The Ammerman Center’s theme for 2020-21 is “Break Out,” a term that is at once generative and disruptive, focusing a critical eye towards structures of power in arts, technology, and culture in the present while highlighting the work of those who are actively crafting other possible futures and breaking out of old patterns.
Our invited speakers are visionary artists, technologists, musicians, activists, curators, organizers and hackers whose work truly deserves being called “interdisciplinary”:
“Wampum.Codes: Emerging technology and indigenous values”
Monday, September 21, 2020
5:15-6:45 p.m.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist/technologist/storyteller whose work runs the gamut from playful to revolutionary. Her oeuvre ranges from directing citizen-design initiatives for urban communities, to being a Google and Sundance fellow for her VR and film work, to producing a podcast series focused on Indigineous artists and technologists, to working at MIT and Mozilla on new computer programming paradigms rooted in the values of her ancestral Haudenosaunee people, questioning and disrupting the ethos of Silicon Valley.
“Reframing Historical Narratives through Augmented Reality”
Monday, November 2, 2020
5:15-6:45 p.m.
Movers and Shakers NYC founders Glenn Cantave and Idris Brewster are activists, artists, and technologists whose work engages with racist historical narratives through direct action, performance, film, music, technology, education and social entrepreneurship.
Ingrid Lafleur, a leading convener of the Afrofuturist cultural movement in the past decade, currently based in Capetown, South Africa, will talk about her overarching project examining and putting into practice alternate future visions based on Black liberation. This work has spanned museum exhibitions, community activism, a mayoral campaign for the city of Detroit, community-based cryptocurrencies, literature, the arts, and technology.
Ingrid LaFleur is a curator, artist, pleasure activist and Afrofuturist. Her mission is to ensure equal distribution of the future, exploring the frontiers of social justice through new technologies, economies and modes of government. As the founder of The Afrofuture Strategies Institute, LaFleur implements Afrofuturist foresight and approaches to empower Black bodies and oppressed communities.
Seth Parker Woods is a world-renowned cellist straddling multiple genres, who has performed cutting edge compositions and collaborated on performances and installations with a range of leading contemporary artists, seeking to change the face and the landscape in which music can be experienced. In one of his recent collaborations, Woods played a melting cello made of black ice, the performance itself serving as an ode to those lost to mental illness and violence in the African American community.
