The Skeuomorph Mendi + Keith Obadike

April 3 – June 6, 2025

It was a pleasure to host Mendi + Keith Obadike at UCSD this past week on the occasion of their show “The Skeuomorph” at the Gallery QI. Talk and panel discussion embedded below.

I served as a guest judge for the Triton XR hackathon held at the Design Innovation Building on March 1-2, 2025. Triton XR is the UCSD VR/AR/XR student organization I am faculty advisor for. The theme was Mindfulness, and I judged along with with Trish and Joe from Maveric Studio, Cassie Vietan from the Stanford Compassion Institute/Center for Mindfulness, Jessica D’Elena Tweed, and external guests from Unity.

I’ll be giving a talk and serving on a round-table discussion at the Sixth National Research Platform (6NRP) Workshop at the Qualcomm Institute, La Jolla, CA on Tuesday, January 28 – Thursday, January 30, 2025.

The Workshop will cover both the current state of NRP as well as its future direction and long-term viability and success. Several tutorials will be offered on Tuesday, January 28th that will help attendees learn how to access NRP’s distributed campus-owned compute cloud and allied resources. Find more information here: https://na.eventscloud.com/website/79913/home/

Ash Eliza Smith and I are leading a workshop and performance on January 23rd, 2025 to coincide with the launch of the Ken Burns Leonardo Da Vinci documentary. Our half day workshop with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute will work through the fundamentals of co-creation with generative AI, producing an immersive theater production performed in the evening at the Sheldon Museum of Art. With key creative and technical contributions from Sam Bendix and Reid Brockmeier.

I was an invited speaker at the UNL CreatiViz Team’s Data Storytelling Workshop and Data Art Jam on January 13th. It was great to speak alongside Rahul Barghava, Laura Guertin, and Matt Waite.

More info:

• https://go.unl.edu/data-storytelling-info
Continue reading Invited Speaker for Experimental Data Visualization Symposium at UNL →

Dances with Robots: VR

For ON DISPLAY GLOBAL 2024 I collaborated with Hortense Gerardo (APT Program), Amy Eguchi, and Joe Unger and Trisha WIlliams (Maveric Studio) for a new performance with robots DANCES WITH ROBOTS: VR. (Ghost Ride the Headset)

I was an invited participant in the 2024 World Imagination Network meetup at ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination October 23-25 2024. Over the course of three days we did intense workshopping of scholarship, development plans, and curricula and toolkits in the area of imagination studies. Guests included Robert Alexander, Stephen Asma, Bob Beard, Ron Beghetto, Fabrice Guerrier, Amy Kind, Peter Langland-Hassan, Karcher Morris, Brendan Bo O’Connor, Robert Sinclair, Laurne Keeler, Clinton Tolley, Cassi Vietan. Thank you Ed Finn, Ruth Wylie, Bob Beard, Nina Miller, and Linsey Wilt from CSI for hosting us! Nice to see our sister institution for the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination.

I’m thrilled to show my project with Ash Eliza Smith as part of the PST Art + Science exhibition, Embodied Pacific, at the Birch Aquarium.

Wonderful to be at SIGGRAPH 2024 as a viewer/consumer/reviewer and not a presenter. I really enjouyed it. So much food for thought, so many inspiring contributions.

We took a crew of Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts students, it was amazing! A really good mix of influences I think.