SAIC Art & Technology/ Sound Practices

Natural Enough opening tonight from 6PM - 9PM

Opened May 22nd - 31st

Curated by & snooow8485

Work by:










Photos by

Natural Enough

Opened May 22nd - 31st
*OPENING RECEPTION MAY 21ST 6PM - 9PM*

Curated by & snooow8485

Work by:

WAVEFORMS IS THIS COMING SUNDAY MAY 17 AT FLATLINE GALLERY (1925 N MILWAUKEE AVE) AT 6:30PM. THERE WILL BE SOUND BASED PERFORMANCES. PLEASE COME.

Next thursday faculty member Whitney Johnson will be playing a record release show at Constellation! You can get tickets at https://wl.eventim.us/event/whitney-johnson-lia-kohl-macie-stewart-record-release/680142?afflky=ConstellationChicago&utm_campaign=as-npt117206356

There are some spots remaining in Lee Blalock’s Retro Tech Programming course!

SATURDAY MAY 16, 7PM our very own Bonnie Han Jones will be performing a new work through Lampo, at the Graham Foundation.

About the work, from Lampo: “a place where many people gather (soundings) is a quadraphonic performance that considers how sound, heard in shared listening spaces, transforms listeners’ relationships to history, to each other, and to place. Jones draws on archival recordings, uses circuit-bent instruments, transducers, and inductors, and works with metal, glass, and voice.”

The link to RSVP is: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lampo-performance-bonnie-han-jones-may-16-tickets-1988442103860?aff=oddtdtcreator

BONNIE HAN JONES
MAY 16
7PM
Graham Foundation
Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610

RSVP: https://lampo.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d6e16d96a7c984635de18f2ec&id=ecece88ce4&e=76339e7124

For Lampo, Jones has created a work inspired by the tradition of Korean pansori—a musical genre incorporating song, story, and gesture—and the sonic ritual practices of female Korean shamans (mudang).

A place where many people gather (soundings) is a quadraphonic performance that considers how sound, heard in shared listening spaces, transforms listeners’ relationships to history, to each other, and to place. Jones draws on archival recordings, uses circuit-bent instruments, transducers, and inductors, and works with metal, glass, and voice.

Pansori is a compound of the Korean words pan 판 and sori 소리, the latter meaning “sound.” Pan is thought to refer either to a song with many tones or to a situation where many people gather, reflecting the format of the pansori performance, which usually lasted three to eight hours and took place in public, communal spaces. The pansori singer is an oral historian, carrying the past into the present.

Bonnie Han Jones (b.1977) is a Korean American improvising musician, poet, and educator working primarily with electronic sound and text. Her work is iterative, multidisciplinary, and typically involves building concepts through research and study and then moving these ideas through a variety of different mediums, methods, and forms. She uses electronic music, recorded sound materials, text, video, performance, and score with attention and focus on listening and improvisation as a core theme and generative method. The work broadly explores noise, sonic identity, listening as thinking, and sound as knowledge.
She performs both solo and in a wide range of collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Jones was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and has been a board member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, with Suzanne Thorpe, she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops focused on technology-based art making, improvisation, and community collaboration.

Jones has received commissions from the ICA, London, and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and has presented her work widely throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Asia. She was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea, Jones was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, spent years in Baltimore and Providence, and is currently based in Chicago.

Jones last performed for Lampo in December 2022. She is also a Lampo Folio contributing artist.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation

Visiting Artist: Ken Goldberg

Day/Time: Wednesday April 29 from 5pm - 6:30pm
Location: Flex Space MC400

Artist Talk Description

Unfamiliar Intelligence: Art, AI, and Robots

Ken Goldberg
UC Berkeley Professor of Art and Engineering

Shortly after the 1918 pandemic, the word “robot” was coined in a play about mechanical workers organizing a rebellion to defeat their human overlords. A century later, emerging advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics, fueled by venture capital and governments, are disrupting labor, trade, and political stability. Claims about “superintelligence” and existential threats to humanity raise new questions about the essential distinctions between humans and machines.

To contextualize a series of his artworks that explore this boundary, Ken Goldberg references Sigmund Freud’s Uncanny (1919) and Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley (1970). Ken will share robot paintings from his first art exhibit at CMU and art installations such as the Telegarden (1995-2004), a living garden tended by a robot operated by over 100,000 visitors over the Internet, and AlphaGarden (2020-), a fully automated garden that took an unexpected twist during the pandemic.

Ken will also present two new projects: Ancient Wisdom (2024), a collection of wooden sculptures addressing AI and ecology in the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition in Los Angeles, and Breathless (2023), an 8-hour robot-human dance performance that premiered at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist Bio
Bio: Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley who explores the boundaries between the digital and the natural. His artworks include a live garden tended by a robot controlled by over 100,000 people via the internet, a 1/1 millionth scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and award winning short documentary films about robots and Jewish identity. Goldberg’s projects have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale, Pompidou Center (Paris), Walker Art Center, Ars Electronica (Linz Austria), ZKM (Karlsruhe), ICC Biennale (Tokyo), Kwangju Biennale (Seoul), Artists Space, and The Kitchen (New York). He is Founding Director of Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium and has held visiting positions at San Francisco Art Institute, MIT Media Lab, and Pasadena Art Center. Goldberg was awarded the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1995, named IEEE Fellow in 2005 and elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2026… His work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum. Goldberg is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Our very own Jan Tichy () is featured in a New York Times article about his new show at the MSU Broad Art Museum! The show runs until July 26.

Lee Blalock will be returning from sabbatical this Fall. Retro Tech Programming will be offered again in Fall 2026 on Mondays, 9 AM-3 PM. Seats are still available!
Retro Tech Programming ATSP 4132 (001)
This is a studio course that will make use of vintage technologies available through the ATSP Retro Lab. Students will learn early programming languages for use on some of the first home computers (C64, Apple 2E, Atari 2600) while deepening their study of creative computing. No programming skills are necessary, though experience with newer programming languages will only enrich your understanding of the content. Students will also have access to early 1970s synthesizers and image processing systems to combine techniques and create multimedia projects throughout the semester.

Lectures and discussions will be based around topics in software studies and the history of computing. Students should expect to produce weekly programming sketches, two significant projects, and a presentation on a topic of their choice relevant to the course.

Those who want a deep dive into the care of artworks made with vintage and retro technologies should also research the Preservation module of this course, which is offered in the spring semester.