Applied Cuteness Research is a virtual reality installation that invites audiences to play with artificial cuties in VR. Some questions I hope audiences will consider include: Who owns the technology you use everyday? Why was it made? When you use technology, who is the user and who is the utilized? Does artificial intelligence live to serve? Continue Reading Angie Fan
–Rose Klein
Description:
Games of the Oppressed creates a scaffolding for playing games critically and thoughtfully, with intention. It implicates players as designers. Following from the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, it seeks to break down the barrier between players and designers. Players change the rules during play. There is no active facilitator. By challenging players to make systemic change in the game, it gives players the tools for revolutionary work.
Games of the Oppressed presents a framework for encouraging players to change the rules during gameplay in order to practice for making change in larger real-life systems.
In form, it takes three parts:
It is a self-propogating workshop which asks participants to make their own games. These games will be presented during part of the MFA show.
It is a collectively edited player’s handbook to interacting with the games made by participants, presented and in mutable form online and physically.
It is a series of example games made by Rose to more thoroughly understand the struggles that others seeking to articulate oppression might encounter.
Bio:
Rose Klein is a human. They can most easily be found online at their website: [link] They like making poetry and realized recently that they could think about nearly everything they do in that context. They care deeply about the liberation of all peoples from the shackles of Empire-capitalism, whether through the creation of tools or the aiding of the collective. Here’s a poem:
This – is – the – space – in – between – two – things
Charge the line -/
revolution through performance,
revolution through play,
revolution through art
every day:
small acts of resistance
Do you want to be a part
of this
your presence recorded
every – space – used
If you want to know personal details about them, you should probably just be their friend.
Out of the 911 homes destroyed during the fires, only 24 have been fully rebuilt over the intervening 32 months. While there are arguments for a cautious approach to rebuilding, those considerations must be weighed against the human cost of having to fight with bureaucracy after losing one’s home to recreate a sense of security and stability.
Smoked Out will approach this clearly complex, systemic issue via a multi-modal approach in three acts:
I. A documentary performance with text composed from interviews with five individuals who have attempted to go through the rebuilding process.
II. A mobile phone game, so audience members can experience some of the structural hurdles via direct play. The game is available to play at tinyurl.com/SmokedOutMobile
III. A forum theater to discuss what changes might be made to help those struggling with rebuilding now and how to change the system before the next large disaster hits.
Additional dramaturgical resources can be found at https://smokedout.sites.ucsc.edu
Smoked Out was originally performed on March 10, 11, and 12, 2023. However, just because this performance is over does not mean that the harm is not still ongoing, or that these structural oppositions to housing our communities will not continue to cause harm unless the underlying systemic issues are resolved.
Poster Designed by Saul Villegas of Moderno
C (Ruby Kastner) describes the initial evacuation from the fires.
A Map of the Lightning Strikes that Started the CZU Lightning Complex.
A map showing the positions of fire resources in Santa Cruz County.
A description of how underinsurance compounds costs.
A (Giovanni Lomeli) describes one of his reasons for wanting to stay through the rebuilding process.
C (Ruby Kastner) describes the major differences in experience between individuals who lost their homes and those who did not.
D (Destiny Oliva) describes the result of the County issued Atkins Report.
Zeus (a personification of Santa Cruz County, played by Hannah Goodwin and Rylind Richmond) says that this is an issue of personal responsibility and not of systemic failing.
Members of the audience attempt to complete their preclearances to move towards rebuilding their houses.
At the start of the mobile game, audience members are prompted to design their home.
An example of paperwork that an audience member might be asked to complete.
The Joker (Rylind Richmond) introduces the audience to Forum Theater by first asking them to get out of their chairs.
An insurance adjustor (Ruby Kastner) accidentally professes love to Morgan after a tense phone call.
A PG+E Representative (Destiny Oliva) talks with an audience member about installing power lines.
Morgan (Giovanni Lomeli) talks with an audience member about the emotional toll of the rebuilding process.
A bureaucrat (Hannah Goodwin) talks with an audience member about the paperwork for getting a building permit.
Propagate is a plugin for simulating plant growth and forest dynamics in Unreal Engine, and an ecologically-oriented approach to game design. Continue Reading Ian Costello
Digital games typically portray natural environments as static backdrops, limiting their ability to engage with a changing climate. Propagate is a plugin for simulating plant growth and forest dynamics in Unreal Engine, and an ecologically-oriented approach to game design. By building tools in collaboration with ecologists and climate researchers, the intent of the project is to usher in new forms of interactive media that explore environmentally-centered narratives.
Ian Costello is an artist and developer using game engines to bridge the gap between games and climate research.
Finding Norma is a video installation that depicts my work of investigation centered on the transnational and fragmentary archives of the Brazilian queer filmmaker Norma Bahia Pontes (1941-2010), from her films during the Cinema Novo in Brazil and France to lesbian feminist videotapes made in New York in the 1970s. Continue Reading Livia Perez
Media: video installation
Description: Finding Norma is a video installation that depicts my work of investigation centered on the transnational and fragmentary archives of the Brazilian queer filmmaker Norma Bahia Pontes (1941-2010), from her films during the Cinema Novo in Brazil and France to lesbian feminist videotapes made in New York in the 1970s. The installation has an experimental/documentary approach, in an immersive and sensitive rhythm, non-chronological, in expanded time based on my research process full of gaps and in which the information was found truncated and the archives fragmented.
Bio: Livia Perez is a Brazilian filmmaker, producer, and media scholar. Her moving-image critical practice spans documentaries interrogating archival materials to animate stories traditionally erased, connect generations, and imagine alternative futures. Her work focuses on sexuality, gender, and feminist media history. She directed Who Killed Eloá? (2015), Lampiao da Esquina (2016). She co-produced A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here (2021, dir. Érica Sarmet) premiered at Sundance, and Carne (2019, dir. Camila Kater) premiered at Locarno Film Festival. In 2022, she was visiting intern at the Isaac Julien Studio in London. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Sao Paulo in 2022.
Media:
Audiovisual performance/installation
Description:
Throwing is a durational performance and audiovisual study of the temporality of baseball as Major League Baseball begins to institute the pitch clock to speed up the pace of play. It is a queer love letter to pitching mannerisms and idiosyncrasies that take up time and disrupt an easily commodifiable game flow. The piece features the artist as a training pitcher throwing baseballs across the performance space and gradually finding their own sense of rhythm, gesture, and slowness.
Bio:
Nicki Duval (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist primarily working in the mediums of performance art, video, and sound. Their work focuses on time, queerness, the body, and questions of form and formlessness. In their time at UCSC’s Digital Arts and New Media program, they have largely focused on athletics (and specifically baseball) as a vehicle for thinking through these concepts. Outside of DANM, they compose and perform experimental electronic music as EEL TANK.
Media: Performance Series
Ancient Greek drama; the manosphere; Virtual Reality; furries; live video; motion-tracking, conjuring Athena from two-and-a-half thousand years ago to answer for what she’s done. Combining live interviews, dance, puppetry, and shared ritual across material and immaterial realms, “virtual Furies” take flight in the pursuit of answers.
Bio: Rory Willats is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, new media, movement, and community. His practice conjures hybrid bodies by staging the consonances and dissonances between bodily capacity and information technologies. From interactive VR installations hung from 27′ pendulums to one-man performances, Rory locates these alternate configurations within a mediated ecology to cultivate new digital phenomenologies. Also a sought-after stage director, Rory’s work has been seen in theaters, opera houses, and galleries in the US and UK.
Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance! is a series of devised performance experiments exploring how masculinity is navigated, manipulated, and remade in virtual communities. This performance combines the live motion data from three different spheres of pedestrian gesture to create a new choreography–a launching point from which to explore how these flows manifest within and between the hybrid body.
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Media:
Installation
Description:
A leather sex sling, hand crafted from materials officially purchased through UCSC research funding, hangs dramatically in the center of a darkened gallery between CRT televisions which speak through static blips about transformative group sex experiences. As a visitor you are encouraged to mount the sling which through thermal imagery projects the users image onto the gallery walls. This functions as an illustration of research into sex clubs as cultural institutions and palaces of unique aesthetic experiences, while placing the queered body as its central currency.
Bio:
Patrick Stephenson decorates sex parties for a living, and has always been fascinated by the potential exchange between these clandestine haunts, and academically supported art institutions. Over the years he has pushed larger multimedia installations into sexual space, leaning on fluxus philosophies to enhance physical human experience. With the thesis work at UCSC, he intends to bridge the gap by reflecting back the aesthetic possibilities of charged queer spaces into an otherwise sterile gallery environment, upending puritanical notions of appropriate content rooted in the university, and society as a whole.