When a call went out for proposals for a faculty exhibition on Art, Science, and Pedagogy at CCA in conjunction with the Fall 2015 Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) Symposium, Leslie Townsend proposed an exhibition idea for her Visual Studies Program African Art course. In addition to displaying material artifacts, she was interested in linking the many types of digital artifacts from the course--images, videos, texts, student assignments, reference materials, syllabus--into an integrated digital display. She worked with Bobby White, Instructional Designer, and Lisa Conrad, Digital Scholarship Librarian to realize the exhibit. Bobby had recently seen student work from faculty member Rebekah Edwards’ literature class using the software tool Twine and suggested it for this project. Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories, and is also used for narrative games. Like a labyrinth, it allows viewers to choose different and multiple paths to travel through a…
The MFA in Writing program’s Digital Storytelling course, taught in spring 2016 by Faith Adiele, brought together graduate writers, artists and makers to hone their narrative skills and develop their own digital projects. The Bay Area is the center of electronic and digital literature (literary work created exclusively on and for devices with screens) and storytelling, but while the dazzling technologies may be new, interactive storytelling is one of the earliest forms of human interaction. We explored e-lit's antecedents and traditions, ranging from non-Western traditions like the griot, talk-story, and testimonio, to the democratized oral history movement of the 1970s; from the physicality of Book Arts to platforms and networks that offer open-source, global activist alternatives to pricey technology. The course was open to all grad students and had participants from Architecture and Design MBA. They received training from Yosmay del Mazo of StoryCorps, Thaddeus Howze of Quora, Chieh-Ju Pai in the Film…
On January 16th, 2016, commissioned by Southern Exposure, the piece Basement Clay was delivered to the public. The work is a text and performance created by CCA Adjunct Professor Kari Marboe for the re-opening of David Ireland’s home, now the 500 Capp Street Foundation. Inspired by the making process of Basement Clay, Professor Marboe has developed the course UDIST Activate Archive: Capp Street Project. It offers students the opportunity to create new work informed by Capp Street Project Archive within an interdisciplinary setting. This course collaborates with the CCA Libraries to provide hands-on archive experiences guided by Jennine Scarboro, Curator of the CSPA and a Meyer Library exhibition guided by Lisa Conrad, Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Grace Xu (Curatorial Practice 2018), Libraries Assistant Curator. Activate Archive: Capp Street Project Exhibition hosts the student’s works alongside the archives they were inspired by. Works, including installations, drawings, jewelries, spread out in the…
California College of the Arts (CCA) is proud to lead the For Freedoms’ 50 State Initiative in the Bay Area—working with major arts and cultural organizations across the region to increase voter registration, voter access, and engagement in the broader practices of democracy. CCA presents Creative Citizensin Action, a series of town halls, special exhibitions, and workshops that facilitate civic discourse and participation to drive social and cultural change. CCA has also collaborated with other Bay Area art institutions to serve as civic forums for action and discussions of values, place, patriotism, and the importance of voting. Additionally, CCA’s San Francisco campus is now a voter registration and polling site serving San Francisco citizens both on and off campus.
A selection of works by poet David Meltzer curated by Lisa Conrad to coincide with a reading of his work, Friday, September 4, 2015, Writers’ Studio, San Francisco Campus. David Meltzer began his literary career during the Beat heyday and is considered a major figure in the San Francisco / Beat Renaissance. Meltzer's reading at CCA centered on the recent reissue of a special edition of Two-Way Mirror (Oyez 1977). It returned with a new introduction and an ample addendum written almost 40 years later.
The Simpson Library presents Moby Dick, or, The White Whale, a display in conjunction with EMOJICON, a conference put on by Emoji Learn to make connections with the global emoji community and discuss the contemporary usages and implications of this popular form of visual communication. Fred Benenson’s Emoji Dick was created in collaboration with over eight hundred Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Benenson worked with one Amazon Mechanical Turk to translate an estimated 10,000 sentences from Herman Melville’s iconic American novel. Another set of workers voted to decide on the most popular versions of every sentence in Emoji Dick. In total this book took 3,795,980 seconds to complete. Each worker was paid per translation (five cents) and for their vote (two cents). This project was crowd- sourced by Benenson using Kickstarter in 2009. In conjunction with Emoji Dick, the library presents alternative versions of Moby Dick.
NL||LE at CCA presents a subset of works from the original exhibition that focus on electronic literature in Spanish and English together with print works of contemporary post-digital experimentalism. Devoted to post digital issues, the works gathered here signal a nonlinear relationship between print and digital which blur the lines between them and look for instances in which they compliment each other. What is the role of print now that everything can be made digital? What are the ways digital objects are informed by print? The exhibition showcases the use of computational and digital technologies in literary production in the networked world and its material connections with 20th-century technologized approaches to literature like futurism, concretism, creationism, stridentism, magical realism, and others. By bringing purposefully together a collection of print and electronic works in the single space of a gallery, NL||LE takes on a media archaeological perspective to create a “space of action for constru…
By definition, a constitution is “a body of fundamental principles ... according to which a state or other organization is acknowledged to be governed. Synonyms: charter, social code, law; bill of rights; rules, regulations, fundamental principles, e.g., “the constitution guarantees our rights’”* Drafting it was a creative and visionary act, during the revolutionary war, “times,” Thomas Paine observed, “that try men’s souls,” words also suited to today’s political climate. But though it was written over 200 years ago, the Constitution is a living document, reviewed, argued over, occasionally amended, continuously. Why is it important, especially in this current moment? Do you feel protected by it? The recent white nationalist protest and counter-protest in Charlottesville, among other things, challenged the definition of “free speech,” protected under the first amendment to the Constitution. Should hate speech be protected under the first amendment? On September 5, the White House announced it would repea…
On March 5th of 2016, the Simpson Library hosted California College of the Arts' 2nd annual Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon aimed at addressing the gender imbalance and skewed coverage of Wikipedia. Library staff and visitors spent the day writing articles on female artists and topics relating to women, feminism, and art.