Conn to host 18th Ammerman Center Triennial Symposium on Arts and Technology
More than 100 artists, scholars and technologists will gather at Connecticut College Thursday, March 26, through Saturday, March 28, for the 18th Ammerman Center Triennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, marking 40 years of the event.
This year’s theme, “All Too Human,” explores how advances in science and technology are reshaping ideas about what it means to be human. The program includes performances, exhibitions, panels and workshops that examine topics such as artificial intelligence, human-machine collaboration and creative practice. Admission for New London-area residents, including Connecticut College students, faculty and staff, is free.
The symposium will feature a keynote by documentary producer and filmmaker Katerina Cizek on Friday at 9:45 a.m. in Evans Hall, Cummings Arts Center. Cizek is a Peabody- and Emmy-winning documentarian, author, producer and senior leader working with collective processes and emergent technologies. She is the co-founder, research scientist and artistic director of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. She co-wrote the world’s first comprehensive book on co-creating media, Collective Wisdom, published by MIT Press in 2022. At the studio, she designs and leads innovative incubators, workshops, research projects, delegations and fellowships fusing art, documentary and journalism with emergent tech and science.
This year’s commissioned artists, Tansy Xiao, Mathieu Pradat and Kate Ladenheim, spent a week at Conn building and finalizing pieces to present at or reflect upon at the symposium, while also meeting with students and communities. Xiao devised a new iteration of “LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor),” a live interaction among musicians, dancers and virtual environments exploring “diverse forms of intelligence independent of human dominance” and Pradat workshopped “Giants and Minis,” a massively multiuser mobile game staging a battle for cities between those who seek to destroy and those who work together to preserve. Ladenheim, a dance artist, will present “Gestural Publics,” a choreographic project that uses motion capture and 3D animation technologies to investigate the cultural implications of digitizing human movement.
The Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College is a community of students, faculty, staff, artists and scholars dedicated to exploring the dynamic relationships between the arts, technology and culture through experimentation, research and creation. Its mission is to inspire and foster the production of creative, scholarly, collaborative and interdisciplinary work by offering innovative educational experiences such as courses, workshops, symposia, colloquia, internships, mentoring and advising.
