Seeing Through Stone: Sonny Trujillo’s Voice from Within
Remy Francisco, October 25, 2024 At 63 years old, Sonny Trujillo stands upon a collapsed prison surveillance tower. He paces five steps...
The discussion will focus on I Agree to the Terms, a new interactive cross-media performance presented by The Builders Association— live streaming online by NYU Skirball March 25-April 3.
I Agree To The Terms is a new virtual performance developed by the OBIE Award-winning ensemble The Builders Association and presented by NYU Skirball. The interactive 30- minute online event is developed in collaboration with a community of Amazon “microworkers” who discretely train the algorithms that influence our online e-commerce experiences. Microworkers earn from $1 to $100 a day in a vast, unregulated industry. Their assignments are repetitive, boring, maddening, and sometimes disturbing. For I Agree to the Terms, audiences enter the Builders Marketplace, train with actual microworkers and compete for paying jobs, connecting with the invisible online labor force that shapes our everyday virtual lives.
Learn more about the performance and how to attend.
Marianne Weems is Professor of Performance Play and Design at UC Santa Cruz and a theater and opera director. She is founder of the award-winning New York-based theater company The Builders Association, an influential ensemble working at the forefront of integrating media with live performance. With the company, Weems has created and directed 17 original large-scale productions and worked with unexpected collaborators including the architects Diller + Scofidio, The National Center for Super Computing Applications, and the South Asian arts collective motiroti. Her work has toured domestically and internationally including to the RomaEuropa Festival, the Festival Iberoamericano de Bogota, the Seoul Festival, the Melbourne Theater Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and The Brooklyn Academy of Music. Weems has also worked in various creative roles with The Wooster Group, David Byrne, Taryn Simon, Susan Sontag, The V-Girls, and many others.
Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, UC Berkeley. She is author of numerous books including The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (M.I.T. Press, 2015); Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, co-edited with Johanna Burton and Dominic Willsdon (M.I.T. Press 2016); and Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge 2011). Jackson’s writing has also appeared in dozens of museum catalogues, journals, blogs, and edited collections. She has received numerous awards, including a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Performance Studies (NCA), the ATHE Best Book Award, Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Kahan Scholar’s Prize in Theatre History (ASTR), and the Arts and Humanities Outstanding Service Award. She has received fellowships from the Spencer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as several collaborative project grants from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, UCIRA, the Creative Work Fund, the San Francisco Foundation, and the LEF Foundation.
Larry Shea is an artist and educator working with a wide variety of digital and analog media, creating visuals and interactivity for theatrical productions and fine artworks around the world. Some highlights include Julia Scher’s surveillance-art installations in the late 90’s; “Securityworld” (Galerie Hussenot, Paris); “Wonderland” (Andrea Rosen Gallery, NY); and “Predictive Engineering 2” (SFMOMA). He was the media/technical designer for Mary Ellen Strom and Ann Carlson’s large-scale outdoor, train-based performance & projection extravaganza “Geyserland,” (2003, Montana). He led the team that created an Augmented Reality “app” for smartphones used throughout “The Elements of Oz” for the acclaimed media-theater company, The Builders Association (2015-17) and continues to work with them on several projects in development. Larry holds an MFA from The Massachusetts College of Art and a BA from the University of Virginia. He dedicated 8 years to the internationally acclaimed MIX: New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival, serving on the Programming Committee from 1997-2002 and as Executive Director from 2003-2005. He has taught at The New School & Pratt Institute in NY, & The Museum School, Boston. Currently he’s an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he founded and runs the Video & Media Design MFA & BFA programs in the School of Drama.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. He co-directs the Expressive Intelligence Studio, a technical and cultural research group, with Michael Mateas. Noah has authored or co-edited six books on games and digital media for the MIT Press, including The New Media Reader (2003), a book influential in the development of interdisciplinary digital media curricula. His most recent book, How Pac-Man Eats, was published by MIT in 2020. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Google, Microsoft, and others. Noah’s collaborative playable media projects, including Screen and Talking Cure, have been presented by the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Krannert Art Museum, Hammer Museum, and a wide variety of festivals and conferences.
