Design at Mason Gross

On Wednesday 3/10, 11:30am* EST, please join us for a lecture by Lauren McCarthy called “Talk to Me.” Link is available at spring2021-seminar.designforthe.net.

* Please note this time change from 10am to 11:30am!

Lauren Lee McCarthy (she/they) is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow, 2020 Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellow, 2020 Eyebeam Rapid Response Fellow, 2019 Creative Capital Grantee. She is the recipient of several grants, including the Knight Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google AMI, Sundance Institute, and Rhizome. Her work SOMEONE was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the Japan Media Arts Social Impact Award, and her work LAUREN was awarded the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction. Lauren’s work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as the Barbican Centre, SIGGRAPH, Seoul Museum of Art, among many others. Lauren is also the creator of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, with over 1.5 million users. She expands on this work in her role as a Director of the Processing Foundation, whose mission is to serve those who have historically not had access to the fields of technology, code, and art in learning software and visual literacy. Lauren is an Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT.

On Wednesday 3/3, 10am EST, please join us for a lecture by Aarati Akkapeddi called “Foraging & Forging: Generative image-making processes.” Link is available at spring2021-seminar.designforthe.net.

Aarati Akkapeddi is a first-generation Indian-American, cross-disciplinary artist, educator, and programmer interested in the poetics and politics of datasets. They work with both personal and institutional archives to explore how identities and histories are shaped by different methods of collecting, preserving, and presenting data. Their work has been supported by institutions such as NYC Media Lab, Beamcenter, ETOPIA Center for Art & Technology, & LES Printshop. They live and work in Occupied Lenapehoking (New York).

On Wednesday 2/24, 10am EST, please join us for a lecture by Chris Hamamoto called “Versioning.” Link is available at spring2021-seminar.designforthe.net.

Chris Hamamoto is a Bay Area-based designer. He is an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts, and has also lectured or given workshops at Letterform Archive, OCAT Shenzhen, The Book Society in South Korea, SUNY Purchase, Meiyi Art Academy in China, and RISD, among others. His work has been exhibited in the Gwanju Design Biennale, Brno International Graphic Design Biennial, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Typojanchi, as well as published in C Magazine, IDEA Magazine, and the Walker Art Center’s Gradient.

On Wednesday 2/17, 10am EST, please join us for a lecture by Silas Munro called “Bearing Witness: A Designer’s Struggle For Integrity.” Link is available at spring2021-seminar.designforthe.net.

In the fall of 1962, James Baldwin gave a lecture at Community Church in New York City entitled “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.” The speech was later broadcast via Radio on WBAI. In the talk, Baldwin grapples with defining terms like “artist” or “integrity.” He concludes that an artist or designer must confront the dilemma that they are “bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows, and nobody wants to face.” Munro will explore how his mutable practice as a designer, educator, writer, researcher, historian, poet, surfer, and activist has attempted to create a form of integrity in the face of racism, homophobia, classism, stigma, and other forms of exclusion. This attempt at integration is reflected in his lived experience as a queer biracial man and the experiences of his clients and students. Munro is particularly interested in the often unaddressed post-colonial relationship between design and marginalized communities. His practice sheds light, opens up space, and speculates on new futures for more inclusive design disciplines.

On Wednesday 2/10, 10am EST, please join us for a lecture by Amelia Winger-Bearskin called “Decentralized Storytelling.” Link is available at spring2021-seminar.designforthe.net.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist/technologist who helps communities leverage emerging technologies to effect positive change in the world. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist at Contentful in the SF Bay Area. In 2019 she was an invited presenter to His Holiness Dalai Lama’s World Headquarters in Dharamsala for the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion. She founded IDEA New Rochelle, which partnered with the NR Mayor’s office to develop citizen-focused VR/AR tools and was awarded the 2018 Bloomberg Mayors Challenge $1 million dollar grant to prototype their AR Citizen toolkit. She is a Google VR JUMP Start creator, co-directing with Wendy Red Star a 360 video story about Native American Monsters which was selected for a McArthur Grant through the Sundance Institute Native New Frontiers Story Lab 2018. It is on display at Newark Museum beginning February 2019. Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the host of Contentful + Algolia’s Developer Podcast DreamStacks. She is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.