Incredible Witness is a public laboratory that asks: how can people ever be “credible witnesses” when even the most basic perceptions, such as color vision or spatial awareness, differ drastically from person to person? We live in a historical period where many traditional binaries are breaking down. Some of the most basic assumptions about social life and hierarchies are fragmenting--ideas around gender, race, sexuality, and ability are being questioned and re-framed. Incredible Witness seeks to encourage this disintegration, and find ways of learning to accept each other fully, beyond the categories. In the Incredible Witness laboratory, we invite people into unusual perceptual worlds to bring home viscerally how different each person’s experience of the world can be, using games and game-based environments. Our talk will review the results of our participatory experiments and point to future activities.
Talk
Allison Parrish
Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She has recently given talks on computer-generated poetry at the Electronic Literature Organization conference, !!Con, Alt-AI, SXSW Interactive and Eyeo. From 2014 to 2016, Allison was the Digital Creative Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, and has recently been a research resident at DBRS Innovation Labs, a Processing Foundation fellow, and a visiting artist at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU. Allison holds a master's degree from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she is currently a member of the full-time faculty.
Clarinda Mac Low
CLARINDA MAC LOW was brought up in the avant-garde arts scene that flourished in NYC during the 1960s and ‘70s. She began performing with her father Jackson Mac Low Meredith Monk at the age of 4 in 1971. Mac Low started out working in dance and molecular biology in the late 1980s and now works in performance and installation, creating participatory installations and events that investigate social constructs and corporeal experience. She is Executive Director of Culture Push, an experimental organization that links artistic practice and civic engagement. Recent work includes Incredible Witness,” where differences in sensory perception lead to empathic understanding; “Free the Orphans,” a project that seeks to “free” copyright orphans (creative work with unknown copyright holders); “The Year of Dance”, an anthropology of the NYC dance world; TRYST, performance interventions in urban space; and "Cyborg Nation," public conversation on the technological body and intimacy. Mac Low has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, through the Society for Cultural Exchange in Pittsburgh, andat Yaddo, and Mount Tremper Arts, among others. Grants and honors include a BAX Award in 2004, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, 2007 and a 2010 Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art grant. Mac Low holds a BA, double major in Dance and Molecular Biology, from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts Practice from CCNY-CUNY.
Lauren Bierly
Lauren Bierly is an arts professional and artist living / working in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Manager of Special Exhibitions and Projects for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bierly's experience in New York City's non-profit arts scene includes exhibition management and administrative support to artists and curators through the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA), the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Eyebeam: Art and Technology Center, Christie’s New York and other organizations. Since 2009, she's produced more than twenty-five independently curated exhibitions, nearly 100 exhibition-related events, and co-directed an artists-administrators residency serving New York City’s five boroughs. Bierly balances her arts profession with an art practice in perception-based theory—predominantly synesthesia. Her installations have most recently been exhibited at Tagore Center: Indian Center for Cultural Relations (Kolkata, India), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Feldenheimer Gallery (Portland, OR), and Emergent Art Space (San Francisco, CA). Incredible Witness is Bierly's first community engagement project, adding tremendous value to her research and understanding of all walks of life and the artwork she produces.
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