"Ser Artista Album Campaign Video" is an attempt at capturing the feel for my upcoming album, Ser Artista, to be released in the fall of 2021. This video will be used to fundraise for the costs of production, mixing, mastering, distribution, and publicity for single releases starting in April. The songs on this album are the music for Quiero Volver: A Xicanx Ritual Opera, which has previously been a live multimedia performance. Quiero Volver was awarded a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts, and I will produce the performance in video form this year, with music videos and instructional text scores for viewers to participate in the performance virtually. This "Ser Artista" video is an opportunity to begin a palette of ideas for what I would like the Quiero Volver videos to look like.

These objects are a key spur for a new theatre experience, The Undrowned Trilogy, currently in early creative development with my company, Raucous. The work that drives Raucous is transdisciplinary - fusing immersive, site-responsive theatre with AI, AR, film and digital technology. Our narratives explore the often harsh choices women have to make due to societal restrictions, geographical location, poverty or class. At the heart of our narratives are ‘familiars’ – personalised objects worn or carried by the audience that animate in response to the live performance. They are physical representations of the emotional resonance of the piece, allowing the audience to ‘feel’ the consequences of the dramatic action. In the image are ‘tokens’, small items tucked into swaddling when a mother, through poverty or societal condemnation, left her baby at the steps of London’s Foundling Hospital (late 18th century). These tokens would allow the mother to reclaim her child should her fortunes change. We are currently investigating what these tokens could do in terms of:

- making the storytelling more personal for the audience
- building awe and wonder
- providing a physical response to both diegetic and memetic narrative

So… what do these tokens physically do? How can something so small be easily worn and yet still be effective in moving audiences? How can audiences gain a visceral relationship with their object? What role do these objects play in the narrative and in revealing more about the audience’s role? Before we alight on a creative solution how messy must our process get? How can a large, complex network of transdisciplinary collaborators embrace messiness in order to alight on the most creative and impactful resolution?

This is my nearly completed NSynth super machine that uses a deep neural network to learn the characteristics of sounds, and then creates a completely new sound based on them. The machine explores improvisation and modularity, or the degree to which system components or modules can be used in embodied interaction and sensemaking. Sounds, visual motifs, blocks of code, or the y-shaped plaits that make up a cornrow braid are basic building blocks for improvisation. My research and art examine how to generate algorithmic designs in cultural artifacts and create “interactive intelligences” or AI using modules, physical devices, and tangible and virtual interfaces. For me, machine learning is a bridge between Black cultural production and generative systems.

Women in the Middle East face a set of legal, cultural, and social barriers that have limited their personal and social lives and affected their moral and mental development. I have been researching women's restrictions to visualize their lives' stories by depicting their limitations in various ways, such as installations, artist books, or sculptures crafted from handmade paper. I try to uncover the relationship between culture and its women's situation and circumstances, such as the roles they play in society, the rights they enjoy (or not), and most pointedly, the dress codes to which they must adhere. I get inspired by the color, form, and statues of the "Chador"- a fabric that has been used as a cover for Iranian women in different historical periods over past centuries. I perform my visualizations by using printmaking and papermaking techniques and incorporating materials that those women have used. I am looking to envision a presence, add something that had belonged to it, or have been somehow used by someone I was referencing. I want to convey both being and not being seen, or maybe to reach an invisible presence.

What materials figure in your processes thinking, analysing, reflecting, arguing, conversing, or sense-making broadly?
Concrete materials, based on the skills our students either currently master or with which we want to inspire mastery, are the start of our processes. When there is a final product we would like to create, as a goal, we scaffold each skill and material and consider what opportunities we have for a medium used in one process to be extended to provide use in another layer of another project to truly inspire meaning and material stewardship.

In what ways does your practice engage with issues of relevance to social justice such as feminism, postcolonialism, or anti-racism? In what ways do the selection and characteristics of materials in your practice advance or thwart your social justice aims?
The beginning of social justice can be found in agency, identity and equality and the opportunities provided to establish those values in individuals and communities. Our methodology provides students with the freedom and self-determination to build skills of agency while also providing the structure and opportunities for true skill mastery so they would not be inhibited by any deficit in physical manipulation of materials or experiences upon which to base their individual creativity and exploration. Social justice continues with the expectation that all materials of all genres will be available to all children and that the expectation is to see one another operate in their strengths, regardless of culture, age or gender. We expect science and mathematical projects from any child and we anticipate creative, artistic expressions from any child.

Students are offered opportunities to compare and contrast their modern school materials and processes with native, indigenous and traditional methods used by the cultures we explore in our curriculum. They learn why materials are used and why techniques are employed, not just that they are used in seemingly ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic’ places. Creating a background of understanding and knowledge of how groups of different people make decisions based on their land, their value systems and their goals, help bring common language and empathy for the human condition; a connection that confronts colonialism, racism and an “othering” that simply uses cultural differences for entertainment. The children become scientist- artists and they gain respect and grow in humility.

Are there temporary materials that you work with, which are different from your finished work materials?
Students are free to make temporary materials permanent, through mod podge or lamination, and conversely make permanent materials temporary through revision, deconstruction and reconstruction and revision.

What kinds of messes do you make when you are making?
The entire philosophy of our Method is process-based. The sensory experience of making a mess helps a child with executive functioning and sorting their creative efforts from their opportunities for refinement.

One morning shortly after the presidential election in 2016, I woke up and instead of the despair I had been overwhelmed with previously, I was consumed with anger. Anger at the indifference of so many towards increasingly normalized injustices, anger at being told our fears were unfounded, and anger at decades of being told by society that I didn't matter. This quilt top is four years of sitting with and processing that anger while meticulously hand-stitching this piece together. Growing up, I was taught that as a girl, I should not show my anger, lest it make someone else uncomfortable. In many ways this quilt is about letting my anger be heard and learning to accept the discomfort that may cause. Working with textiles, and quilts in particular, helps highlight this disparity; quilts are typical made for and seen as objects of comfort, but jarring colors and the subject matter push back against that assumption and demand to be noticed. Now I'm faced with the final design decisions (backing, quilting, binding), and I'm finding it hard to know how to proceed. Partly because I don't want to mess up four years of work, but also because I'm not sure how to integrate what's been happening into the remaining design and with the materials required.

Building on the history of the Victorian ‘philosophical toy’ Feminist Philosophical Toys presents a re-imagined set of paper machines as feminist materials for readers to think with. Grounded in an understanding of the rhetorical power of materialities, as inspired by thinkers new and old from Maria Montessori to Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, this short volume provides a grounded approach to feminist design and critique through the use of cut-and-fold paper objects, provided to the reader via a downloadable template that accompanies the text.

Whereas traditional philosophical toys were luxury-object apparatuses such as the zoetrope and stereoscope, brought into the Victorian home to teach principles of human perception and disseminate the practices and principles of the scientific method, Feminist Philosophical Toys are flexible and accessible paper-based objects that push back against scientific positivism as it manifests in design, refutes the book as the primary material of the Philosophy discipline at large, and opens up feminist perspectives and methods at the intersection of philosophy, pedagogy, and design practice. As such, feminist philosophical toys are at once a reflection and extension of a feminist epistemological and ethical position: that of situated knowledges and reflexive practice grounded in relational and restorative justice.