Berette S. Macaulay "BIPOC on Colonialism, Nationalism, and [The Harmful Illusion of] White Supremacy"

How incredible to have come to our LAST (for a while anyway) episode of Critical Bounds. Please enjoy this exceptional conversation with Berette S. Macaulay.

We have such gratitude for Berette for engaging in this conversation. We discuss living a multiplicitous life, and the institutional lie that you must focus on One Thing, or be branded a failure. How to interrogate the process and usefulness of critical dialogue. What populations are still being overlooked in the art world? The influence of the Black Portlanders project. Working with artists who are creating work to, “...speak to some of the traumas, but not define ourselves by these traumas.” How institutional racism creates a challenge in even putting together a show that is about Black people. Tokenism in cultural institutions. The invisibility of power. Interrogating terms like “white privilege” and “white supremacy”, to unroot the mythologies of “Whiteness”. And so much more.

Berette S. Macaulay is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer from Jamaica and Sierra Leone. Her research and visual arts practice engage themes of belonging, identity-performance, illegibility, love, memory, and mythmaking. 

She is currently the inaugural curatorial fellow at On The Boards Performing Arts Theater in Seattle, has exhibited and published nationally and internationally, receiving recent Artist Grants from the Vermont Studio Center Residency, Shunpike Arts, and 4Culture. Art and writing publications include Feminist Media Histories, UNESCO Courier, Of Note and Museé magazines, and the World Policy Journal. Her curatorial work includes illusive self (2013) at Taller Boricua Gallery, NYC, and Exploring Passages in the Black Diaspora (2020) at Photographic Center NW. 

MFON in Seattle catalogue. Get the print catalog HERE.

Berette was the creator and organizer of the MFON in Seattle (2019/20) program in which she facilitated exhibition partnerships with MFON Women, Frye Art Museum, Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and Photographic Center Northwest, following the legacy work of Adama Delphine Fawundu and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn to feature Black women photographers from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America. 

Berette’s awards include a 2019 Simpson Center Research Cluster Grant as founder of Black Cinema Collective (BCC) where she curates screenings, watch parties, and panel discussions alongside co-programmers Savita Krishnamoorthy and Mateo Ochoa, focusing on African and Afro-Diasporic films. BCC functions as a project of i•ma•gine | e•volve, an interdisciplinary arts incubator she has been tending to since 2010. 

Berette was named a 2019 Ottenberg-Winans Fellow for African Studies (UW), and is the recipient of the 2020 Champion of Seattle Arts (COSA) Award. Berette also serves as the Art Liaison Program Manager at Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin on "Art, AI, and Technology"

It’s the Last episode of our segment on Art, AI, and Technology, with Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin. We talk about Amelia's podcasts Wampum.codes, a podcast which features Indigenous people working with tech in a multitude of ways, and Dreamstacks, the developer podcast by Contentful + Algolia which Amelia hosts. We also discuss her former life as an early-internet hacker and simultaneous opera singer, her Mozilla Fellowship on "trustworthy AI" and using Indigenous value-systems in tech, and much more.

“Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist/technologist who helps communities leverage emerging technologies to effect positive change in the world. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist at Contentful in the SF Bay Area. In 2019 she was an invited presenter to His Holiness Dalai Lama’s World Headquarters in Dharamsala for the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion. She founded IDEA New Rochelle, which partnered with the NR Mayor’s office to develop citizen-focused VR/AR tools and was awarded the 2018 Bloomberg Mayors Challenge $1 million dollar grant to prototype their AR Citizen toolkit. She is a Google VR JUMP Start creator, co-directing with Wendy Red Star a 360 video story about Native American Monsters which was selected for a McArthur Grant through the Sundance Institute Native New Frontiers Story Lab 2018. It is on display at Newark Museum beginning February 2019.

Amelia was a professor of time-based media art and performance art at Vanderbilt University for five years before returning to her roots in NYC creative technology, graduating from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2015. In 2016 she went on to found and direct the DBRS Innovation Lab, an applied research lab that specialized in developing creative uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Amelia is the founder of the Stupid Hackathon, which now holds events around the world. She is a fellow of the Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab , a Sundance Institute Time Warner Fellow, in 2018 she was awarded Engadget Alternative Realities Prize for her VR experience Your Hands Are Feet. She was a member of the 2017-2018 cohort at NEW INC, the incubator of the New Museum in NYC. In 2016 she was an Oculus Launch Pad Fellow and an Artist in Residence at Pioneer Works 2016, Her art is part of the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the McCord Museum. Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.

Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the host of Contentful + Algolia's Developer Podcast DreamStacks.”

Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman on "Art, AI, and Technology"

The first episode of our segment on “Art, AI, and Technology” is finally up for your consideration. Head over to Soundcloud (or your listening conveyance of choice) for our conversation with director Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman about his web series and now feature film Early Stage, the protests happening in both LA (where he is based) and Seattle (where I am) this summer, police brutality, the houseless crisis, the perils of social media, AI as a symbiotic lifeform, and the rather banal-yet-dangerous role it currently plays in our lives, Star Trek, Covid, how smartphones have changed our brains, and his conversations with Paradise, CA residents that resulted in his upcoming film, "Tips on Surviving the End of the World".

His intimate, provocative documentary work has won a regional EMMY and an Edes Award for Emerging Artists. His documentaries have been featured in the Zeppelin Museum, the Athens Biennale, San Francisco's DeYoung Museum, the BBC, PBS, Atlas Obscura, the Washington Post, NBC Left Field, and a handful of other platforms. This work has brought him to Ghana, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, Tahiti, a heavy metal cruise in the Caribbean, and a snake-handling Pentecostal Church in Kentucky.

His scripted webseries "Early Stage", which was the seed of his current feature film, was originally released online as short vignettes on DIS.art, and in the physical world at Madrid's Matadero Museum in 2019 and at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Coppenhagen in 2020, and was recently part of a group exhibition called "The Sea Is Glowing" at Drugo More Gallery in Rijeka, Croatia.

He has directed music videos for Squarepusher (Warp Records), DNTEL (Dublab), Anna Ash, Gosh Pith, Horatio Clam, Lord Scrummage, and Briar Rabbit.

Susan Aldworth on "Art and Health"

Very happy to share this lovely conversation with visual artist, experimental printmaker, and filmmaker Susan Aldworth.

“Susan Aldworth is a visual artist who lives and works in London. She is an associate lecturer on the Art & Science MA at Central Saint Martin’s, London. Aldworth studied philosophy at Nottingham University and fine art at Sir John Cass, London. She is an experimental printmaker and filmmaker with a strong interest in investigating the workings of the human mind, especially consciousness, sleep and our sense of self. She has developed experimental print techniques to realise her ideas including the historic Transience etchings printed directly from human brain tissue.”

We talk about neuroscience, consciousness and the human brain, the ways in which Aldworth is inspired by art, philosophy, and science, and about her latest projects including "Out of the Blue", a kinectic sculpture installation project that looks at epilepsy through the stories of 100 people.