6-10pm | Performances at 7pm
Free and open to the public
The Museum of Human Achievement, 3600 Lyons Rd, Austin, TX 78702
This spring 6 residents, a handful of mentors, and occasional visiting artists gathered for weekly Computer Club sessions to explore ideas, technologies, and ways of working together.
Something between a showcase, open studio, and performance, CATS+ Out of the Bag is an invitation for audiences to get curious, start conversations, dig into artists’ processes, and get excited about what technology means when we define it together.
The CATS+ residents are Itai Almor, Jesse Cline, Kellyn Dassler, Sam Mayer, Sara A Roma, and Serena Zam. Contributing mentors and artists include Kristine Fernandez, Julia Kunze, Cathryn Ploehn, Celine Lassus, Rachel Weil, Jay Roff-Garcia and Rachel Stuckey.
Itai Almor is an illustrator and an educator who recently published their first kids book! Find Sasha and the City of Whispers online, or ask your favorite bookstore to order you a copy! It’s an imaginative, artsy, cli-fi romp for the kids. Itai received a BA in Computing & the Arts from Yale university in 2020, and they’re currently completing an AmeriCorps service year in school social work with Communities in Schools. As a first generation American and queer person, they make art that explores the beautiful and the intimate entangled in monstrosity and the intergenerational longing for home. They love to cook, to draw, and whistle while driving on a sunny day.
Jesse Cline is a designer, artist, and educator interested in contemporary systems of representation and production. Through appropriation and subversion, Jesse explores the ways that objects and images embody meaning and transmit information, and the ways we define ourselves using these signifiers. Jesse is a co-founder of Partial Shade, a nomadic curatorial project dedicated to exhibiting artwork in nontraditional spaces. They earned a BS in Electronic Media, Art and Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2011, an MFA in Design from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016, and currently teaches communication design at Texas State University.
Kellyn Dassler is a software developer and creative technologist interested in co-creation and deconstruction of technology and code as methods of exploration and critical lenses for creating more ethical, playful technology. She is particularly interested in natural user interfaces, creative and human-centered AI, feminist technoscience, and augmented reality and explored these spaces through research at Carnegie Mellon University’s HCII and Colorado State University’s NUI Lab, as well as human centered design prototyping, art installations and software development through CIID, NASA Colorado Space Grant, and her current employer, frog design. She most recently exhibited an online code poetry piece via the School for Poetic Computation’s showcase in 2022 and a future-focused interactive tech installation at frog’s SXSW PoP event in 2023. As a volunteer, she serves as a mentor and educator through Girls Who Code, Code Chicas, and a variety of hackathons for underrepresented students in design and tech. Originally from Colorado, she earned a BS in Computer Science with a focus on Human Computer Interaction as a Boettcher Scholar, and she still loves to hike, rock climb, hammock, and vibe in Austin’s nature while listening to indie music in her free time.
Sam Mayer is a playwright and performance maker from Houston. Full length works include POOLBOY00 (Beaubourg, Co-Lab Projects, Crashbox, UTNT) , THE CUCK (Intramural Theater), and CHET'S SUMMER VACATION (Kennedy Center; Intramural Theater; Rec Room Arts). His work has been developed with The Orchard Project, The Workshop Theater, The Mastheads, SVT/Grackle Jack, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. He is the recipient of the Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation Prize and a fellowship from the Michener Center for Writers. MFA: UT Austin.
Sara Aleyce Roma is an ATX based new media artist, animator and occasional curator and facilitator. A Motion Design graduate from SCAD, they have a particular interest in time-based works involving animation, video, interaction, and performance.
Most recently in their short film “A Problem” they explored stop-motion as endurance performance in efforts to exhaust the meaning of a single object. From learning HTML on neopets and studying experimental animation, to diving into VJing, ecophilosophy, and phenomenology; they pull inspiration from a variety of fields and subcultures. A strong believer in “bad art”, process, and experience as art.
Serena Zam is an artist and technologist based in Austin, TX. She makes paintings, collages, and tech-based art to explore how technology and internet culture shape people and their rituals. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and shares her life with her dog, Darcy, and cat, Bennet.
If you're a tech wizard or artist working with computers who is interested in thoughtful collaborative opportunities, mentorships, workshops and talks in the realm of art + tech - we want to know about you! Tell us what you're excited about and want to see/do by signing up on our Wizard Registry.
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The experiment is to push back on technology. The experience is the Collaborative Art + Technology Situation (CATS+), a new program at The Museum of Human Achievement which pairs artists and tech wizards to collaborate on projects and share their processes.
CATS+ 1.0 is composed of 3 pairs of artists who spent the summer glitching normalized systems by creating their own user experiences.
Celine Lassus and Mark Yoder’s video game What’s on your mind, User? takes us deep into a social network fever dream, scrutinizing how the structure and design of social sites (from Facebook to 4chan) influence the group behaviors, language, and aesthetic preferences of their users.
Aryel René Jackson and Alex Goss reimagine the physical exhibition venue, Cage Match Project, as an expanded digital/physical hybrid space. Their case study, Onward, features a playable 3D simulation that illustrates the barrier-breaking capacity for change of The Cage in its new form.
Andie Flores and Sam Lavigne’s multimedia abolitionist campaign, APD Decruitment, explores productive alternatives for the city by upending police recruitment strategies. The artists used “real fakes” to hack politicians using the Cameo platform, build a discount program, and create functional resources including motivational posters and recommended reading.
are UXperienced? is an invitation to get curious, start conversations, dig into artists’ processes, and get excited about making our own systems (or just making our own memes 😜 ).
Aryel René Jackson is a Black creole anti-disciplinary film-based artist whose practice considers land and landscape as sites of internal representation. Themes of transformation are embedded in their use of repurposed imagery and objects, video, sound, and performance. Jackson’s work is influenced by their afro-creole Lwizyan heritage and Black American cultural language. They live and work in Texas and teach at Texas State University and at The University of Texas at Austin. Jackson is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Royal College of Art Exchange Program, and The Cooper Union. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally.
Alex Goss is a sculptor, educator, and freelancer committed to fostering mentorship in digital and physical 3D and time-based mediums. Drawing inspiration from manufacturing waste, Goss creates projects that breach the logic of mass production by emphasizing unconformity and cast-offs. Alex received his BFA in Art from the Cooper Union and his MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University. Alex has held solo exhibitions in New York, Baltimore, and Houston. Alex is a co-founder and organizer of Moonmist, an artist-run project space in Houston, TX. He lives in Richmond, VA with his dog Butterbean.
Andie Flores (she/her) is a performance artist, comedian, and writer who uses embarrassment as a medium for investigating hypervisibility in a racialized body.
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UT Austin.
Celine Lassus (b. 1999, Tampa, FL) (she/they) is a digital native first, artist second. Based in Austin, TX, they work across new media, performance, video and installation. Her practice reflects on the promise of a technological utopia and how terribly they’ve been let down.
Mark Yoder (b.1999) is a retired micro celebrity, designer, and artist based in Los Angeles. When he's not doomscrolling on TikTok, you can find him somewhere stuck at the intersection of art and technology.
AI. Memes. HTML. Buffoonery. Come goof around at this workshop where artists Celine Lassus and Mark Yoder will walk you through the process of using AI art generators to create memes and word soup. Then using these elements, participants will be introduced to the basics of creating a website and destroying it on purpose.
Please bring a laptop, if you have one. If you need to borrow one, we'll have some available.
Artists and educators will learn about the science-oriented, inquiry-focused 5E model and how to use it to move through creative blocks. Artists Aryel René Jackson and Alex Goss will highlight how 5E thinking has impacted their collaborative physical/virtual projects and teach participants how to apply the method to their own practice.
You might want to bring a notebook and pen, laptop, or whatever tools you like to use for notes and sketches. We'll have paper and pens available.
In this workshop, artists Andie Flores and Sam Lavigne will discuss the process behind their recent work "The APD Decruiting Initiative", a multimedia public service campaign that aims to prevent potential recruits and to convince existing officers to quit their jobs. After the talk, the artists will lead participants in a telethon to support the project's reward card program and make bumper stickers for the campaign.
