A screening of four youth-produced short films from Spy Hop's Voices of the West media intensive in Utah, paired with research on how young filmmakers practice perspective-shifting. The selected works span a documentary, a YouTube-tutorial parody, an anxiety-themed narrative, and a nostalgic piece on community spaces.
An interactive live magic show demonstrating how magic can be used as a pedagogy for creativity and design thinking. Through performances with narrative explanation, it shows how watching, learning, and performing magic promotes flexible thinking and user-centered creative design.
An arts gallery presentation by an interdisciplinary artist-educator on listening for learning in children's art created within a children's hospital school. The work explores inclusive, adaptive arts education for pediatric patients and how fleeting experiences can be translated into tangible visual forms.
An experimental 360-degree video work built from chest-mounted GoPro footage of educators conducting macroinvertebrate sampling in a Lake Erie tributary, probing the limits of video-based interaction analysis. It invites viewers to wonder about the point-of-view of non-human creatures and to sit with the unresolved messiness of wading and listening.
A VR documentary and participatory installation drawing on interviews with 22 visually impaired participants in China, using AI-assisted processes to translate their dream narratives into non-visual sensory visualizations. A companion Dream Book invites viewers to record their own dreams, opening reflection on disability, perception, and assumptions about blindness.
A video performance examining time, movement, and rest through a scholar living at the intersection of academia and chronic illness, with footage replayed at varying speeds amid campus foot traffic. #SlowLS prompts viewers to question the rushed 'two-a-year' pace of academia and how disability might help resist its pressures.
Four short films from Spy Hop's "Voices of the West" media-production intensive in Utah showcase how youth filmmakers make multimodal artistic decisions while shifting perspective. The selection spans a documentary on a local restaurant, a parody YouTube tutorial subverting the superhero genre, a film on anxiety from social media, and a nostalgic piece on a community movie theater.
Drawing on critical participatory ethnography with Arab American immigrant youth, families, and teachers, this arts-based project frames collaborative climate-change mapmaking as intergenerational knowledge work. Attendees see participant artwork and learn how storytelling legitimized lived realities and nurtured critical consciousness for climate-justice advocacy.
A demonstration of improv games created and modified by undergraduates in an 'Improv for Games' course, performed by a campus improv troupe. The work frames students' new forms as legitimate contributions to improv's oral history, motivated by a pedagogy of meaningful making.
A mixed-media collage series that treats artmaking as collaboration with unruly materials, advancing a posthumanist, distributed view of agency among bodies, ideas, and matter. Created by a disabled, chronically-ill scholar-artist, the work reframes the 'flawed' or 'ruined' and explores how arts can support critical consciousness and radical hope in science and engineering.
An exhibition of student art from a children's hospital school, accompanying research on integrating arts education into pediatric settings through inclusive, adaptive approaches. The artist's own practice spans drawing, photography, sculpture, and digital fabrication, often dissolving printed images to evoke memory and emerging meaning.
An experimental video built from 360-degree GoPro footage of educators collecting macroinvertebrate data in a Lake Erie tributary, reworking interaction analysis to wrest point-of-view from participants into researchers' hands. It invites wondering about the perspectives of the creatures we study and embracing the messiness of wading and listening without answers.
A video performance about a scholar living at the intersection of academia and chronic illness, layering footage of the subject amid campus foot traffic at varying speeds with textual provocations. It invites attendees to question the rushed pace of academic work and whether disability can help resist its oppressive rhythms.
A design-based study of Shaunk, a robotic Dhol co-designed with music instructors and used in an after-school program for middle and high schoolers. Mixed-methods analysis links embodied interaction with the instrument to gains in practice time, task completion, and engagement, yielding design principles for culturally responsive computing.
"On the Fly" is a card-and-dice game that supports musicians in practicing collaborative improvisation through generative constraints, asking players to improvise performances that enact contours shown on cards. It functions at once as a performance format, a pedagogical tool, and a research instrument for theorizing how improvisation is learned.