BEI 🤖🐰: Thinky Feely Tank #2 – The Many Worldings of BEI 🤖🌸
Sunday, May 7, 12–5PM PT
Hosted by The Revolution School
On Zoom
Zoom Meeting ID = 974 6590 3963 | Password: 982884
Max Participants: 300
Free
RSVP here
Join our Artists In Residence, The Revolution School and friends for part two of a three-part Thinky Feely Tank (TFT) series. In TFT #2, we will expand our interdisciplinary playground with even more entanglements via our exciting special guests: K Allado-McDowell, Karen Arcos, Edgar Fabián Frías, Elle Parks, Stacy E. Wood, Alice Yuan Zhang, and Nat Decker!
In TFT #2, we will ask “how” questions. How can artists and scientists collaborate to build an ethical somatic machine worlder? How can we co-build a machine learner that worlds with and learns from Indigenous and quantum physics worldviews? How is the BEI🤖🐠* going to connect/ interface /entangle with our nervous system and gut microbiota? How can BEI🤖🕷️s consent to or be reciprocal with their own becoming? These how questions will become the BEI🤖🌾-building criteria for TFT #3: BEI🤖🍄 Hack House Build-A-Thon. No prep work or prior experience needed!
* BEI🤖🐥 s (pronounced ‘baes’) are somatic machine learners / AI robot animals that connect to our nervous system and are co-designed with our gut microbiota and perform diffractive methodologies rooted in quantum physics to help us operate from a place of abundance and identify cyclical underlying beliefs, traumas, and biases—which are produced by and perpetuate interlocking supremacy systems.
If you missed, TFT #1: Co-Worlding with Karen Barad, Nkem Ndefo, and Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe), watch the recording here.
Please email The Revolution School at [email protected] to share your accessibility needs.
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Meet the featured friends
Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago born, Los Angeles based artist. Their work is situated within queer disability arts as a political practice, combining the intimacy of lived experience with provocations towards collective care and liberation. They create between digital and physical mediums as a form of personal access and to emphasize themes of fantasy and futurity. Results explore the aesthetics of access, desirability, and the relationship between technology and the body. Nat is also an access worker, consulting on accessibility for organizations such as p5.js, New Art City, Creative Growth, the LA Spoonie Collective, and for various projects at the University of California, Los Angeles. In June 2022 they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design/Media Arts and Disability Studies.
Alice Yuan Zhang 张元 is a Chinese-American media artist, writer, and cultural organizer. Her trans-disciplinary practice operates on cyclical and intergenerational time. Along the peripheries of colonialist imagination, she works to bring technology down to earth by devising collective experiments in ancestral remembering, interspecies pedagogy, and networked solidarity. Alice co-founded virtual care lab, a collective that has hosted various creative engagements in remote connection since 2020, and is currently teaching Solidarity Infrastructures at the School for Poetic Computation.
Edgar Fabián Frías is a nonbinary Wixárika artist, psychotherapist, educator, curator, and brujx based in Los Angeles. Their art spans a diverse range of mediums, including installation, photography, video art, sound, sculpture, printed textiles, GIFs, performance, social practice, and community organizing. Frías has a notable ability to convey stories and narratives through their art, which addresses historical legacies, acts of resistance, resiliency, and radical imagination within the context of Indigenous Futurism, spirituality, healing practices, play, pedagogy, animism, and queer aesthetics. Their work seeks to bridge the gap between traditional and contemporary art, creating a rich tapestry that speaks to the complexities of our modern world. Frías’ work has been exhibited internationally at prestigious venues such as the Vincent Price Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Oregon Contemporary, MOCA Jacksonville, Project Space Festival Juárez, and ArtBo, and has been featured in several publications, including Cosmopolitan, Taschen, ELLE UK, Bustle, Los Angeles Times, Slate, CVLT Nation, Terremoto, and Hyperallergic. Visit their website.
Dr. Karen Arcos is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Karen earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience and a Field Emphasis in Chicano/Latino Studies from the University of California, Irvine, along with a Bachelor’s in Psychology and a Spanish minor from the University of Southern California. Karen has accomplished feats such as earning the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship despite being totally blind.
Thanks to those who have helped her be where she is today, Karen is passionate about giving back to her community. She mentors students on undergraduate and graduate admissions processes, as well as on conducting experimental procedures, to show them that they, too, can pursue advanced degrees. During her free time, Karen enjoys reading mysteries, spending time with family and friends, and hiking.
K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, and Air Age Blueprint and are co-editor of The Atlas of Anomalous AI. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors, and record and release music under the name Qenric.
K established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.
K’s work has been covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, WIRED, Bookforum, Artforum, Lithub, The Warburg Institute, Institute of Network Cultures, and by writers including Erik Davis and Bruce Clarke.
K has spoken at New Museum, Tate, Serpentine Gallery, HKW, Moderna Museet, Christie’s, MacArthur Foundation, MfN Berlin, Ars Electronica, Sónar, and many other venues, and has taught at SCI-Arc, Strelka, and IAAC.
Elle Parks (MSc, MA, MDiv) is an interdisciplinary neuroscientist with unique expertise in modern neuroscience, bioethics, trauma, and human embodiment. Her research in chronic pain and traumatic brain injury has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals. Elle’s multidisciplinary research collaborations include co-creation of the first nonlinear, evidence-based systems science model of concussion funded by the Brain Trauma Foundation.
As Founder and Managing Director of Systems NeuroEthic, Elle currently offers consulting services for a wide array of clients representing government, industry, and nonprofit sectors. Her subject matter expertise addresses intrinsically complex medical challenges including chronic pain, health equity, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Long COVID.
Elle has over a decade of experience as a workshop leader, public speaker, writer, and group facilitator for highly diverse audiences. Elle brings a distinctive approach to integrating neuroethics with somatic and spiritual practices, having trained in a multi-religious seminary in ethics, multicultural embodiment, liberation theology and religious pluralism.
Stacy E. Wood is a researcher, writer and teacher. She is currently the Director of Research and Programs for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. Her work focuses on the interstices of technologies and cultures of evidence. Website: stacyewood.com