It’s really touching to have a student become a colleague! Mattia Casalegno was at UCLA Design Media Arts many years ago now — he teaches at Pratt now and introduced my talk — first in person-talk and critique afterwards since the pandemic closed down.

I focused in this talk on the Octopus Mandala, Brain Storming, Noise Aquarium and Alien Star Dust starting with the Chernobyl ferris wheel… this was just days before the war around this area broke out, waking up the old Cold War tensions of nuclear disasters / threats. In the audience was Kay Hines who — ages ago — edited the Bhopal Christmas; on the street with Bast performance. Once again the individual and the collective return to some of the old shadows we repress….

Hosted today Franz Giesibl with Jim Gimzewski as moderator — to help launch his book released on this day! Also the birthday of Gerhard Richter who he had a long standing dialogue. They know each other from the late eighties when Jim was a researcher at IBM Zürich working on the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) and Franz was a PhD student under physicist Gerd Bining

.HERE is the link to the video:

Ushered in the year of the Water TIGER with an incredible group! Video will be up soon if you missed it… Ruling organ of the TIGER are the LUNGS — we focused on breathing, food and poetry. Anna Nacher (pig) started us off with a breath meditation, followed by Xtine Burrough who shared her one minute breath poetry project, Debora Giannone read a Rumi poem about breath and spirit, Lili Anamarija No shared info on the year of the tiger (careful for traffic accidents, fires, sudden events) and the NSK exhibition, DUMPLINGS!, CC Hart (snake) shared a beautiful poem connecting St Bridget to the Tiger (east / west!) and an Irish lamb dish with foraged greens / stinging nettles, Aisen Caro Chacin pulled out silicon muscles she is working on in her lab, Ellen K. Levy was interrupted by her parrots who had something to say, Maryam Razi made some Persian crispy rice and reminded us of the Persian tiger that disappeared, Nina Sobell played a video performance from CCTV, Mick Lorusso told us about the bacteria in cat poop that make us crazy and Clarissa Ribeiro read a poem about the TIGER + DRAGON combo. Siddharth and I hosted and brought along our classes — his in neuroscience & ethics, mine in NanoBiotech + Design. They loved it and one student said — “I wish all our classes were like this — I learned so much in such and it was so much fun!”