The schedule for the New York edition of Night of Ideas is still evolving.
Check back here for additional programming.
Youth-oriented programming with Afrofuturist Period Room artist Fabiola Jean-Louis. Teens will tour the exhibition with Fabiola and Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie, Senior Research Associate of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, followed by a conversation about the artist’s practice and an art-making demonstration and workshop led by the artist. No registration required.
Joe Baker, Lenape elder and Executive Director of Lenape Center, shares the meaning of Lenapehoking, the Lenape territory that includes Manhattan as a living cultural space. Joe will draw from family stories and life experience to animate an untold history and counter the invisibility of his people. With supporting commentary by Hadrien Coumans.
Drop-in Drawing with a focus on Rodin’s best-known public monument The Burghers of Calais. Experience The Met’s collection through this creative drawing challenge in the galleries with expert teaching artists. Materials are provided, but participants are welcome to bring their own sketchbook.
A gallery walkthrough of the Afrofuturist Period Room with Ana Matisse.
Three actresses on stage reclaim the mystery of the annunciation between the Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel. Three performative speeches explore this motif to question it in the present and draw it toward modernity. Here, the audience becomes the receiver of the revelation, it is in the same position as the Virgin, listening. What could we announce today? What could the contemporary annunciations be? The coming environmental catastrophe? The end of the world? The coming of a new era? A reverse movement? Everything is left open and the imagination rules.
Wanjiru Kamuyu will take us on a migrating performance consisting of excerpts from her solo work “An Immigrant’s Story.”
Her lens is that of a Kenyan Mũgikũyũ African American diasporan woman currently living in France. Having lived on three different continents – Africa, North America and Europe – has provided her the privileged space and time to observe and absorb diverse cultures and worldviews.
Summer 2017, in France, Kamuyu worked on a community engagement project with 65 young Eastern Europeans and 11 Middle Eastern and African refugees. Their audacious stories remained with her and activated the idea behind “An Immigrant’s Story”. A work that holds a reservoir of 20 stories and interrogates the notion of and politics surrounding the privileged vs. unprivileged (im)migrant alongside “otheredness”.
Link to teaser: https://vimeo.com/503130368
“I have finished putting into words what I consider to be an extreme human experience, bearing on life and death, time, law, ethics, and taboo–an experience that sweeps through the body… Among all the social and psychological reasons that may account for my past, of one I am certain: these things happened to me so that I might recount them.” Annie Ernaux
For the 2023 Night of Ideas, Villa Albertine and Columbia University’s Maison Française and Department of French will be hosting a collective public reading of Happening by Annie Ernaux, French author and winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. Happening recounts the abortion Ernaux had at age 23, in 1963, at a time when the procedure was still illegal in France. Her story, told with unsparing honesty, resonates strongly in post-Roe America, where the right to a safe and legal abortion has been curtailed in many states. Happening will be read in English in its entirety with brief passages performed by more than 25 diverse voices—writers, artists, doctors, teachers, students, activists—in a collective expression of appreciation for Annie Ernaux’s bold work and solidarity for reproductive rights.
Every day, we are bombarded with information right in our pocket, via the endless social network notifications on our phone. Sometimes, we would rather say “stop”. Bruno Patino explores the reasons for this news fatigue but insists on our collective duty to be well informed. By tracing the history of information, he convinces us that it is a weapon, a decisive counter-power in our society. To explore these issues, Bruno Patino will engage with three graduate students: Audrey Hatfield (Columbia), Sarah Marx (Columbia), and Katharina Tittel (Sciences Po).
In a series of face-to-face conversations, Night of Ideas attendees will engage with novelists, media theorists, filmmakers, journalists, scientists and designers who will talk about their craft and discoveries from recent work. They’ll further interrogate the over–stimulation and excess of our physical and digital realities while asking what aspects of our contemporary existence, conversely, are being neglected.
As a kind of modern sanctuary to experience a moment of pause, a time capsule to return to oneself in a collective setting, a chosen interval to deepen our relationship with what we long for through breath, body and mind, the Detox Room will allow participants to breathe through, unload, metabolize, and digest what seems too much.
Participants will be guided in the following practices:
In between these movements and activities, the space is open to simply rest, exchange, journal, draw, read, nap…to simply be without any formal tasks except to feel how the body and the mind resonate after attending lectures and performances. The Detox Room is a space to connect with one’s own presence in a collective container.
Evolution is the defining phenomenon of nature: change after change, in a direction perceptible as ‘time’. Freedom is everywhere because design change is everywhere: inanimate, animate, and human. Power and movement result from the consumption of foods and fuels. Conversion happens in flow configurations (designs). Manifestations of movement are endless. Society is an earth-size organism, constantly morphing to provide greater access to what flows and lives. Society develops, moves, changes, and produces more when endowed with freedom, free questioning, and self-correcting. Nature is dynamic, free, always evolving: one law of physics (constructal law) covers all aspects of evolution in nature.
Founded and edited by designer, professor, and researcher Mindy Seu, Cyberfeminism Index documents over 700 instances of radical techno-critical activism, feminist manifestos, hackerspaces, hardware, wetware education and net art from 1991 to 2020. By gathering and sharing excluded tech histories, the project reclaims cyberspace as a platform for criticality, mutation and entanglement. As an online database, and now a book, Cyberfeminism Index documents the perspectives of hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of diverse identities to consider how humans might continue to reconstruct themselves with and through technologies.
In a series of face-to-face conversations, Night of Ideas attendees will engage with novelists, media theorists, filmmakers, journalists, scientists and designers who will talk about their craft and discoveries from recent work. They’ll further interrogate the over–stimulation and excess of our physical and digital realities while asking what aspects of our contemporary existence, conversely, are being neglected.
The unicorn has become the epitome of the 21st century. This magical creature questions the concept of
existence that the emergence of AI has profoundly reshuffled. The frontier between reality and fiction has
never seemed so blurred. In that context, our body remains the last limit between humans and robots, but
for how long? Will generative AI be a point of no return?
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in recruiting is on the rise. By 2026, the global AI recruiting market is expected to grow to $695 million. Yet, we know very little about how professional recruiters use different AI across the various decision points in the recruiting process. This knowledge gap impedes our ability to create impactful accountability mechanisms. This talk will showcase ongoing research on AI use in the professional practice of recruiting. It will examine how AI affects discretionary decision-making and discretionary power of recruiting professionals, and how recruiting AI can contribute to more opaque socio-technical systems that reduce accountability.
The performance will feature brilliant pianist and educator from Martinique Dinah Vero and a longtime bandmate of Kit McClure, Big Band alum Bernice Brooks on drums.