Installation View of Negotiated Differences in Stakes and Holders, 2020. M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong. Commissioned by M+. Photo: Ringo Cheung

As part of the Department of Visual Arts Guest Speaker Series I hosted Shirley Tse for a remote artist talk on Thursday May 8, 2025.

About Shirley Tse

Los Angeles-based artist Shirley Tse (b.1968) works in sculpture, installation, photography, and text. She deconstructs our world of synthetic objects that carry paradoxical meanings and constructs different models in which differences might come together. Various strategies of visualising heterogeneity are used: conflating different scales, fusing the organic with the industrial, crossing between the literal and the metaphorical, merging different narratives, and collapsing the subject and object relationship. Tse received a Master of Fine Arts from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena and Bachelor of Arts degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong Department of Fine Arts. Tse represented Hong Kong at the 58th Venice Biennale. Her work is featured in many articles, catalogues, and publications including Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life (2015) and Sculpture Today (2007). Tse received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2009 and is on faculty at California Institute of the Arts since 2001 where she is Robert Fitzpatrick Chair in Art.  Her work is exhibited at venues including: Pasadena Museum of California Art (2004/2017); Osage, Hong Kong (2010/2011); K11, Hong Kong (2009); Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (2009); Museum of Modern Fine Art, Minsk (2006); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2005); Para Site, Hong Kong (2000/2005); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (2003); Art Gallery of Ontario (2002); Bienal Ceará América, Fortaleza (2002); Biennale of Sydney (2002); Capp Street Project, San Francisco (2002); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2002); MoMA PS1 (2002); New Museum (2002); Palazzo dell’Arengo, Rimini (2002); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001); TENT, Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam (2001); and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2000).

For more about Shirley Tse: https://shirleytse.com/

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’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/

Wednesday, January 29th, 2024

Thursday, January 30, 2024

Ash Eliza Smith, Sam Bendix, Reid Brockmeier and I are running 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.

>>> tune in live radio-play.net/davinci <<<

More Information:

• Ken Burns Leonardo Da Vinci https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/leonardo-da-vinci/
• Sheldon Museum of Art https://sheldonartmuseum.org/
• Nebraska Public Media Event – https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/watch/community-engagement/leonardo-da-vinci/
• Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln https://olli.unl.edu/

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
• https://dataculture.northeastern.edu/2025/01/14/UNL-data-art-jam.html

I collaborated with Trisha Williams, Joe Unger (Maveric Studio), Hortense Gerardo, and Amy Eguchi for a new performance with robots in VR for ON DISPLAY GLOBAL 2024.

“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.

Researchers at Scripps Oceanography have been eavesdropping on marine soundscapes for decades to study animals and the threats they face. High-frequency Acoustic Recording Packages (HARPs) use underwater microphones, or hydrophones, to capture everything from whale songs and dolphin clicks to passing ships and military sonar.

Inspired by this work, Ash Eliza Smith and Robert Twomey invite us into an interactive audio experience that blends storytelling with a guided sound bath. Inside a phone booth, participants embark on an underwater journey, tuning in to both animal and human-made sounds—and responding with their own vocalizations. Outside the booth, people’s movements are tracked, creating visual trails that echo the migratory patterns of sea life.

The project poses thought-provoking questions: What if the animals we listen to could talk back? What if a fish could text you about ocean noise? Could a phone call connect us to an “internet of animals,” and what would that mean? This work brings ocean acoustics and the idea of an “internet of animals” to life, transforming data beyond human perception into an immersive sensory experience.

Fish Phone Booth is a project of Ash Eliza Smith + Robert Twomey (A Speculative Devices x Cohab Labs Production). Production, Graphic and Experience Design support: Sam Bendix. Developer, Design support: Reid Brockmeier. Dramaturgy: Micha? Stankiewicz. Prototyped in support from the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival, Worlds In Play and The Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts.

https://aquarium.ucsd.edu/newsroom/embodied-pacific-ocean-unseen

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.

Continue reading Reviewer for SIGGRAPH 2024 →