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Soft Structures in Hard Times: Franceli Cibrian, Chapman U and Christopher Kuhl, UC San Diego Theatre & Dance
November 9, 2022 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Production still of Human Measure, performed at HOME, Manchester, UK 2021. A work created by Cassils with choreography by Jasmine Albuquerque and lighting design by Christopher Kuhl. Photo by Manuel Vason.
Available Light: Soft Gaze/Hard Focus Shining A Light On Social and Environmental Justice via Light Design for New Performance Based Works
Kuhl will speak about new formal experiments and innovations in the field of light, design, dance, and performance art. He will focus this lecture around two performances. The first work, ABACUS is a baroque presentation created at the Experimental Media Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic University, made collectively by Early Morning Opera and Lars Jan. It places the viewer unnaturally far from the stage, forcing a perspective that references the long view instead of the short fix and challenges people to consider the breakdown of all national borders, the next logical step forward to create true environmental and social change in a time of mass destruction. The second work is a new contemporary dance and social sculpture titled Human Measure created by the artist Cassils. It brings to light the growing violence, repression, and ongoing overwhelming rollback of rights for transgender and non-binary people. The performance forces creative action as driver for propelling the possibility of empathy and is the culmination of a communal effort, that includes the work of choreographer Jasmine Albuquerque, Sound Designer Kadet Kuhne, and five trans and non-binary performers. In this space we created a world of saturated deep red “safe light” that allowed the performer freedom of expression, transcendence, and radical joy.
About the Speaker
Christopher Kuhl is a theatre, dance, opera, installation artist and designer for new performance, theater, dance, and opera. Among other awards, he received two Ovation awards and two Bessies. Recent work includes Dog Days (Prototype Festival, Los Angeles Opera); The Object Lesson (BAM, Edinburgh Festival, Sydney Festival); The Source (REDCAT, BAM); The Public Theatre, Kaai Theater, Centre Pompidou); The Elephant Room (St. Ann’s Warehouse); ABACUS (Early Morning Opera, BAM, Sundance Film Festival, EMPAC). Kuhl has designed for new music and opera with the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Beijing Music Festival, Alarm Will Sound and Carnegie Hall. He is an associate artist of Hand2Mouth Theatre and founding co-director of Live Arts Exchange (LAX). A graduate of CalArts, Kuhl is originally from New Mexico and is design faculty in the department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego.
Taking Self-Regulation in Your Own Hands: The Role of Wearable Technology as a Co-Regulation Assistant for Neurodiverse Children
Building on her expertise in ubiquitous interactive technology and interventions for neurodiverse children including motor and breathing exercises involving gesture patterns and sound for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Franceli L. Cibrian will describe CoolCraig, a wearable technology application to support co-regulation strategies among children with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) and their caregivers. Cibrian will explain how “invisible” collaborative assistive technologies and child-centered design can better support self-regulation, one of the most challenging tasks for young children, adolescents, and neurodivergent children.
About the Speaker
Franceli Cibrian is Assistant Professor in the Fowler School of Engineering at Chapman University. Her research focuses on the design, development, and evaluation of ubiquitous interactive technology to support interventions in technology and interaction for children’s educational and therapeutic encounters, particularly for neurodiverse children. Cibrian is a co-author of the book Research Advances in ADHD and Technology. She is affiliated with theMexican Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia. She did her postdoctoral training at UCI and received her Ph.D. in computer science at the CICESE Research Center in Ensenada, Mexico.
About Designing Soft Structures in Hard Times
The design of structures and systems brings hard materials to mind: steel, glass, molded plastics, microchips, batteries. But a single layer of graphene, the crumbly-soft graphite used in the pencils we sketch with, is the strongest material we know. The flexibility of “soft” structures like skin, fabric, and the atmosphere makes these forms open to strategic adaptation and imagination, empowering resilience and creativity. For the Design@Large Fall 2022 series, we invite you to consider the power of soft structures in design ecologies ranging from medical research to Indigenous communities, and from the textile industry to web design and the modeling of outer space. We hope you will join us as we consider the power of soft structures in hard times, and as we try our hands at making change through the design of soft structures.
About Design@Large
Design@Large is a speaker series hosted by The Design Lab at UC San Diego, where each quarter we examine a topic in society and the relevance and implications through the lens of human centered design.
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