Following the people and events that make up the research community at Duke

Students exploring the Innovation Co-Lab

Category: Art Page 3 of 6

Students Dance Their Way Out of “AI Bias”

Martin Brooke is no ordinary Engineering professor at Duke University. He teaches computer scientists, engineers, and technology nerds how to dance.

Brooke co-teaches Performance and Technology, an interactive course where students create performance projects and discuss theoretical and historical implications of technologies in performance. In a unique partnership with Thomas DeFrantz, a professor of African and African American Studies and Dance students will design a technology based on “heart,” for example, in order to understand how human expression is embedded in technology. Two weeks later, they’ll interact with motion-sensing, robotic trees that give hugs; and 3D printed hearts that detect colors and match people, sort of like a robotic tinder.

Thomas DeFrantz (left) and Martin Brooke  watch their students perform in the Performance and Technology course .

Brooke loves that this class is fun and interactive, but more importantly he loves that this class teaches students how to consider people’s emotions, facial expressions, cultural differences, cultural similarities and interactions when designing new technologies.

Human interface is when a computerized program or device takes input from humans — like an image of a face — and gives an output — like unlocking a phone. In order for these devices to understand human interface, the programmer must first understand how humans express themselves. This means that scientists, programmers, and engineers need to understand a particular school of learning: the humanities. “There are very, very few scientists who do human interface research,” Brooke said.

The students designed a robotic “Tinder” that changes colors when it detects a match.

Brooke also mentioned the importance of understanding human expressions and interactions in order to limit computer bias. Computer bias occurs when a programmer’s prejudiced opinions of others are transferred into the computer products they design. For example, many recent studies have proven that facial recognition software inaccurately identifies black individuals when searching for suspects of a criminal case.

“It turns out one of the biggest problems with technology today is human interface,” Brooke said. “Microsoft found out that they had a motion sensitive Artificial Intelligence that tended to say women, [more often than men], were angry.”  Brooke said he didn’t consider the importance of incorporating the arts and humanities into engineering before coming to Duke. He suggested that it can be uncomfortable for some scientists to think and express themselves artistically. “[When] technologists [take Performance and Technology], for example, they are terrified of the performance aspects of it. We have some video of a guy saying, ‘I didn’t realize I was going to have to perform.’ Yeah, that’s what we were actually quite worried about, but in the end, he’s there in the video, doing slow motion running on stage — fully involved, actually performing, and really enjoying it.

Duke has a strong initiative to promote arts and humanities inclusion in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Brooke plans to bring Bass Connections, a research program that focuses on public outreach and cross-disciplinary work, to his Performance and Technology class before the end of the semester to demonstrate bias through a program he calls AI Bias In the Age of a Technical Elite.  

“You give it someone’s name and it will come up with a movie title, their role, and a synopsis of the movie,” Brooke said. “When I put in my name, which is an English name, it said that the movie I would be in is about a little boy who lives in the English countryside who turns into a monster and terrorizes the town.” This program shows even something as simple as a name can have so much stigma attached to it.

Bass Connections Students working on technology and engineering projects. (From the official Duke page for Bass Connections.)

Brooke’s hope is that his class teaches students to think about technology and human interface. “Hopefully that’s a real benefit to them when they get out actually designing products.”

Guest post by Jordan Anderson, a masters student in Science & Society

Undergraduate Research in Duke’s Wired! Lab

Meet Jules Nasco, a sophomore studying Political Science and Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

Jules is intrigued by the theories behind “how and why people form governments.” Yet, beyond her participation in various theatrical performances, commitment to several social and living-learning communities, and multiple campus jobs — from being a tour guide to editing Twitter and the Medium blog for DukeStudents — Jules also brandishes the role of undergraduate researcher in the Wired! Lab.

Duke’s Wired Lab is dedicated to digital art history and visual culture. The group – facilitated by Olga Grlic and Bill Broom and comprised of three current undergraduates – works in conjunction with the University of Catania in Italy and senior researchers around the world. Jules works specifically on the Medieval Kingdom of Sicily database, “a collection of historic images of the medieval monuments and cities in the Kingdom of Sicily, available as an open-source resource for travelers, researchers, academics, and anyone curious about the history of this part of the world!”

Since the spring semester of her first year at Duke, Jules has been searching high and low through public and private “collections, museums, archives, libraries, and publications in search of relevant paintings, drawing, etchings, photographs, or other images for the database.” She says that this can be as straightforward and easy as checking the permissions of a digital photo and downloading it or as complicated as contacting persons about image rights or scanning and editing photos from old books. Jules also collects metadata about the images she compiles such as artist or photographer, the date it was produced, the reason for production, or any relevant notes about the work. This data is then reviewed and added onto by senior researchers before being added to the public database.

The work can lead to “super-duper cool discoveries.” Earlier this year, Jules found an illustration of Salerno in a book that was drawn over 500 years ago, which led the team to a collection containing another illustration – likely by the same unknown author – likely drawn solely to depict the event of someone’s execution. However, the execution drawing is now the oldest depiction collected by the Wired! Lab of Castel Nuovo in Naples, which is one of the most prominent monuments studied by the lab.

The photo of Castel Nuovo in Naples that undergraduate researcher Jules found.

Though she admits that more career-focused endeavors may eventually take precedence over her work in the database, it’s her passion for art history that initially drew Jules into the research. Knowing that other pursuits would fill her time at Duke, she wanted to keep her interests alive in other ways. After participating in the Medieval and Renaissance Europe FOCUS program, Jules’ professor introduced her to Olga and Bill and the project. “The rest is art history!”

Jules’ favorite part of the work is the feeling that she is “meaningfully contributing to a community of interested travelers, researchers, and academics.”

Jules is able to provide people globally with information about a part of the world that she believes may otherwise be too hard to find. Her work facilitates and spreads knowledge in an interactive way, which she says makes the sometimes-tedious parts all worth it. In their data review at the end of each semester, Jules is able to see where in the world the database has been accessed and finds it awesome to know that people in Africa, Asia, and Australia use the information she has helped provide.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Curating a New Portrait of Black America

It’s been over three years since the National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) opened in D.C. in September 2016, but the excitement around it doesn’t seem to have dimmed much. Chances are, you’re going to have to get your tickets three months in advance if you want to visit. Infants need their own timed pass, too.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Photo courtesy of Prabal Tiwari

On Friday, January 17, Duke’s From Slavery to Freedom Lab hosted a panel in conjunction with the Franklin Humanities Institute on the topic of contemporary Black arts and icons. The panel, “New Black Aesthetics,” featured speakers Rhea L. Combs, curator at the National Museum of African American & Culture, and Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke, and was one half of a two-panel conference titled “Black Images, Black Histories.”

According to Combs and Powell, the reason for the unprecedented popularity of works like the NMAAHC by contemporary Black artists is likely because they do something that other pieces and people rarely do: allow African Americans to tell the African American story.

As a museum curator, Combs doesn’t simply curate cohesive mixed-media exhibitions that shed light on the Black experience. In order to create those exhibitions, she must also dig through and analyze a wide range of old archival materials.

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Rhea L. Combs, Curator at the NMAAHC.
Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian

However, these archival materials at the NMAAHC aren’t necessarily just historical artifacts and records associated with figures like Rosa Parks or the Obamas; the Museum wants people to shuffle through their own attics to find things to donate. It demystifies the question of who belongs in a museum, according to Combs. “We create agency in terms of who gets to tell everyday stories,” she said.

She’s especially interested in the role of photography and film in African American studies. “We use cameras to culturally agitate the ways in which African Americans are understood,” she explained; the camera is a pathway into self-representation.

Captured in the Museum’s photos and moving images are stories of duplicity, or “celebrations that happened in the midst of tragedies.” Combs often finds themes of faith and activism as well as education and uplift, but she says that there’s plenty of variety within those overarching ideas. A photo of boys playing basketball on unicycles, for example.

“Art creates social understanding of who we are,” Combs said. Like hip-hop remixes and re-envisions things that are already understood in one way, so too does the NMAAHC.

On a similar vein, Powell’s presentation focused on the famous Obama portraits, and I’m guessing you might already know which ones I’m referring to. A fully-suited Barack Obama, seated in a wooden chair against a lush green background of flora and fauna; Michelle Obama in a flowing black-and-white colorblock dress, her chin resting on the back of her hand.

Powell examines how these portraits, simply titled “President Barack Obama” and “First Lady Michelle Obama,” manage to blend visual elements with socio-historical allusions and contexts to become world-famous 21st-century icons.

Richard J. Powell, Professor of Art and Art History at Duke.

While the portraits are visually exceptional, Powell said their context is what envelops. These images of the first Black U.S. president and first lady do allude to the old, white traditions of portraiture, “but they dismantle the genre’s conventional outcomes” for something new, he explained.

The portrait of Barack Obama is, visually, extremely similar to those of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Likewise, Michelle Obama’s portrait quite closely resembles that of Madame Moitessier, for example. But unlike these representations of pre-21st-century white men and women, the Obama portraits finally depict people of color. According to Powell, portraits elevate status, and it isn’t very often that you see Black individuals portrayed.

And yet there’s also a sad irony involved, Powell explained. Especially for other similar contemporary works of portraiture that depict Black people, there’s a decorative, incongruous grandeur that highlights the tension between social realities and the manner of portrayal. For instance, “saintly” portraits exist of Black men wearing urban clothing, but despite whatever “saintliness” might be visually depicted, the realities of Blackness in the inner cities of America is often far from positive.

One of the most striking features of the Barack Obama portrait is the blooming greenery behind the former president. It’s a metaphor of sorts, Powell said: social and historical context isn’t absent from art. Or, in other words, “The world can never be left out of the garden.”

By Irene Park

Games, Art, and New Frontiers

This is the third of several posts written by students at the North Carolina School of Science and Math as part of an elective about science communication with Dean Amy Sheck.

Beneath Duke University’s Perkins library, an unassuming, yet fiercely original approach to video games research is underway. Tied less to computer science and engineering than you might expect, the students and faculty are studying games for their effects on players.

I was introduced to a graduate researcher who has turned a game into an experiment. His work exists between the humanities, psychology, and computer science. Some games, particularly modern ones, feature complex economies that require players to collaborate as often as they compete. These researchers have adapted that property to create an economics game in which participants anonymously affect the opportunities – and setbacks – of other players. Wealth inequality is built in. The players’ behavior, they hope, will inform them about ‘real-world’ economic decisions.

Shai Ginsburg playing

At the intersection of this interdisciplinary effort with games, I met  Shai Ginsburg, an associate professor in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern studies who studies video games and board games the way other humanities professors might study Beowulf.

For example, he is able to divide human history into eras of games rather than of geopolitics.

“Until recently, games were not all that interactive,” he says. “Video games are, obviously, interactive, but board games have evolved, too, over the same period of time.” This shift is compelling because it offers us new freedoms in the way we express human experience.

A new gaming suite at Lawrence Tech University in Southfield, Mich. (LTU/Matt Roush)

“The fusion of storytelling and interactivity in games is very compelling,” Ginsburg says. “We haven’t seen that many games that handle issues like mental illness,” until more recently, he points out. The degree of interactivity in a video game grants a player a closeness to the narrative in the areas where writing, music, and visual art alone would be restricted. This closeness gives game designers – as artists – the freedom to explore themes where those artistic restrictions also hinder communication.

However, Dr. Ginsburg is not a game historian; the time that a game feature evolved is far less relevant to him than how its parent game affects players. “We tend to focus on the texts that interest us in a literature class,” he says, by way of example. He studies the games that interest him for the play opportunities they provide.

One advantage of using games as a medium to study their effects on people is that, “the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow is not yet there,” Ginsburg says. In painting, writing, and plenty of other mediums, a clear distinction between “good” and “bad” is decided simultaneously by communities of critics and consumers. Not so, in the case of games.

“I look at communities as a measure of the effectivity of the game less than for itself,” Ginsburg notes. “I think the question is ‘how was I reacting?’ and ‘why was I reacting in such a way?’” he says. Ginsburg’s effort seeks to reveal the mechanisms that give games their societal impact, though those impacts can be elusive. How to learn more? “Play lots of games. Play different kinds of games. Play more games.”

Guest Post by Jackson Meade, NCSSM 2020

Visualizing Climate Change, Self, and Existential Crises

Nothing excites Heather Gordon like old Duke Forest archives do. (“Forestry porn,” she calls it.) Except maybe the question of whether a copy is inherently worse than its original. Or the fear of unperceived existence and dying into oblivion. Or a lot of things, actually.

Gordon, a visiting artist at Duke’s Rubenstein Arts Center, is blending data and art through origami folding patterns. She doesn’t usually fold her designs into three-dimensional figures (“I hate sculptures”), but the outcome is nevertheless just as—perhaps even more—exciting that way.

Heather Gordon, Durham artist
Heather Gordon, visiting artist at the Rubenstein Arts Center.
Photo by Michelle Lotker

Gordon happened to stumble upon the idea simply by proceeding through day-to-day life. Namely, she found herself growing increasingly frustrated by online security questions. “They’re always asking stupid things like ‘what’s your favorite pet’s name?’, and I can’t remember what I put 10 years ago,” she said. (And Gordon says she loves all her pets equally.)

Instead, she thought that data visualizations could make for a much more effective security protocol by making use of personal data that only the individual in question would know and remember. “A shape could define you,” she said.

Most recently at the Ruby, Gordon worked with the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Duke University Archives to collect old photographs, spreadsheets, letters, and other documents that would contribute to her arts project. Gordon says she knew it was something she had to do when she found an archived letter addressed to Duke’s Dr. Clarence Korstian reading, “Thanks very much for the two shipments of twigs.” 

But what was most artistically compelling to Gordon was the light intensity data. Using the documented entries and calculations, she noticed that there were four quadrants in each plot, with 10 readings in each quadrant. Given this, Gordon used a compass to create a series of concentric arcs reminiscent of ripples in a pond. The final product put all four quadrants together to create a painting.

abstract painting
This pattern was derived from archival data on light intensity in the Duke Forest.
Photo by Robert Zimmerman

The second half of the Ruby project is directly linked to its title, UNLESS. Inspired by Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, Gordon took the word “UNLESS,” converted each letter into its respective ASCII value, and mapped those numbers into a tree pattern. As in The Lorax, she hoped to tackle issues of resource management and climate change and the idea that unless something is done, climate collapse remains imminent.

For the final product, Gordon used tape to display the tree patterns in colored stripes onto the glass windows of the Ruby. The trees will remain on display into Spring 2020.

tape piece on the Ruby's windows
Gordon’s UNLESS on display at the Rubenstein Arts Center.
Photo by Robert Zimmerman

Yet Gordon’s portfolio neither begins nor ends with UNLESS.

For instance, she’s created an installation called ECHO, inspired by an old personal project of mapping a series of mostly failed “intimate communications” over the course of a year. “I realized I was just seeing what I wanted to see,” Gordon said, reflecting on the project. And thus ECHO was born as an examination of self-awareness, reflection, and authenticity.

The installation itself used strips of mirror tape in a pattern derived from dates of correspondence with Gordon’s close friends. With dancer Justin Tornow, she also put on a dance performance within the space. Unintentionally, ECHO also became a case study in the perception of copies versus originals; a hundred or so audience members chose to crowd around a tiny door to watch Tornow dance, even though the exact same performance was being broadcast live on TVs just a few feet away.

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Tornow’s dance performance.
Photo courtesy of Heather Gordon

In another project, titled And Then The Sun Swallowed Me, Gordon revisits a childhood fear: “I was obsessed with the idea that the sun could go into supernova at any moment, and you wouldn’t know,” she explained. Even now, a similar panic persists. “I’m afraid of unperceived existence,” Gordon said. “No one will know about me 3,000 years later, and I stress about it.”

The folding pattern was made using the atomic radii of elements in suns that are capable of supernovas. Wrapped in black tape around the walls of a large room, the installation is explosive. In the center, a projection shows a swimmer swimming, though moving neither forward nor backward. It’s a Sisyphian swimmer, Gordon explains, forced to go through the motions but unable to find purpose.

And Then The Sun Swallowed Me, featuring a projected Sisyphian swimmer.
Photo courtesy of Heather Gordon

Gordon finds connections where most people can’t. There has long existed a gap between the sciences and the arts, but she seems to suggest that there need no longer be. And she also somehow manages to blend philosophy and existentialism quite gracefully with humor, youthfulness, and creativity. 

In essence, Gordon knows that there’s a lot in this world that’s worth freaking out over, but she handles it quite expertly.

By Irene Park

Traveling Back in Time Through Smart Archaeology

The British explorer George Dennis once wrote, “Vulci is a city whose very name … was scarcely remembered, but which now, for the enormous treasures of antiquity it has yielded, is exalted above every other city of the ancient world.” He’s correct in assuming that most people do not know where or what Vulci is, but for explorers and historians – including Duke’s Bass Connections team Smart Archaeology – Vulci is a site of enormous potential.

Vulci, Italy, was an ancient Etruscan city, the remains of which are situated about an hour outside of Rome. The Etruscan civilization originated in the area roughly around Tuscany, western Umbria, northern Lazio, and in the north of Po Valley, the current Emilia-Romagna region, south-eastern Lombarty, southern Veneto, and some areas of Campania. The Etruscan culture is thought to have emerged in Italy around 900 BC and endured through the Roman-Etruscan Wars and coming to an end with the establishment of the Roman Empire. 

As a dig site, Vulci is extremely valuable for the information it can give us about the Etruscan and Roman civilizations – especially since the ruins found at Vulci date back beyond the 8th century B.C.E. On November 20th, Professor Maurizio Forte, of the Art, Art History and Visual Studies departments at Duke as well as Duke’s Dig@Lab, led a talk and interactive session. He summarized the Smart Archaeology teams’ experience this past summer in Italy as well as allowing audience members to learn about and try the various technologies used by the team. With Duke being the first university with a permit of excavation for Vulci in the last 60 years, the Bass Connections team set out to explore the region, with their primary concerns being data collection, data interpretation, and the use of virtual technology. 

Trying out some of the team’s technologies on November 20th (photo by Renate Kwon

The team, lead by Professor Maurizio Forte, Professor Michael Zavlanos, David Zalinsky, and Todd Barrett, sought to be as diverse as possible. With 32 participants ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to professionals, as well as Italian faculty and student members, the team flew into Italy at the beginning of the summer with a research model focused on an educational approach of practice and experimentation for everyone involved. With a naturally interdisciplinary focus ranging from classical studies to mechanical engineering, the team was divided, with people focusing on excavation in Vulci, remote sensing, haptics, virtual reality, robotics, and digital media. 

Professor Maurizio Forte

So what did the team accomplish? Well, technology was a huge driving force in most of the data collected. For example, with the use of drones, photos taken from an aerial view were patched together to create bigger layout pictures of the area that would have been the city of Vulci. The computer graphics created by the drone pictures were also used to create a video and aided in the process of creating a virtual reality simulation of Vulci. VR can be an important documentation tool, especially in a field as ever-changing as archaeology. And as Professor Forte remarked, it’s possible for anyone to see exactly what the researchers saw over the summer – and “if you’re afraid of the darkness of a cistern, you can go through virtual reality instead.” 

An example of one of the maps created by the team
The team at work in Vulci

In addition, the team used sensor technology to get around the labor and time it would take to dissect the entire site – which by the team’s estimate would take 300 years! Sensors in the soil, in particular, can sense the remnants of buildings and archaeological features up to five meters below ground, allowing researchers to imagine what monuments and buildings might have looked like. 

One of the biggest takeaways from the data the team collected based on discovering remnants of infrastructure and layout of the city was of the Etruscan mastery of water, developing techniques that the Romans also used. More work was also done on classification of Etruscan pottery, tools, and materials based on earlier work done by previous researchers. Discovering decorative and religious artifacts was also impactful for the team, because as Professor Forte emphasized, these objects are the “primary documentation of history.” 

But the discoveries won’t stop there. The Smart Archaeology team is launching their 2019-2020 Bass Connections project on a second phase of their research – specifically focusing on identifying new archaeological sites, analyzing the landscape’s transformation and testing new methods of data capturing, simulation and visualization. With two more years of work on site, the team is hopeful that research will be able to explain in even greater depth how the people of Vulci lived, which will certainly help to shine a light on the significance of the Etruscan civilization in global history.

By Meghna Datta

Responding to the Climate Crisis Through Dance

Kimerer LaMothe began her talk in an unconventional way, by singing a song. As she reached the refrain she repeated the words “everybody dances” and invited the audience to join her. 

She then posed an intriguing question: How can dance be a response to the climate crisis? In the western world, dance is usually seen as a recreational activity and here LaMothe was asking how it could be used as a tool or even as the solution to one of the largest issues of our time. I was definitely a little skeptical. 

Image by Geoffry Gee

The talk was a part of Duke’s Ruby Fridays organized by the staff of Duke Arts and the Rubenstein Arts Center. LaMothe was invited to contribute to the series which features casual art talks with the intention of connecting art across a multitude of disciplines.

Her response to the climate crisis began with a discussion about the body. LaMothe explained that for three and a half billion years after the planet was formed, there were no complex bodies on the planet, just microbes. She said they developed multicellular bodies because they needed to move.

“We build our knowledge of the world through the bodily movements we make,” she said.

The idea is that a body’s ability to move and interact with the world around it is a form of dance. This is especially demonstrated by how human babies interact with their caregivers. Human babies, unlike many other animals, are extremely reliant on their caregivers and must find a way to communicate with them. Thus, they use movement to garner attention. They have an impulse to connect and use patterns of movement like a smile or a snuggle to make sure they are taken care of. What results is something like a dance.

LaMothe described it as, “A vital human expression of kinectivity.”

Using movement and dance as a way to connect or interact, however, is important to human life past infancy. Many different cultures around the world use dance as the primary ritual of their community.

One example LaMothe gave was the healing dance practiced by the Bushmen of the African Kalahari. They use dance to “stir energy” and understand any pain. As the dancing intensifies the energy grows. 

LaMothe explained that this allows them to “enter what they call first creation, a perception of reality where everything is changed and everything is changing.”

Through this, the healer can see the capacity of that pain to change and help the members release the pain. The idea is that to dance is to heal both themselves and the earth. 

Still, the question remains: How does dance heal the earth? The earth that is facing ecosystem collapse, species extinction, and overexploitation. The past five hundred years have exponentially brought us to the brink of the climate crisis. These are the same centuries that Europeans traveled around the world colonializing and overtaking native lands. One of the main ways colonists tried to make native people civilized was by stopping them from dancing.

LaMothe stated, “Native communities were told to stop dancing and instead make “progress towards civilization.”

In many places, it actually became a crime to dance. In fact, until 1932 it was against the law for native people to engage in ceremonial dances in the United States. Furthermore, in efforts to “civilize” people, a focus was placed on learning through reading and forsaking movement as a way to gain knowledge. This “civilized” culture also abandoned the awareness and respect native communities showed towards the environment around them. Dance not only allowed them to connect with each other but with the earth. This connection was reflected in the other parts of their life resulting in sustainable living and caring for the earth.

In LaMothe’s words, “dance can catalyze a sensory awareness of our own movement making.” 

An Image from LaMothe’s Presentation Featuring People Participating in
Climate Conscious Dance

She explained that through climate-conscious dance we can reconnect ourselves with the environment and help restore the earth.

One example she gave of how to do this is through events like Global Water Dances where people can participate in events all over the world to dance and raise consciousnesses about how to protect water.

In 2005 after teaching at both Brown and Harvard, LaMothe moved to a farm with her family so she could write and dance in an environment closer to nature. She has written six books, created several dance concerts and even a full-length musical titled “Happy If Happy When.” She spends her time writing, singing, dancing, and tending to the farm alongside her family.

Post by Anna Gotskind

Dreams of Reality: Performing Dementia

White Lecture Hall’s auditorium is a versatile space. It hosts classes, speakers, and student organizations. And this Wednesday, White 107 was an institution for the elderly, an elementary school classroom, a lake, and an old blue house.

On October 23, Duke welcomed solo artist Kali Quinn to the stage to perform her now 13-year-old, one-woman show, Vamping. Vamping is an artistic and humanistic rendition of dementia, inspired by Quinn’s personal experience with a grandmother who moved into an institution just as Quinn was leaving for college on the other side of the country. It tells the story of 91-year-old Eleanor Butler, who drifts in and out of old memories, joys, and regrets as she experiences dementia in an elderly care facility.

Eleanor undergoing a PET scan

Throughout the hour-long performance, the physicality of the stage remains constant. There is one actor, Quinn herself, accompanied by a few props: a projector, a wheelchair, a blanket, a voice recorder. Yet each of these, Quinn included, shapeshift constantly. Quinn plays not only Eleanor, but also a caregiver, a granddaughter, and Eleanor’s younger selves at different stages of life.

That’s what dementia is like, Quinn explains. It’s experiencing a hundred different things all at once. 

“I don’t know what’s dream and what’s awake,” says an elderly Eleanor as she returns from an old memory and just before she’s immersed into another one.

Vamping captures the existence of identity and personhood in diagnosis, according to Jessica Ruhle, Director of Education at the Nasher Museum of Art. While the story has no clear plot and no clear resolution, it flows in a way that is real and personal. At 91, Eleanor re-experiences her elementary school spelling bee, her 16-year-old flirtationship with the boy who would become her husband, the birth of her first child, her regret at not being a better wife and mother and grandmother, and so much more. She doesn’t particularly succeed in making sense of it all, but neither does she try. The resolution is simply an acceptance of life’s complexity.

A series of memories, materialized through pieces of film, are held over a 91-year-old Eleanor. This is the last scene of the performance.

Janelle Taylor, a medical anthropologist at the University of Toronto and one of the panelists following the performance, explained that this complexity is what differentiates pure medicine from an anthropological approach. “I do kind of the opposite of what medicine does,” she said. “Medicine makes sense of things by excluding possible causes and contexts. Anthropology seeks to bring it all together.”

The entanglement of all these different possible factors perhaps explains why Quinn’s performance also offers glimpses into the lives of caregivers, family members, and others who share in the experience of dementia. In many cases, a single diagnosis affects a far larger network than just the diagnosed patient.

And though that’s true in Vamping as well as the panelists’ experiences with dementia, they acknowledge that other stories of the same condition often go untold. “We’re very alike in our whiteness, our economic condition and ability to afford professional care,” said Ruhle, referring to herself and Quinn. After all, Eleanor experiences dementia within a care institution—which, according to Eleanor in the play itself, costs about $85,000 per year.

Taylor added that she was searching for more data on diagnosed persons who have no healthcare or no family. Unfortunately, there isn’t much existing research on such people, and the data are difficult to find. And adding onto that, there are many cases of dementia that are never formally diagnosed at all.

But even so, Quinn’s performance is important to share. Vamping doesn’t attempt to do the impossible by telling a universal narrative of aging and dementia; instead, it gives an immensely personal and humanistic story of one patient’s experience of life.

Even the cold realities play into its personal nature as well. As Eleanor exclaims at one point in the performance, more money is spent yearly on Viagra and breast implants than on Alzheimer’s. The implication is clear: there’s a need for more research, and there’s a need for more humanness.

By Irene Park

Across the Atlantic: Caribbean Music and Diaspora in the UK

According to Professor Deonte Harris, many of us here in the U.S. have a fascination with Black music. But at the same time, we tend not to realize that it’s. . . well, Black music.

Harris, an International Comparative Studies professor at Duke, holds a freshly minted Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from UCLA. At the moment, his research focuses especially on the practice and influence of Afro-Caribbean music and diaspora in London.

Image result for deonte harris ethnomusicology
Deonte Harris, Ph.D.,
Assistant Professor of the Practice of the International Comparative Studies Program

He chose to conduct his research in the UK because of its large overseas Caribbean population and because he found that not much scholarship was dedicated to Black Europe. “It’s such a rich space to think about different historical entanglements that affect the lives and trajectories of Black people,” he explained.

Those entanglements include the legacies of colonialism, the Slave Trade, empire, and much more. The racialization of such historical processes is necessary to note.

For example, Harris found that a major shift in Black British music occurred in the 1950s due to anti-Black racism in England. Black individuals were not allowed to socialize in white spaces, so they formed community in their own way: through soundsystems.

These soundsystem originated in Jamaica and debuted in the UK in the postwar years. A soundsystem was the organization of Black individuals, music, and machines, typically in basements and warehouses, for the enjoyment of Black music and company. It became a medium through which a Black community could form in a racialized nation.

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Notting Hill Carnival, London: An annual celebration of Black British culture.
Photo by Dominic Alves.

Today, Black British music has greatly expanded, but still remains rooted in sound systems.

While the formation of community has been positive, Harris explains that much of his research is a highly complex and often disheartening commentary on Blackness.

Blackness has been created as a category by dominant society: the white community, mostly colonizers. Black music became a thing only because of the push to otherize Black Britons; in many ways, Black culture exists only as an “other” in relation to whiteness. This raises a question of identity that Harris continues to examine: Who has the power to represent self?

In the U.S. especially, Black music is a crucial foundation to American popular music. But as in the UK, it finds its origins in community, folk traditions, and struggle. The industrial nature of the U.S. allows that struggle to be commercialized and disseminated across the globe, creating a sort of paradox. According to Harris, Black individuals must reconcile “being recognized and loved globally, but understanding that people still despise who you are.”

To conduct his research, Harris mostly engages in fieldwork. He spends a significant amount of time in London, engaging with Black communities and listening to live music. His analysis typically involves both sonic and situational elements.

But the most valuable part of Harris’ fieldwork, perhaps, is the community that he himself finds. “Ethnomusicology has for me been a very transformative experience,” he said. “It has helped me to create new global relationships with people ⁠— I consider myself now to have homes in several different places.”

By Irene Park

The Making of queerXscape

Sinan Goknur

On September 10th, queerXscape, a new exhibit in The Murthy Agora Studio at the Rubenstein Arts Center, opened. Sinan Goknur and Max Symuleski, PhD candidates in the Computational Media, Arts & Cultures Program, created the installation with digital prints of collages, cardboard structures, videos, and audio. Max explains that this multi-media approach transforms the studio from a room into a landscape which provides an immersive experience.

Max Symuleski

The two artists combined their experiences with changing urban environments when planning this exhibit. Sinan reflects on his time in Turkey where he saw constant construction and destruction, resulting in a quickly shifting landscape. While processing all of this displacement, he began taking pictures as “a way of coping with the world.” These pictures later become layers in the collages he designed with Max.

Meanwhile, Max used their time in New York City where they had to move from neighborhood to neighborhood as gentrification raised prices. Approaching this project, they wondered, “What does queer mean in this changing landscape? What does it mean to queer something? Where are our spaces? Where do we need them to survive?” They had previously worked on smaller collages made from magazines that inspired the pair of artists to try larger-scale works.  

Both Sinan and Max have watched the exploding growth in Durham while studying at Duke. From this perspective, they were able to tackle this project while living in a city that exemplifies the themes they explore in their work.

One of the cardboard structures

Using a video that Sinan had made as inspiration for the exhibit, they began assembling four large digital collages. To collaborate on the pieces, they would send the documents back and forth while making edits. When it became time to assemble their work, they had to print the collage in large strips and then careful glue them together. Through this process, they learned the importance of researching materials and experimented with the best way to smoothly place the strips together. While putting together mound-like cardboard structures of building, tire, and ice cube cut-outs, Max realized that, “we’re now doing construction.” Consulting with friends who do small construction and maintenance jobs for a living also helped them assemble and install the large-scale murals in the space. The installation process for them was yet another example of the tension between various drives for and scales of constructions taking place around them.

While collage and video may seem like an odd combination, they work together in this exhibit to surround the viewer and appeal to both the eyes and ears. Both artists share a background in queer performance and are driven to the rough aesthetics of photo collage and paper. The show brings together aspects of their experience in drag performance, collage, video, photography, and paper sculpture of a balanced collaboration. Their work demonstrates the value of partnership that crosses genres.

Poster for the exhibit

When concluding their discussion of changing spaces, Max mentioned that, “our sense of resilience is tied to the domains where we could be queer.” Finding an environment where you belong becomes even more difficult when your landscape resembles shifting sand. Max and Sinan give a glimpse into the many effects of gentrification, destruction, and growth within the urban context. 

The exhibit will be open until October 6. If you want to see the results of weeks of collaging, printing, cutting, and pasting together photography accumulated from near and far, stop by the Ruby.

Post by Lydia Goff

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