DECOLONIALATHON
May 14-15, 2022


2 days of free workshops 
Think-feel with the Earth
Collaborate in Augmented Reality


What is the DECOLONIALATHON?

The DECOLONIALATHON is a 2-day community design event happening May 14-15, 2022 in Los Angeles for ~15 participants to co-creatively explore decolonization and augmented reality (AR) from an anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and intersectional feminist lens.

The event is free, and we are offering need-based stipends.  

Following Arturo Escobar's call to ‘think/feel with the Earth’, and Doreen Massey’s ‘power-geometries’ of place, we will engage in embodied inquiry, ‘queering’ the practice of field work, and co-creating through a decolonizing lens. Participants are invited to design ways of connecting the past, present, and future histories through the medium of augmented reality.


Programming

FINAL DETAILS COMING SOON:
Day 1 
Saturday, May 14th, 2022
11am - 4pm

Community building, introduction to the topic of decolonization, augmented reality, and workshops led by facilitators that think-feel with the earth, personal, and local histories.

Los Angeles Historic Park
1245 N Spring St, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Day 2 
Sunday, May 15th, 2022
11am - 4pm 

Collaborate on a range of non-technical and mobile AR projects in small workshop groups. Wrap up, reflection and shareout.


USC School of Cinematic Arts
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007


Who is it for?


The DECOLONIALATHON centers queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and people of color (QTBIPOC) artists/designers in creating alternate eco-futures through augmented reality. Participants learn low barrier technical workflows on how to author in augmented reality, as a tool for artistic, ecojustice and activist expression.   


Who are the workshop facilitators?


DAY  1:

Workshop Facilitator
Sasha Anemone (she/her) is a landscape designer and researcher who believes that new futures can be made possible by investigating and understanding the processes that have given us our present.


Workshop Facilitator
Cesia Domínguez López (she/ella) is an UX designer, educator, & cultural worker striving for our collective liberation. Through many modalities, they explore historical legacies of healing to cultivate and nourish ecologies of care that center the health and dignity of Black and Indigenous communities. Rooted in an embodied and pleasure-based approach, they primarily work with organizers, movement-based organizations, and other frontline communities impacted by prison and border violence.


DAY  2:

Workshop Facilitator
Biayna Bagosian (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) program at the University of Southern California (USC). Her Ph.D. research focuses on the development of interactive and immersive information visualization media for environmental citizen-science initiatives. Biayna is Assistant Professor of Architectural Technology at Florida International University’s School of Architecture, Associate Program Director of FIU’s Robotics & Digital Fabrication Lab (RDF Lab), and Affiliated Faculty with FIU Institute of Environment where her interdisciplinary research is supported by several NSF grants. 

Workshop Facilitator
Alessio Grancini (he/him). 
With a hybrid background between design and technology, I am an interactive and prototype engineer at Magic Leap. I am interested in how Augmented Reality can infrastructure and scale the products of the future.
I led the work for the exhibition "Interfaces" at Milan Design Week 2019 by award winning design practice Morphosis collaborating with Dassault Systemes, building a multiplayer augmented reality app experience that let users experience the built environment spatially, sharing virtual annotations.
I taught “Urban Mixed Reality Environment”, Unity workshop for DigitalFUTURES 2019 Shanghai and exhibited some of my work at AWE '18 -'22 and national art galleries.
I am excited about the emerging field of AR/VR and I tend to contribute to the community curating or writing tech publications on a number of web platforms such as DesignBoom and Forbes.  



Who’s organizing this?



Co-organizer
Jessy Escobedo (she/her) is a community-centered product designer and strategist interested in near and far futures.  

Co-organizer
Selwa Sweidan (she/her) is a media artist whose work probes computational epistemologies through embodied and decolonial approaches.


Collaborator
Sultan Sharrief (he/him) is a trans-media activist, filmmaker, and XR designer. In 2018 he founded the Quasar Lab at MIT. 

Collaborator
Alice 元 Zhang (she/they) is an immigrant  an artist, designer, and program organizer based in Los Angeles who makes homes in AR filters, browsers, and communities. 



Advisors


Scott Fisher (he/him) is a Professor in the Media Arts + Practice Division, founding Chair of the Interactive Media Division, and Director of USC’s Mobile & Environmental Media Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is an interaction designer whose work focuses primarily on mobile media, interactive environments and technologies of presence.


Holly Willis (she/her) is the Chair of the Media Arts + Practice Division in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she teaches classes on digital media, post-cinema and feminist film. She is the author of Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts and New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image, as well of Björk Digital, and the editor of both The New Ecology of Things, a collection of essays about ubiquitous computing, and David O. Russell: Interviews. 

Alison B. Hirsch (she/her), FAAR, is a landscape theorist, historian and designer. Both her design and written work focus on how understanding cultural practices and social histories and memories can (and should) contribute to the design of meaningful places. As Director of the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program, Alison has established the Landscape Justice Initiative which serves as a platform to address questions of environmental, spatial and climate justice at local and systemic scales.



Sponsors & Supporters







Questions?
Reach out to us at info@decolonizingar.design 

Creative Commons license:  “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” (CC-BY-NC-SA)