are living art, you are living art, and people call back, you are living art. And they take it, and it becomes a callback all the way around the circle with people who are from out of town, from in town, who know the call, who don't know the call, and they all become… it becomes a beautiful call of joy in the midst of the madness and anger that it came out of. It becomes a call of joy and community. And since then, I… it's a weird celebrity where I'll walk through town, and all of a sudden, somebody that I don't even know calls out, we are living art, or I am living art, or you are li- and just to hear that randomly is really…

Guy.

Beautiful.

You're the living art guy.

We are… we are the living art, guys.

We are the living room, guys. Alright, we… I think we're gonna wrap up in about 5 minutes at 2 o'clock, we went a little late, but I wanted to ask a general question, which is… it's always a difficult one for me. How do we avoid preaching to the choir? Because everybody who's attending here is… Likely and high agreement and excited by everybody's work and words. How do we… how do we get out of our own bubble? To connect. Anyone? I mean, it… you don't… no one really has to have an answer, because I think it's a difficult question, but…

You carry it wherever you go. You know, you make it contagious. When you carry it into your life. And, you know, we have different lives, all of us, and we all have a bigger life out there besides the circle where we sit right now. So, if we take what we learn here, With us wherever we go. Then it's gonna rub off on people. You know? Unless you're totally introverted with it. If you share it, those who… Are in sync. We'll start to hum along with whatever frequency you're giving off.

Verneda Lights

You know, and they will learn. And incorporate, and maybe the frequency will change, maybe not, but then they'll find, like, people. Ripple effect. You know?

We have to… so… Yeah, so… I have a follow-up question to that. Are we obligated to do that as artists?

Yes, we are.

Yes.

Yes, we are. You're your brother's keeper. I am my brother's keeper. I'm my family's keeper.

The main thing that we have to… the main thing that we… show and display in any of the work that we do. Is our authenticity. And I think that's what resonates. That's what's going to resonate with us as this little circle, but it also resonates with anybody who comes across us. As long as we're authentic, and authentic means that we are committed to whatever it is we're doing. That… that is something that is undeniable, and I think it's also common, and I'll, be quiet now.

I mean, that's a fantastic note to end on. Thank you, Steven. Everyone here, I think… I know most of you are pretty authentic, wonderful humans. And, I feel honored to be amongst… who I think, really, I think this group are some of the greatest potential defenders of reality right now, and life. And, I thank you for joining us. We're gonna stop the recording. And we can continue, to discuss and Q&A, whatever you like. It'll be more freeform, hang out and chill. But thank you, everybody, for coming. Thanks for, my wagging voice.

Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Erin, very much.

Thank you.

Yep.

It was great seeing everybody and hearing everybody.

And…

All right, well, thanks… yeah, thanks so much, Erin, for organizing this, coming up with the topic. As some of you might know, who are kind of regulars here, we have this, after-party, which goes on after the Zoom recording is stopped, aka the advisory board, so… that's where things get worked out and decided upon as far as upcoming salons. It was proposed in the, very early days of Techspressionism that we have an advisory board. And I sort of reacted violently against the notion of that, so I thought the people that stick it out long enough to hang out after the salon get to decide on things like what happens for the next salon, and talk about exhibition ideas, and all that other kind of good stuff, so… Yeah, today's salon was really, an illustration of how this group can function, as a social sculpture, you know, with these new armatures, kind of like.

Colin Goldberg

Branching off, and I think what Erin did by bringing in her own, sort of, personal network of artists that she knows that are relevant, is a great model to you know, to grow this, and to just open it up. So, yeah, I'd just like to thank all the presenters, really incredible work, and Hope to see you guys at upcoming salons. So with that… What was that?

I'm in.

Okay, anyhow, we will stop the recording then in 3, 2, 1, and…

And cut.