Tag Archives: Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

Altering

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Penn Program in Environmental Humanities Artist-in-Residence Roderick Coover, in collaboration with Nick Monfort and Adam Vidiksis.

The Altering Shores

artist Roderick Coover, poet Nick Montfort, and composer Adam Vidiksis

Interweaving sound, language and image, The Altering Shores is a four screen video performance with live music. Set in the marshlands and industrial wastelands of our local Delaware River watershed and others worldwide, the experience presents a kaleidoscope of climate futures through fragmented language and multi-layered sounds and images. Participants are guided through this uncertain terrain by lead artist Roderick Coover, poet Nick Montfort, and composer Adam Vidiksis.

Beginning on Saturday, November 16 at 4pm you can experience the project via short 360-degree vignettes, viewable at four unique virtual reality pop-up stations around the University of Pennsylvania campus. The stations will appear from 4-6pm on Nov 16, 19, 21, and 23. 

Click here for a map of the locations.

The Altering Shores, Main Performance
Saturday, November 23 | 7:30 PM

Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

3680 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6219
For tickets, call 215.898.3900.

Reserve Tickets

November 23, 2019, Harold Prince Theatre

Environmental Storytelling & Virtual Reality

November 22 – 23, 2019

Register

Environmental Storytelling & Virtual Reality will explore environmental research and virtual reality (VR) across two days of talks, film screenings, workshops and a live multimedia performance for students, faculty, and staff at Penn and beyond. 

The festival is organized around three keywords that illuminate the connections between interdisciplinary environmental research and virtual reality technologies and experiences: empathy, education, and action on climate. As authors of the October 2018 IPCC Special Report have urged, action on climate must come now, from individuals and institutions across sectors and across languages and borders. The forecast of 1.5 degree surface warming already by 2040, as dire as it is realistic, points to the need to wrench down greenhouse gas emissions to slow the current acceleration of ongoing climate change.

It also hints at the creative and imaginative combinations of scientists, humanists, artists, and environmental and public health advocates that we can bring together to nurture, in the language of the IPCC report, “the wide scale behavior changes consistent with adapting to and limiting global warming to 1.5 C.”

The IPCC report also suggests the role of emotion. Taking action on climate depends centrally on empathy. And, if that empathy is to make positive environmental impacts, it needs education. Touted in headlines as “the ultimate empathy machine,” virtual reality holds great promise as an educational tool, but remains largely untested. In this gathering of scientists, artists, educators, and the interested public, we want to put this claim to the test to see how VR and immersive storytelling might catalyze action on climate. 

The event’s invited guests work at the forefront of VR, AR, and game design in educational institutions, in media and journalism, and in informal community spaces promoting public health, environmental literacy, and climate solutions.

RODERICK COOVER holds a BA from Cornell University (1989), an MA from Brown University (1994) and a PhD in the history of culture, with a specialization in media arts and anthropology, from the University of Chicago (1999). His films and new-media works include Unknown Territories (2011), Vérité to Virtual (DER, 2008), The Theory of Time Here (Video Data Bank, 2007), and Cultures in Webs (Eastgate, 2003), among others. His scholarship has been published in journals such as Film Quarterly, Visual Studies, and Visual Anthropology and in books such as the SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods. As co-editor of the recently published Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts (University of Chicago Press), Professor Coover examines the impact of new technologies in the humanities and arts.

nickm.com . Nick Montfort

poet & professor of digital media, Massachusetts Institute of Technologydirector, The Trope Tank . curriculum vitae . biography . contact meall courses . MIT fall 2019 courses: Exploratory Programming . Interactive Narrativedigital poems . if . misc . Post Position (blog) . Nomnym (naming company) . Synchrony (demoparty)

Hyperdyne by Adam Vidiksis at IRCAM ImproTech Philadelphia

Thank you to The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities for the content of this post.

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Innovation

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Keith & Kathy Sachs, Howard HodgkinHoward Hogkin, Portrait of Keith and Kathy Sachs, 1988 – 1991, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Penn Announces Sachs Program for Arts Innovation

University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann and Provost Vincent Price have announced the creation of the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation.

Founded with a commitment of $15 million from alumni Keith L. Sachs and Katherine Sachs, this transformative gift – the largest gift ever made across the arts at Penn – will establish the Sachs Arts Innovation Hub and closely link arts education to the Penn Compact 2020’s goal of advancing innovation across the University.

“Creativity is the very soul of innovation, and what is art but creativity made manifest?” Gutmann said. “Keith and Kathy are among the undisputed patron saints of the arts at Penn, and their latest extraordinary generosity will transform how we understand, teach and break new ground in the arts. The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation promises to empower a new wave of artistic and ingenious creation at Penn.”

The new Sachs Arts Innovation Hub, to be located in the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, will aim to visibly energize the arts and arts innovation at Penn. It will integrate research, teaching and practice, working collaboratively with faculty, students, arts and culture leaders and the Provost’s Arts Advisory Council, while building on the highly successful initiatives of the three-year Art and Culture Initiative sponsored by the provost and the School of Arts & Sciences.

“This tremendous gift comes at an especially exciting time for the arts at Penn,” Price said. “It allows us to integrate and amplify the wide range of activity already underway in our world-leading arts institutions and academic departments – and in a city bursting with unrivaled arts opportunities – creating a whole decidedly greater than the sum of its parts. The longtime leadership of Keith and Kathy Sachs across the ICA, Penn Design and the School of Arts & Sciences has set the stage for this new era, and we are all indebted to their generosity and vision.”

Led by an executive director, to be appointed through a national search, the Sachs Program will expand sustainable curricular innovation in the arts across the University, including grants to develop courses, workshops, master classes and other learning opportunities; encourage hands-on artistic production and public art spaces; foster cross-campus collaborations, especially between arts centers and academic programs; appoint artists in residence and other new faculty members; and build community and new audiences for the arts at Penn.

The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation culminates more than a decade of support for the arts at Penn from Keith and Katherine Sachs. These major gifts, which have transformed the landscape of arts education on campus, include the Sachs Guest Curator Program at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Sachs Professorship in Contemporary Art in the Department of History of Art in the School of Arts & Sciences and the Fine Arts Program Fund and Visiting Professorship in the Department of Fine Arts in the School of Design. The Sachs’ vision has been to expand arts programs across the University by integrating the ICA, the Department of Fine Arts and the Department of History of Art and bringing outstanding artists to teach on campus.

“We believe strongly that the arts are essential to the core mission of education,” Keith Sachs said. “The very best students seek out a university with a vital arts program. At the same time, the arts are central to advancing key Penn values, such as diversity, innovation and integrating knowledge.”

“We are especially pleased,” Katherine Sachs said, “that our gifts to the arts create synergies and new ideas across campus. These connections foster the creativity and imagination that our students need to become the leaders of an ever-changing world.”

Keith Sachs is former CEO of Saxco International, member and former chair of the School of Design Board of Overseers and a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is a longtime leader of the Class of 1967 Gift Committee, which he is chairing during its 50th-reunion year. Katherine Sachs, an adjunct curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for many years, is an emeritus member of the University Board of Trustees, a member of the University’s Design Review Committee and a member of the ICA Board of Overseers, which she formerly chaired.

Thank you to Penn News Service for the content of this post.

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