I WANT AN AI FOR PRESIDENT: experimental LARP / immersive theater playtest

computationally generated line drawing of an ai president
February 15, 2024 | 19:00-21:00 | Hammy Wammy, 4633 N Clark St #1, Chicago, IL 60640
Event
Past

The Hoffmeier Institute of Art is part of a historic liberal arts college that specializes in secondary fine art education. The school emerged from an early cooperative of academics engaged in education reform who founded the school on abolitionist principles. Throughout the 20th century, the school went through a period of expansion, rapidly increasing its student body and course offerings, but ultimately decided not to invest in an expansion of its campus footprint. As a result, space is a highly sought after resource on the campus which has affected its reputation among prospective students.

By the early 2000s the school’s student population began to decline and the school leadership made efforts to downsize where possible and sought out corporate relationships to ease the financial burden of avoiding any layoffs while supporting a smaller student body. These efforts were undermined in part by their unpopularity with the faculty, staff, student body. Indeed, the school’s aversion to contemporary approaches to financing higher education (online education programs, proliferating masters programs, international campuses, rampant real-estate speculation) with no feasible alternative has left the school in a poor financial repute. Today, the school is still known for its radical history but has been marred by a number of controversies.

Having recently weathered a tumultuous resignation of its former president, the school has been operating with limited leadership for a number of months. As the faculty and staff of this institution, you have all gathered here for a campus wide meeting to offer your insights as the school begins its recruitment process for a new president. The board of directors has hired a consulting firm, WikiD Solutions, to host an opening listening session and gather information on what skills and attributes the community wants from its future leadership.

Join leads Kristin McWharter, Doug Rosman, and Garrett Laroy Johnson to “play test” this new experimental live action role play (LARP) / immersive theater piece. Registration details below.

Drinks and light food provided.

Registration

Registration spots are extremely limited. Please complete the form below by 2/14/24 to be added to the waitlist. If there is a spot available, we will reach out via email to confirm. Please register only if you are sure you will be able to attend. If something comes up, please inform organizers so we can open the spot to another registrant.

REGISTER HERE

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Kristin McWharter

'Kristin McWharter uses performance and play to interrogate the relationship between competition and intimacy. Inspired by sports narratives and strategies for collective decision making, her work blurs the boundaries of intimacy and hype culture to challenge viewer's relationships to affection and competitive drive.'

Doug Rosman

Doug Rosman (b. Santa Monica, 1991) is an artist and programmer working at the intersection of art and technology. He received his Bachelor of Arts in the Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts Major at the University of California, San Diego in 2014, and his Master of Fine Arts in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019.

Garrett Laroy Johnson

Garrett Laroy Johnson is a Chicago-based sound and media artist, researcher, and theorist. His transdisciplinary work engages Guattarian process theory, politics and the production of subjectivity, computation and materialism, and post-psychoanalysis.

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