Living Code & Sharing Abundance | with Thomas DeFranz

We resist lack and move towards plenty. We know, from our moving, that data arrives incomplete and too often, disappointingly unpredictable. What are we pre-disposed towards; what’s been pre-accelerated? If we are living with and as code, where do we live? How do we share? Let’s meet to explore how the fragmented and the glitch help us align towards each other, and towards a shared orientation of ethical possibilities.

Thomas F. DeFrantz Bio

Directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. Believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Creative Projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE- gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017. Books: Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft, 2018), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield, 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez, 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004). Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 325 researchers committed to exploring Black dance practices in writing. Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. Has chaired Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke; and served as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016. slippage.org

This seminar is generously supported by the Geometric Media Lab (GML) at Arizona State University. The lab is co-directed by Pavan Turaga and Max Bernstein.

GML was formally founded in 2018, building on our years of work in the areas of geometric methods for machine learning and vision. Over the years, our work has broadened to include extensive collaborations with applied mathematicians, statisticians, health-scientists, and media-arts that inform our work and increase its impact.

The primary features of work at GML include: Understanding the underlying phenomena of diverse media — images, video, computational sensors, wearables, to name a few. Mathematical methodologies from statistics, optimization, differential geometry, and topology in a manner that is motivated by physical constraints, invariance requirements, or other phenomenological considerations. Collaborations with researchers from diverse areas including rehabilitation, health promotion and well-being, and media-arts, which motivate the development of new algorithmic advances, as well as present challenging use-cases.