2023–24 Grantees
Mapping Chicago’s Lost Chinatown
Mapping Chicago’s Lost Chinatown, a collaboration between Alexander Weinberg (PhD student, Economics, UChicago) and Alice Yasi Xie (MA candidate, Modern and Contemporary Art History, SAIC), re-looms histories of individuals and businesses into the first digital map of Chicago’s “lost” Chinatown. This 3D representation reconstitutes the South Loop center of community, commerce, and life for the early Chinese immigrants in Chicago. Using tools from machine learning, art history, and urban economics, the map weaves historical photographs, personal artifacts, and papers with historical business and census records in a digital map which allows viewers to engage and explore Chicago’s “lost” Chinatown. In this visualization of the community, we hope to make known the built geography of the historic Chicago Chinatown and immigrant economic and social experience in Chicago.
Faculty Advisors: Emily Talen (Professor, Urbanism, UChicago); Jennifer Dorothy Lee (Associate Professor, Chinese Art History, SAIC)
Mechanical Beings
Mechanical Beings asks about the most subjective and emotional relationships that humans can form with non-human mechanical beings. Yukyeom Kim (MFA candidate, Art and Technology / Sound Practices, SAIC) and Hayoung Song (PhD candidate, Integrative Neuroscience, UChicago) will investigate the emotional experiences of humans as they interact with machines that exhibit human-like behaviors. In the context of evolving technology and the robotics industry, we will explore the potential for humans to feel empathy towards non-human entities. During the project time, the team will do research in related fields including Psychology, Neuroscience, and Post-humanism. Yukyeom will create a pair of installations composed of two robots: one that avoids human gaze and one that makes eye contact with humans. Hayoung will conduct behavioral experiments investigating audiences' reactions toward the two types of robots. The project will provide artistic and scientific insights into how eye contact contributes to human-machine interaction
Faculty advisors: Lee Blalock (Assistant Professor, SAIC); Yuan Chang Leong (Assistant Professor, Psychology, UChicago)
Sing, Play, Write: Materializing Language Revitalization
Sing, Play, Write: Materializing Language Revitalization is an experiment where Tanvi Dev (MFA, Visual Communication, SAIC), Roberto Young (PhD student, Anthropology, UChicago), Jonah Francese (PhD candidate, Ethnomusicology, UChicago) investigate the possibility of drawing together revitalization material, archival documentation, and accessible approaches to language learning at different pedagogical levels for two endangered Inuit Languages, Inuktitut and Tunumiisut. We focus on the creation of two cultural instruments for this purpose: 1) A hip hop album, leveraging the genre which has a deep and growing influence on Indigenous youth, for Tunumiisut language learning, recording, retelling native stories, oral traditions, and songs; 2) A small portable box with individual Inuktitut syllable stamps that can be joined together to print words and sentences. In doing this, we wish to encourage interactive language acquisition activities, games, art, poetry, and community-building exercises at different language proficiency levels and age groups. Both parts involve extensive engagement with local community organizations and stakeholders. Each cultural instrument is designed to be easily accessible, reproducible and mass-manufacturable at low costs, and archival in nature. In the end, this project formulates a well-documented system for the creation of revitalization tools that can be replicated for other endangered languages.
Faculty advisors: Stephen Farrell (Assistant Professor, Visual Communication Design, SAIC); Jessica Baker (Assistant Professor, Music, UChicago); Lenore Grenoble (John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor, Linguistics, UChicago)
Rolling Around in the Compost of Life
Composting is a natural process in which multispecies assemblages—from humans to worms—interact to recycle organic matter into nutrient-rich soil. From this decomposed, seemingly chaotic matter, new plants and organisms are able to thrive. What kinds of transformation are possible when we read, share, shred, till, test, plant, and grow collectively with the land and its soil? By exploring the compost that results from different dietary habits across different socioeconomic regimes, this project seeks to understand the reciprocal relationship between anthropogenic food waste and soil composition–which then informs the plants that can be grown therein. This research project is a collaboration between ecologist and anthropologist Cat Buoncore (PhD student, Ecology and Evolution, UChicago) and performance artist and queer feminist theorist Virginia Kennard (MFA candidate, Performance, SAIC). Virginia has made solo and ensemble performance installations that negotiate how feminized, commodified bodies are looked at, with a focus on explicit performance gestures and queer disruptions.
Faculty Advisors: Vanessa Damilola Macaulay (Assistant Professor, Performance, SAIC); Trevor Price (Professor, Ecology and Evolution, UChicago)