The UCLA C2i2 Scholar's Council Speaker Series features new and emerging work from the community that represents a wide-range of methodologies, disciplines, strategies and media united by a desire to imagine and build alternative futures to those posited by the tech industry.

Modern grooming for the new masculinity.

Virtual Futures is an annual conference held in London. The events bring together artists, designers, philosophers, and writers to discuss and address the benefits of looking at our future through the role of technology. The goal is to connect individuals across various practices and promote original thinking within a cultural space.

The Self Development Kit (SDK) is an ongoing research project that investigates the habitual life spent in front of computers. Using machine vision, AR trigger patterns, and front facing camera performances, the project explores how our algorithmically driven habits might evolve into digital trigger postures or BUI—body user interfaces. SDK examines this evolution of ‘pattern’ — pattern as habit, textile, and algorithm—through a fashion line made to be worn for the automated, interfacing, and computer facing everyday self.

2 sided poster which acted as a container for assets and information relating to both MDP and the 2019 Grad Show. The prints were used in various ways: gridded on a 10 foot wall as an entrance graphic, sliced up into 10 individual pieces and fragmented across the exhibition for each student's name and project info, and finally folded up and sent out as mailers or takeaways. (w/ Ben Hooker)

LAUNCH SESSIONS is an intensive series of workshops that kick off the new year at MDP. Over this 3-week period, students engage with different ideas and ways of working as a form of introduction—or re-introduction—to the community and culture of the MDP and, in particular, the values we believe are key to design in the 21st Century: adaptability, criticality, relevancy, and experimentation.

Digital Healing is high definition rain played on loop—designed and catered towards nature. Digital Healing embeds itself in an unnatural environment to supplement plant nutrients with high energy visible light in the form of virtual rain, increasing plant coloration and stimulating growth.

As a person new to Berlin I found myself going on lots of tours. Ranging from a mere 1–3 hours, these tours were designed to just skim the surface, by either walking, biking, cruising, or segwaying. What I ended up discovering was that none of the tours were comprehensible enough to fully understand the city. In response I decided to set up my own tour enterprise. The Tour Quadrathalon combines each individual tour into one ultimate tour adventure: a brief 12 hours of exhilarating site seeing. The project is a critique on the plethora of tours readily available to a gullible tourist. If you want the full Cutting Edge™ experience call the number and sign up for a trip of a lifetime.

BRB is a live-stream symposium of: #StreamingLifestyles #InterfaceAesthetics #VirtualUrbanism #eSportBodies, with Speakers: Matt Asato-Adams, Jess Frucht, Nathan Hertz, Rachel Kinnard, and Sam Rolfes. Organized by Ben Hooker and Jenny Rodenhouse and hosted in the Wind Tunnel Gallery.

Through an architectural lens, this project looks at the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong from its inception to its destruction. The city was unique in that there was no singular architect, it was a rhizomatic structure that was constantly building and adapting to various conditions. The Walled City was the holy grail of avante garde architecture, an organic mega structure that exhibited radical flexibility by growing with the changing needs of its endlessly shifting and changing inhabitants. The Walled City defied all conventional rules of architecture and even engineering, embodied no hierarchies or rules of zoning and developed in total anarchy, and yet not only functioned but continued to grow in ways that were inconceivable for buildings designed by architects.

The Pillars of Unsound is a proximity and sound reactive installation, part of the 2018 Unsound Festival identity proposal. The pillars act as an extension of the identity system's logotype, performing alongside the years lineup. Using custom Processing code, the typography is mapped directly to sound input around the structure, shifting color, expanding, and contracting. The installation also utilizes a motion sensor to control upward velocity of the type, creating abstraction and texture when no one is near, and providing legibility when close by.

A quarterly magazine focused on exploring dialogues between cultures without tinted glasses. The goal of the publication is to break away all previously established connotations of a culture and reveal its truths. Each issue collaborates with a native artist to provide a social commentary on the culture's influence and influences in the world.

Hajichi were traditional tattoos women in the Ryukyu islands wore dating back to the 14th century. Commonly seen as arrowheads, circles, and squares, they functioned as symbols of the transition from adolescence to womanhood warding off evil, ensuring safety, and bringing happiness. In Ryukyuan belief, women ruled the spiritual domain and were believed to possess spiritual powers—by extension these tattoos performed as signifiers and transmitters of female power.

Ryukyuan Rituals performs this act, allowing individuals to lay their hands upon a Ryukyuan hearth to take part in the hajichi ritual.

Our individual habits compose an unconscious rhythm: adjust glasses, clear throat, check phone, repeat. As a series of blind gestures, habits exist somewhere between mindless repetition and comfort. Habitual Actions is an attempt to transform unconscious habits into conscious rituals. The project records a day in the life of a person, beginning with a performance of Matt by Matt. His habits can now be yours.