Tao Leigh Goffe (Dark Lab, Cornell University)

**Due to COVID restrictions, only UCSD students and employees will be allowed to attend the class in person. All others must attend remotely via Zoom. Capacity is limited to first-come first-serve.

Note: The Design and Innovation Building (DIB) is located adjacent to the Structural and Materials Engineering Building on Pepper Canyon Lane

*There will be an optional outdoor reception from 5:00 – 5:45 P.M on the DIB 2nd Floor Terrace. Desserts and refreshments provided. UCSD students, employees, and external guests are welcome to attend.

**This will be hybrid event. For those attending remotely, please register via Zoom using the “Register Here” button at the top.

Dirge: Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial

The Western hemisphere is a haunted house built on the foundation of stolen land and stolen life. Considering the entanglement of the dispossession of Native sovereignty and African enslavement across deep time, in this talk Tao Leigh Goffe will present elements of a sound sculpture produced with collaborators. As a multimedia reckoning with the ongoing colonial present, Dirge explores Black and Indigenous burial rites, rituals, and futurism. Dr. Goffe asks, How can we use sound as a way of theorizing space and race? She tunes in to the resonances of improper burial across the hemisphere in spaces that are cemeteries but are not typically thought of as such.

About the Speaker

Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born award-winning writer, professor, and interdisciplinary artist. She specializes in colonial histories of race, debt, and technology. Her research and curatorial work is rooted in literatures and theories of labor that center Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Committed to building intellectual communities beyond institutions, she is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an engine for the study of race, technology, and ecology through digital storytelling (XR). Much of her artistic and sound design practice explores Afro-Asian histories and her heritage. Based in New York City, her work negotiates Black diasporic intellectual and political life. She studied English literature at Princeton University before pursuing a PhD at Yale University. With San Diego-based visual artist Andrea Chung, she is the 2021-2022 Artist-in-Residence at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Goffe is also an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history at Cornell University.

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.

Our theme this quarter is “Rebels, Revolutionaries & Risk takers”.