ONGOING VISIONARY CONVERSATIONS
Live, candid conversations with artists, researchers, and cultural leaders examining the rapidly evolving landscape of contemporary culture.
ONGOING VISIONARY CONVERSATIONS
Live, candid conversations with artists, researchers, and cultural leaders examining the rapidly evolving landscape of contemporary culture.
Sponsored in part by the Marshall Woods Lectureship Foundation of Fine Arts
Join us for a thought-provoking Ruckus Session with Chico MacMurtrie, an artist who integrates robotic sculpture, new media installation, and performance. In addition to his sculptural practice, MacMurtrie is an arch-technologist, developing complex robotic systems that challenge the boundaries between the instrumental and the aesthetic, and trouble the very notion of boundaries and borders.. MacMurtrie’s work intertwines questions and critiques of embodiment and environment, imbuing them with a sense of play, irony, and quiet sarcasm.
Chico MacMurtrie’s visit to Brown activates BAI’s curricular offerings through our Fall ARTS course, Robots (re)Imagined, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between RISD, the Brown Arts Institute, and Brown Engineering. One week prior to MacMurtrie’s Ruckus Session, students from the class will visit the artist’s Robotic Church in Brooklyn where they will learn from the artist directly, all while immersed among 50 of MacMurtrie’s pneumatic sculptures. Professors Nora Ayanian and Paula Gaetano Adi composed this groundbreaking class with the support of the Brown Arts Institute in order to afford their students the opportunity not just to build robots, but to build robots in the service of expression, to accept the possibility of failure, and to find play in the process– a sense of play that MacMurtrie exemplifies within his own practice.
Sponsored in part by the Marshall Woods Lectureship Foundation of Fine Arts
Gus Wenner ’12, Founder and CEO of Wenner Media Ventures and former CEO of Rolling Stone magazine, returns to Brown this fall for an electrifying Ruckus Session. Wenner is an artist and entrepreneur who has transformed his own experience with creative practice into business models that support the arts. While enrolled at Brown, Wenner collaborated with multiple students and groups as a musician, forming folk-rock duo Gus+Scout with friend Scout LaRue Willis '13. Following his graduation, Wenner worked at Rolling Stone magazine, expanding the magazine’s footprint during a time of ultimate consolidation in the music journalism industry and eventually serving as the legacy publication’s CEO. Wenner’s latest undertaking, Wenner Media Ventures, serves to invest in music journalism outlets and cultivate the creative and organizational ecosystems that will uplift the artists of today and tomorrow.
Tim Blake Nelson and BAI Director Sydney Skybetter
Student interlocutor, Ilektra Bampicha-Ninou with Tim Blake Nelson and BAI Director Sydney Skybetter.
From left to right: Student interlocutor Rishika Kartik, BAI Director Sydney Skybetter, and Dr. Costanza-Chock in conversation on stage at the first Ruckus Session.
BAI Director Sydney Skybetter, and Dr. Costanza-Chock in conversation.
From left to right: Student interlocutor, Lottie Doughty with President and CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation Sam Gill and BAI Director Sydney Skybetter.
From left to right: Student interlocutor, Lottie Doughty with President and CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation Sam Gill and BAI Director Sydney Skybetter.
Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer. Hailed by the Financial Times as “One of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of dance and emerging technologies,” Sydney’s choreography has been performed at such venues as The Kennedy Center and Jacob’s Pillow. He has lectured at SXSW, Yale, Mozilla and the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and consulted for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, and The University of Southern California, among others. His work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and a Creative Capital “Wild Futures” Award. He is a Senior Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard University, a frequent contributor to WIRED and Dance Magazine, the Founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and Host of the podcast, “Dances with Robots.” Sydney serves as the Director of the Brown Arts Institute, is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and was the first choreographer at Brown University to receive tenure.
The Ruckus Sessions: Chico MacMurtrie, and Gus Wenner '12, are supported in part by The Marshall Woods Lectureship Foundation of Fine Arts.
