The CCA Libraries Exhibition Program presents a digital exhibition by Erik Scollon’s undergraduate course, Craft as Social Justice. Exhibiting students include Maha Almadhi, Kelsey Bowen, Faye Dennis, Laila Espinoza, Maya Gulassa, Christine Juon, Angela Seon, Rosa Novak, Tracy Ren, Tenzin Tsomo, and Mai Utsumiya. For their final project, the students of Craft as Social Justice created an online exhibition of objects that focus on the intersection of craft practices and a social justice issue of their choosing. The collected exhibitions seek to make visible the connections between skilled making and materiality to the lived experiences of the makers and users. The curators sought to tie the issues and the makers to the current political moment. Viewers are invited to view the student projects on display in the digital space of exhibition by powering on the iPad display and following the links and videos embedded on the Craft as Social Justice homepage. Digital exhibitions on view include Break the …
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…
Fa He was born and raised in Huaian, Jiangsu, China and is a second-year MFA student. His research-based artworks discuss the possibilities and complexity that speaking two languages can lead to, in this case, English and Chinese. Fa seeks for the moments when the two languages “blend” into each other and the boundaries between them break down. Ambiguity is essential. In his video work Kunlun (Brother Order), 2017, he recites the poem Kunlun- to the tune of Nien Nu Chiao by Mao Zedong. When Fa translated it, he didn’t follow the traditional method — translating the meaning —but translated character by character. Then he read the translation into English with a Chinese accent. He discovered that he sometimes sounds as if he is saying something different than the words he was reading. To capture this ambiguity moment, he recorded the pinyin[1] he heard in his recitation and found a Chinese character for each phonetic notation. After that, he put these Chinese characters into Google translator to get the English…
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 constructed attempts to connect what is separated,” in Siegfried Zielinski’s words. NL||LE asks questions that highlight unconventional literary relationships like the look or the handling of the works as objects. The exhibit intervenes in the temporality of the works it brings together. NL||LE brings forth the historical dimension of its collection by incorporating vintage computers in the exhibit, next to mobile devices, and print materials from CCA Libraries’ collections. While undeniably each one of the print and electronic pie…
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…