Seminar

Convened by Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research, integrated presentations consider the relationships between linguistic, technical, aesthetic, social, ethical, and political protocols for communication.

Artist Jesse Chun‘s lecture-performance builds upon her ESL-EFL (English as a Second Language) inspired workbook that decenters the hegemony of English and leads participants through an aural and somatic experience of mistranslation and sonic abstraction. Scholar Meredith D. Clark follows with a talk about the various symbolic and social protocols of Black Twitter. Accessibility advocate Chancey Fleet discusses how different protocols can foster or inhibit accessibility And artist, writer, organizer Taeyoon Choi examines the integrated protocols of code, computation, social connection, and care.

Participants:
Taeyoon Choi, co-founder, School for Poetic Computation
Jesse Chun, artist
Meredith D. Clark, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia
Chancey Fleet, Assistive Technology Coordinator, New York Public Library
Convened by Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research, in conjunction with their class Anthropology & Design: Objects, Sites, Systems.

Accessibility
The Vera List Center is committed to ensuring that our programs are accessible to and inclusive of all. As part of that commitment, this event will feature close captioning subtitles and ASL interpretation. Please let us know when registering if you need any additional accommodation.

As for Protocols Seminar Series
Led by The New School and Vera List Center faculty and staff, each monthly seminar in this year-long series will examine a particular aspect of protocols, among them those relating to language and communication; protocols for equitable networks, computer interfaces, and algorithms; global health and development; data aggregation and narrative systems; culturally-specific community agreements; or protocols undergirding scientific research. Building on the conversations started in previous sessions, each seminar is centered by an art project and accompanied by readings.

Taeyoon Choi is an artist, teacher, and organizer based in Seoul and New York. He co-founded the School for Poetic Computation where he continues to organize sessions and teach classes on electronics, drawings, and social practice.

Jesse Chun is a conceptual artist working across video, sculpture, sound, drawing, and publishing. Chun’s work addresses systems of language, power, and legibility to consider new translations toward opacity, poetry, and the untranslatable. Select forthcoming and recent presentations of her work include SculptureCenter; Queens Museum; The Drawing Center; BAM; Bronx Museum of the Arts (United States); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto; Oakville Galleries (Canada); and the Nam June Paik Art Center (South Korea), among others. Select solo digital and print publications include WORKBOOK (Triple Canopy, 2019) and Intangible Heritage (Wendy’s Subway x BAM, 2018). Chun’s work is in public collections of the Whitney Museum Library; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Artist Book Collection; the Smithsonian Institution, Archive of American Art; Yale University Library, and Asia Art Archive in America, and more. Chun works and lives in New York.

Meredith D. Clark, Ph.D, is a journalist and Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Her research explores the relationships between Black communities and the news on social media. Clark’s academic analysis of Black Twitter placed her on the Root 100 list of most influential African Americans. Now evolved into a theoretical framework of black digital resistance, her book is under contract with Oxford University Press. She is academic lead for Documenting the Now II, a fellow with Data & Society, a faculty affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture and Society, and sits on the advisory boards for Project Information Literacy and the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. Clark is an in-demand media consultant. Connect with her on Twitter @MeredithDClark.

Chancey Fleet is a Brooklyn-based advocate for accessible technology and design. As assistive technology coordinator at the New York Public Library, she leads a peer-powered tech coaching program and co-leads Dimensions, a project that empowers patrons with and without disabilities to create tactile images and 3D models. Fleet was a 2018-2019 fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute focusing on the social and cultural impact of cloud-connected accessibility tools. She proudly serves as the Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of New York (NFB.org). 

Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and convened this program in conjunction with her class Anthropology & Design: Objects, Sites, Systems. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and The City Is Not a Computer, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. She contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal, and she collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.