Clarissa Chevalier

Crafting Plankton Data: A Feminist Materialist Reframing of Oceanographic Representations Across Art and Science

How do scientific technologies and representations render ocean plankton legible? How do these renderings reflect particular power dynamics and political commitments? How does an attention to art, craft, anticolonial and Black ocean feminisms destabilize the dominant Western oceanographic gaze? This talk offers a feminist media archaeology of oceanography by tracing the net as both material craft and epistemic device. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies, visual culture, and multisensory media analysis, I argue that oceanographic knowledge is shaped by woven interfaces that preconfigure what can be sensed, counted, and known. Anchored in research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and aboard research vessels, the talk follows plankton from nineteenth-century silk nets to twenty-first-century acoustic sensing. I examine how mesh size, sonar frequency, and data visualization practices selectively render zooplankton legible, embedding colonial, extractive, and managerial logics within environmental datasets. I interweave Pacific Indigenous ocean engineering, Black feminist conceptualizations of ocean as archive, and art–science collaborations in ceramics, foregrounding craft, embodiment, and multistability. Ultimately, I position the net as a feminist gateway for reimagining ocean sensing beyond surveillance, quantification, and frontier fantasies.

Respondent: Lisa Cartwright

Biography: Clarissa Chevalier is an environmental media theorist who explores oceanography through the lens of feminist science and technology studies. She is a PhD candidate in the Program for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research through Scripps Institution of Oceanography and in Art History, Theory, and Criticism through the Visual Arts Department. In 2024, Chevalier received a Ships Fund Research Grant, which supported her participation in a ten-day oceanographic research cruise. In 2025, she received an award for excellence in undergraduate teaching and course design at UC San Diego. She was also a visiting scholar at Colby College’s 2025 Summer Institute in the Environmental Humanities. Chevalier has published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, the Palgrave Handbook for Global Sustainability, and Configurations. As part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time 2024 program, under the theme “Art and Science Collide” Chevalier curated and co-curated multiple public-facing exhibitions on craft-based and anticolonial approaches to oceanography and novel data visualization.

Mingyong Cheng

Speculative Ecology in the Age of Generative AI

This research explores the role of generative AI as a transformative creative medium in art-making through the lens of "Speculative Ecology." Speculative Ecology is a transdisciplinary framework that combines ecological thought with speculative philosophy. It investigates interconnectedness, interdependency, and non-human-centered perspectives while envisioning potential ecological futures through reflections on the past and present. Recent advancements in generative AI, especially through large pre-trained models like Stable Diffusion, MusicFx, and GPTs, have unlocked new artistic possibilities. These models excel at generating synthetic content across a wide range of contexts in visuals, sounds, and texts with guidance provided by humans. Such synthetic capability empowers generative AI to co-imagine alongside human artists, introducing a collaborative method for speculation between humans and machines.

Employing a practice-based research methodology across various media—from still imagery to interactive performances—this research examines the speculative potential of generative AI systems within ecological contexts. It positions art as a critical medium for exploration, highlighting the adaptive and evolving collaboration between AI and human artists within speculative ecological frameworks. The research emphasizes the mutual influence and co-evolution of AI and humans within our ecological and digital landscapes, offering novel approaches to navigating the complexities of our interconnected world.

Respondents: Memo Akten & Pinar Yoldas

Biography: Mingyong Cheng is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and creative technologist from Beijing, now based in California, working at the intersection of generative AI, computational media, and environmental research. She holds dual BFAs from the Communication University of China, an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, and is completing a PhD in Art Practice and Art History at UC San Diego with a concentration in interdisciplinary environmental studies. Her practice spans immersive installations, interactive environments, and real-time audiovisual systems integrating generative AI, sensing, and spatial media. She has led commissioned projects for the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA), the Museum of Photographic Arts at SDMA (MOPA), and Jacob’s Pillow Doris Duke Theater, overseeing end-to-end system design, real-time generative workflows, and onsite installation. Grounded in her framework “Speculative Ecology,” her research explores how generative AI shapes ecological imagination, cultural memory, and embodied experience. Her work has been shown at ACM SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, ACM Creativity & Cognition, NeurIPS, ISEA, and the IEEE CVPR AI Art Gallery, and has received the Gold Muse Design Award (AI), Speculative Futures Digital Arts Student Competition award, and the IEEE TCPAMI Art Award.

IG: @mingyong_art | LinkedIn: Mingyong Cheng | Website: mingyongcheng.com

Xuexi Dang

The Crisis of the Smile: Revisiting Modern Sketch (1934-1937) Through Humor

In mid-1930s, humor (youmo) erupted across Shanghai’s print media, positioning humor as a contested discourse for negotiating modern sensibility, social critique, and the tense era of the Nanjing Decade. This presentation examines Modern Sketch (Shidai manhua, 1934-1937) as a key pictorial site for this phenomenon and asks: What kind of force did the “smile” carry in an environment defined by state censorship, urban pressure, and impending machinery of war? What, exactly, did humor make possible for cartoonists? I argue that in Modern Sketch, humor functioned not as mere escapism, but as a sophisticated visual strategy for navigating crisis through two distinct modes. First, it operated as a mode of mediation, utilizing collage, fashion imagery, and absurd juxtapositions to camouflage politically charged content within low-threat visual forms. Second, drawing on Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter, I contend that the magazine utilized humor as a social corrective against the mechanical rigidity of ideological orthodoxy and failed modern mimicry. Through the magazine’s humorous specimens, this talk reveals how Modern Sketch trained its readers to decode, rather than merely consume, the fragmented reality of the treaty port. Ultimately, humor served as a readerly mode of perceptual flexibility, allowing the urban subject to inhabit the contradictions of Chinese modernity without collapsing.

Respondent: Kuiyi Shen

Biography: Xuexi Dang is a PhD candidate in Art History, Criticism, and Theory at the University of California, San Diego. Her research examines modern Chinese visual culture, with a focus on the development of manhua (Chinese cartoon and comic) in print media and exhibition contexts from the 1930s to the 1950s. She explores satire, transnational influences, and visual modernism in printed media, as well as the significance of cartoon exhibition in shaping artistic discourse. She is also interested in the resilience of traditional Chinese aesthetics in contemporary digital and AI- generated art. Her work has been featured at international venues including the College of Art Association, SIGGRAPH Asia Art Gallery, and NeurIPS Creative AI Track. She obtained her MA degree from University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel Arcand

Walter Crane: Arts & Crafts Ethics, Meaningful Labor, and the Contingency of Form

Ethical labor in Walter Crane’s late-Victorian work emerges as a response to the erasure of craft under industrial capitalism, visible in handmade books, wallpapers, and domestic objects whose traces reflect Arts & Crafts principles. In domestic contexts, these objects cultivate habits of cooperation, care, and moral formation, shaped by genteel aesthetic standards. In public allegories, such as political prints circulated in periodicals, these gestures extend outward, translating domestic attentiveness into a socialist ethic of solidarity and mutual aid. These dynamics appear across Crane’s oeuvre, from intimate domestic works such as The Baby’s Bouquet and The Baby’s Opera to more overtly political imagery like The Sirens Three, Freedom, and The Triumph of Labor, demonstrating how ethical labor functions pedagogically, linking private practice to broader collective and socialist ideals. Through his artistic practice, Crane exemplifies care, skill, and imaginative engagement, modeling attention, cooperation, and responsibility, and offering an alternative to the fragmentation of industrial capitalism. By rendering craft labor visible, Crane shows that ethical, imaginative, and aesthetic labor underpins both domestic life and public social imagination. His work further demonstrates that ethical labor, freedom, and solidarity are never fully realized ideals; their aspiration exists as a dialectical continuity, oriented toward future possibilities and circulation rather than a final form. While this talk is rooted in Crane's oeuvre and Victorian England, the broader project traces the early roots of what would become twentieth-century proletarian art in the United States, examining the material, social, and cultural conditions that shaped its form. This trajectory begins with The Comrade (1901-1905), which adapted Crane’s ethical and allegorical strategies in an Arts & Crafts-influenced aesthetic, producing a visual culture that reflected genteel ideals and engaged with working-class concerns.

Respondent: Jordan Rose

Biography: Daniel Arcand is a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UC San Diego, specializing in the historical and ethical foundations of radical visual culture, from late-Victorian Britain to early 20th–century U.S. socialist art, focusing on small magazines, prints, and domestic objects. He holds an MFA in Studio Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a focus on printmaking and painting, an MA in Art History (specializing in Contemporary and Modern Art) from York University, and a BA in Art Education from Salem State University.

Andrea Chavarín

Presentation Title: Tlacuiloque Self Representation in New Spain: An analysis of visual strategies for the possibility of protecting knowledge

What were the material conditions of art production during the sixteenth century? How did the complex social environment of colonial production transform indigenous art production? This presentation aims to shed light on the role and meaning of autoethnography and self-identity constructions in the artistic productions of the sixteenth century in New Spain. It will focus on works of art, craft, and codices that embody spaces of invention and negotiation in the moment of encounter of the Indigenous and the Spanish. I argue that early moments in the “conquest” cannot be seen in a reduced “conqueror and vanquished” dichotomy perpetuated through canonic master history, and that through reading against the grain, viewers will perceive the agency that indigenous people had as they reordered, strategized, gazed, and created a new visual grammar in clandestinity. Each indigenous culture lived the encounter with the Spanish in a different way, but as the Habsburg governance started to take hold of different populations, the empire under Charles V implemented multiple laws that censored, modified, and surveilled indigenous bodies and cultural productions. An analysis of the artistic creations produced during this timeframe can shed light on the constant artistic choices of Indigenous elite tlacuiloques (noble artists), whose role of disseminating and protecting Indigenous epistemologies was at stake. I argue that when a culture auto-proclaims itself, it also modifies to create a new one.

Respondent: Elizabeth Newsome

Biography: Andrea Chavarin is an Art History PhD candidate in the department of Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. She is a Latin American art historian, museologist, archaeologist, mother, and curator. She specializes in Pre-contact Mesoamerican and Colonial Art. Her main research analyzes the convergence of European and Indigenous productions in New Spain during the outset of the conquest in the sixteenth century, but she also researches colonial legacies in contemporary visual culture. During 2025 she was a visiting scholar at the British Museum, as well as the Archivo General de las Indias in Seville. Among her publications in 2024, Editorial Planeta published Caminar Juntas a feminist illustrated book available in all Latin America. She received an MA with honors in museum studies from Georgetown University in 2021, creating a research Capstone thesis on museum community outreach and inclusion in Latinx communities. Chavarin graduated with honors with a double major in Art History and Anthropological Archaeology from UC San Diego. She has worked in many art institutions like the Hirshhorn Smithsonian Museum (DC), the Mexican Cultural Institute (DC), The Stuart Collection (CA), Museo Templo Mayor (MX), and the San Diego Museum of Art (CA), among others.

Figure 1. Aztec tlacuilo (painter-scribe) working, from the Codex Mendoza, ca. 1540s. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Arch. Selden A. 1, fol. 70 (detail).

Doreen Ríos

Artisanal Cannibalization. Chatarreros’ Radical Aesthetic Praxis

From the invention of the cannibal as a discursive weapon to the global megastructure of technocapitalism, domination has operated through both language but and technics. If Aimé Césaire's Caliban reclaims naming as a decolonial act, my presentation asks: how might the Prosperian technical object be renamed? I examine a community of artists I term chatarreros, who advance a radical aesthetic praxis of technological counterproduction. Emerging in Mexico in the 2000s, the chatarreros neither reject technology nor celebrate it as progress. Instead, they cannibalize Prosperian technical objects—those inheriting colonial logics of extraction and control—reconfiguring them into technoaesthetic objects. Drawing on Georges Bataille's concept of dépense and Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation, I argue that the chatarreros perform a dual operation: expelling utility from technical objects while reactivating them as sites of open-ended relation. Through close consideration of works by Arcángelo Constantini and Carolina Esparragoza, I trace how artisanal cannibalization proceeds through seizure, dismantling, and reassembly—not to repair, but to rupture. Constantini's archaeological excavations of obsolescence and Esparragoza's material inscriptions of memory enact an Other epistemology, a sovereign, materially-grounded knowledge-making that emerges from the ruins of technocapitalism. The chatarreros do not promise better systems instead, they stage interruptions that make visible the possibility of Other worlds.

Respondent: Mariana Wardwell

Biography: Doreen Ríos is a curator and independent researcher. Her work focuses on technological counterproduction within contemporary art, tactical media, and new materialities. She is the author of the book Medios inestables. De objetos técnicos y arte (Bartlebooth, 2025). Ríos is the founder of [ANTI]MATERIA, an online platform dedicated to the study and exhibition of art produced through digital media. From 2019 to 2021, she served as Chief Curator at the Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City. Recent curatorial projects include Vanishing Acts at the Taipei Fine Art Museum (2025-2026) and Postborder (code)pendency at Rhizome (2025). Her critical writing has been featured in publications such as Media Arts 21, Luna Córnea, and the Brooklyn Rail. She holds an MA in Contemporary Curating from Winchester School of Art, specializing in digital cultures, and a Bachelor's in Architecture from Tecnológico de Monterrey. Currently a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego, she is also a member of the Leonardo Peer Review Panel.

Jae Hwan Lim

The Sinmyŏng (Mutual Exhilaration) of the Oppressed

This presentation introduces the Korean sahoe ch’amyŏ yesul (socially engaged art)producer Kim Bong-jun (1954–), conventionally recognized for his work within the 1970s and 1980s minjung (people’s) art movement. For Kim, sinmyŏng embodies a collective sense of exhilaration and playful vitality shared among oppressed workers, peasants, and protesters—a spirit he interweaves throughout his artistic practice. Drawing on anticolonial theories of the Global South, including Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, this presentation reconsiders the role of marginalized communities as collaborative cultural agents who generate communal and creative exchange through modes of exhilaration, rather than unidirectional political messaging. Through his collaborative theater projects with dismissed Korean workers in 1978, cartoons created with discriminated Korean farmers in 1982, and percussion performances with international peace activists in Koreatown, Los Angeles, in 2024, Kim exemplifies a reciprocal artist. I conclude with his recent painting Light of Hope (2025), which depicts radiant beams of light and people performing traditional Korean dance and music alongside protest scenes and symbols of oppression, visualizing the sinmyŏng ethos as a mutually bright and playful energy that connects the oppressed through collective joy and artistic solidarity.

Respondent: Grant H. Kester

Biography: Jae Hwan Lim is a socially engaged art researcher and producer whose work explores human rights and the struggles for democracy on the Korean Peninsula. His research examines historical and contemporary issues in both the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, addressing violence, discrimination, and inequity in social and political contexts. Lim is a member of the editorial collective of FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism. His writings appear in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (Brill), Journal of Korean and Asian Arts (Korean National Research Center for the Arts), and the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art. He has presented research at the Association for Asian Studies and the Association for Asian American Studies, among other international scholarly and artistic platforms. Lim is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)’s Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, Criticism, and Practice Program.