Above: BAI Director Sydney Skybetter welcomes incoming students to campus during a presentation on Brown's Open Curriculum.

Greetings, nerds!

Welcome back to campus, and if you're new here, welcome to Brown. I'm Sydney Skybetter, Director of the Brown Arts Institute, and our newsletter is one of the ways we keep you posted on what's new and what's next in the arts at Brown. Whether you're a first-year still learning which building is the Granoff Center, a faculty member with a wild idea but no budget, or a neighbor who keeps meaning to catch a show at The Lindemann, this is for you.

Our work is predicated on riotous interdisciplinarity: a studio practice colliding with a research lab, a magician convening scholars in fields from computational studies to psycholinguistics in order to understand reality in the age of AI, a rehearsal hall transforming into a seminar room, people who have no business sharing a building sharing one anyway. The Brown Arts Institute is built for exactly that. Our galleries, stages, studios, grants, and courses exist to make those collisions happen on purpose, and so does the team of people who run them.

Take Robots (re)Imagined, a new course born at BAI this fall, co-taught by Paula Gaetano Adi, a RISD professor and artist who builds robots as sculpture and performance, and Nora Ayanian, a Brown professor and engineer who teaches swarms of drones to coordinate without a human in the loop. Their students, from both sides of the hill, will spend the semester making and thinking about machines together. That class doesn't stay in the classroom. On Friday, October 2, robotic sculptor Chico MacMurtrie of Amorphic Robot Works joins me in the Fishman Studio for a Ruckus Session, our live, no-holds-barred conversation series, with a student from the course as our interlocutor. In November, Rigorously Curated, our film series that puts the "cult" in culture, runs three nights alongside the class in The Lindemann: Sleep Dealer on the 10th, The Mitchells vs. the Machines on the 11th, and Ghost in the Shell on the 12th. The machines we live with, the machines we labor through, and the machines we are. Popcorn included.

Or take Jeanette Andrews, our PRIZMA Artist in Residence, a magician whose work runs on declassified secrets. She has built an installation around the CIA's Cold War manual of trickery and deception, and last year at Brown she transposed the secret of a sixteenth-century magic trick into Morse code, then into music for three cellists, with the original manuscript on loan from the Hay. She's with us this year building a new work, and on Thursday, September 24, she convenes The Logic of Illogic in the Martinos Auditorium: a public conversation on what magic knows about perception, power, and what we agree to call real, at a moment when feeds and deepfakes engineer belief at scale.

Everything we do starts with someone showing up with an idea that doesn't fit. We're specialists in the art of the impossible: making possible what can't happen elsewhere. Come find us. All nerds welcome.

Sending my best,

Sydney, and the Team at BAI