My First EYEO Festival
A day-by-day photo chronicle from the Library to the Guthrie
What follows is the day by day illustrated chronicle of my first Eyeo festival— “A Gathering for the Creative Technology Community” held in Minneapolis June 3–6, 2019.
As a first time attendee but long-time admirer of the conference, Eyeo exceeded my expectations. From the venues (The Walker, Aria, Machine Shop, and Guthrie) to meeting and interacting with an amazing group of creators, it proved to be a memorable four days.
Day 1, Monday:
I attended the Code+Libraries Summit — this “unconference” explored the role of libraries in the digital world. The all-day meeting was held at the Central Library:
The Summit had an interesting structure: there was no preset agenda — it was built from scratch by the participants — anyone could simply propose a topic and add it to the schedule.
Here is Jer Thorp facilitating the process, and the participants considering the choices.
If you look closely you can see some of the topics discussed:
“Publishing without Capitalism”,
“Maker Spaces, dawg”,
“Libraries and democracy, how can libraries defend against misinformation”.
After choosing a topic, participants went to a breakout space to discuss.
The summit was a great opportunity to meet and interact with concerned, passionate, and intellectually curious people. (In the third photo above, that’s Eyeo speaker Darius Kazemi on the left — I also met and had lunch with Chad Smith (fourth from the left) who is doing cool VR work at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore)
Day 1: Kickoff
After the summit, the festival kicked off at the Aria. In the second photo are Data Visualization Society members Amy Cesal and Jason Forrest:
The kickoff introduced the speakers, with an opening keynote from Lucianne Walkowicz: “Encountering the Universe”, where she discussed taking subway rides and encouraging riders to “Ask a Scientist”.
Next were a series of Ignite talks (5 minute talks with slides advancing every 15 seconds) — including presentations that discussed the personality of apps and images that reflected the tracking of data on the Internet.
Day 2, Tuesday: The main session
Walking through Loring Park to the main venue at the Walker Art Center was a pleasant interlude to begin the day:
The first session was Catherine D’Ignazio’s “Feminist Data, Feminist Futures”, which highlighted the blind spots that design has shown in the past, ignoring the concerns of women and others. The story of hack-a-thons and other activities to address the needs of new mothers and breastfeeding (“making the breast pump not suck”) was especially relevant for me — I was frantically texting information to my daughter, a new mother, during the presentation.
Next, Nicole Atekar gave a highly personal presentation, “A Line Taut Against a Curved World” that outlined a journey from large installations to considering the perfect laser cut lines of newer work:
During lunchtime, I was delighted to give a 5-minute talk on “decksh — a little language for decks and Information Displays”
After lunch, Amon Milner in “Unruly Approaches to Empowerment, Play and Programming” traced his origin story, from confronting racism in early life, including the implications of being “a 6-foot black man”, to working on the Scratch (a visual programming language designed for kids), to his current position as Professor of Computing and Innovation at the Olin College of Engineering
There was a definite space theme at the festival — first from Lucianne Walkowicz, and then from Sara Schnadt, an artist and designer working at JPL. In her talk “How Designing Space Missions is Like Creating Installation Art”, two themes stuck with me: for space projects “you only get one chance to get it right”, and “there is no real distinction between artists and engineers”.
One of the highlights of the conference was getting to chat with Sara one-on-one. I’ve always had a fantasy that working at JPL was the perfect space-nerd destination, and Sara confirmed that for me. She described a place where people have long careers, where mentoring is an important part of the culture, and what matters is the work you produce.
For the evening’s activities we met at the Machine Shop for puzzles, games, drawing, chatting, and cupcakes. Amy Cesal’s squishy data viz was a hit; I spent my time doing conditional design drawings games:
Day 3, Wednesday:
The next day began with Christina “PhaZero” Curlee’s talk “From Video Art to Video Games”. Takeaways for me were “You have to teach yourself everything”, overthrowing traditional game tropes, and the feedback they received from kids playing their games: “This is Art.”
Another strong theme of the festival was social justice and activism. Sacha Constanza-Chock kicked this off with “Design Justice”, which concerned itself with how design effects the distribution of benefits and harms.
The Infoviz star Nadieh Bremer did not disappoint with “Visualizing Connections” — an exploration of the various ways that connections are shown:
Next up, Lauren McCarthy (creator of p5.js) explored the nature of “following” and surveillance (including surveillance as a luxury item) in “Feeling at Home”. From live-streaming a date with real time followup — I saw this in Black Mirror’s “White Christmas” to offering herself as a human digital assistant — I like to think of it as “Lauren as a Service”.
In the talk, “Trust Is Not Harmful” by Darius Kazemi, discussed an alternative social network where trust is paramount and is governed by principles counter to the traditional motivations of centralization, scale and profit.
The Walker was excellent venue for this event, and includes a sculpture garden across the street:
Thursday: the Final Day
Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo kicked off the day with a wide-ranging talk “With Not About: Undermining Computing”. She discussed Surveillance Capitalism and explored live coding as performance:
In “Residual Black Data,” Ron Morrison explored the themes of Friction, Opacity, and Residue while presenting the “slow violence” of redlining, the hidden messages of freedom quilts and the beauty of discarded objects.
Onyx Ashanti, with “Sonomorphic Fractionalization” mesmerized the crowd with his head-to-toe electronic, sensor-laden exoskeleton: (“I’m not micro-dosing today”)
The final talk of the main session was “AI, Small Data & Oral Histories”. In this presentation, Stephanie Dinkins combined AI, art installations that presented her own family’s oral history with the “Not the Only One” project. Themes explored included AI bias, data exclusion (“Why not just use the Cornell Movie Dialog corpus?”), and challenging the notion of representation and racial identity. (Who does Bina48 represent?)
The Closing Talks and Party
At the send off event at the Guthrie Theater, we received a tour-de-force presentation from Refik Anadol “Space in the Mind of a Machine”, along with Diana Nucera aka “Mother Cyborg” schooling the audience on combining technology with community organizing, and topped off with a live vocal performance (who can forget the DJ Mother Goose??)
My overall impression as first-time attendee and long-time admirer, is that Eyeo is unique, and the event this year had strong inclusion and social justice bent, not just showing off the latest whizzy thing.
The experience reminds me of another seminal conference for me: Golan Levin’s “Art+Code” conference in 2009. I was thrilled to see Professor Levin and Eyeo, and he told me that “Art+Code was Eyeo before there was Eyeo”.
Thanks again for the Data Visualization Society for pulling my name out of the hat:
