Opening Night of Ideas Atlanta, artist and creative communications manager for the Asian American Advocacy Fund Nicole Kang Ahn and executive director of Flux Projects Anne Archer Dennington will lead a tour the exhibition Our mothers, our water, our peace by Korean-American artist Gyun Hur.
Commissioned by Flux Projects, this immersive installation of more than 125 handblown, tear-shaped glass vessels reflects upon the Atlanta Asian community’s resilience and love. Created in response to the escalation of Asian hate crimes during the pandemic, followed by the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, Hur’s project explores grief by inviting communities to reflect on their immigrant experience and offering a way for them to heal. With Our mothers, our water, our peace, Flux Projects continues FLOW, a multi-year series designed to explore Atlanta’s history with water, how it has shaped the city, and the potential it holds for our future.
Discover the art installations featuring six artists presented at Goat Farm:
Night of Ideas’ mainstage performance is designed as a radio show, the Common Ground Show, hosted and moderated by acclaimed WABE journalist Rose Scott, featuring speakers, musicians, and sound artists.
It starts with a live taping of WABE’s signature midday news show, Closer Look with Rose Scott, addressing the first question of the Night: To what extent is Atlanta a common ground for the different communities that call it home?
To answer this question, Rose Scott invites her first guests of the evening, Marketing and Business Executive Jacqui Chew, Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College Dr. Illya E. Davis, Executive Director of Atlanta Civic Circle Saba Long and Executive Director and Founder of the Latino Community Fund Gigi (Gilda) Pedraza. Together, they question how Atlanta’s diverse communities CAN collaborate using a common ground approach and debate the importance of establishing shared goals and visions, encouraging open and respectful dialogue, building trust and relationships, collaborating on problem-solving and celebrating differences and commonalities.
They are joined by Walid Hajar Rachedi, a French author and publisher currently in residency in Atlanta with Villa Albertine, exploring identity, immigration, and Atlanta communities through his project What’s Left of the American Dream.
When the deep-rooted rhythms of Africa meet the ethereal textures of ambient music, something truly otherworldly emerges. Voyagers is the sonic convergence of Marquinn Mason, the Atlanta-based visionary, and T.I.E, the multifaceted Senegalese artist whose voice and artistry transcend borders. As artists of the Black Atlantic, their common ground is music – an ancestral force that flows through their veins, connecting continents, histories, and futures. Voyagers bridges African heritage with modern innovation, blending polyrhythmic grooves, offbeat sequences, and modular synthesis with the improvisational soul of jazz. Their sound is fluid, unpredictable, and deeply rooted—an open dialogue between tradition and experimentation. This is not just music – it’s a journey. Join Voyagers as they navigate new dimensions, crafting a bridge between worlds – one beat, one pulse, one melody at a time.
In this second segment of the Common Ground Show, Rose Scott and her guests question the role of art and cultural institutions in the making of the common. What common ground can cultural institutions and communities create today? Guests include Miya Bailey (artist and founder of Peters Street Station, a multi-use space and community center located in the Castleberry Hill Historic District of Atlanta), Alban Corbier-Labasse (General Director of Friche la Belle de Mai, one of the largest cultural institutions in France and Europe), and Miranda Kyle (Curator of Indigenous Arts of the Americas at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University).
Then, Rose Scott talks to author, artist and associate professor of French and Francophone studies at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Mame-Fatou Niang, about Echoïques: Sounds of Silence, Niang’s 2024 residency at the Ateliers Médicis (France). Échoïques is a sonic dive into a public housing project destroyed by urban renewal, in the northern outskirts of Paris. In a mosaic of tapestries and sound installations, Niang and six former residents sketch a sensitive map of the lost neighborhood. The talk, entitled Monumentalizing the Ordinary: Creative placemaking in times of (not-so-new) crisis will explore the potency of the ordinary as a tool of creative placemaking.
Finally, Rose Scott discusses art practices, monuments and museums as spaces for collective reflection and expression of the diversity of worlds, with artist and scholar Dr. Fahamu Pecou, Dr. Pierre Singaravélou (curator and Professor of Modern History at Sorbonne University) and TK Smith (writer, historian and Curator, Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University).
2CUBES is a live-electronic performance for double bass, modular synth and two Augmented Reality (AR) interfaces. The musicians (the composers, performers and researchers in music technology Hyunkyung Shin and Henrik von Coler) wear head-mounted displays (HMDs), to interact with a virtual cube – programmed in Unity, that is placed next to their instruments. This interface allows them to manipulate the sounds of their instruments and distribute them in space with Ambisonics rendering – all realized in SuperCollider. The HMDs also capture the first-person view of both musicians and stream them to the audience using GEM in Pure Data, which enables a direct connection between the instruments’ sounds and the visuals. This new perspective creates a completely new experience for the audience, revealing the minute movements, even for the modular synth. 2CUBES is a structured improvisation, that explores the possibilities of the instruments in combination with the interface and the spatial rendering system.
In the final segment of the Common Ground Show, Rose Scott and her guests discuss the potential of artificial intelligence to serve shared creativity and human diversity.
Discussion begins with Dr. Gil Weinberg (Director of Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology), creator of medusai (presented during Night of Ideas), an AI-driven robotic sculpture built on the myth of Medusa, as a metaphor for the transformational effect of AI on culture and society. It reflects on the original good intentions and promises of AI as well as on its risks and mortal threats. As it relates to AI ethics, medusai takes a Deceleration Position, encouraging visitors to approach the sculpture with caution.
The conversation continues with Dr. Ifeoma Ajunwa (Emory School of Law, Founding Director of the AI and Future of Work Program) and Dr. Ben Miller (Emory University, Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network) around practical and theoretical questions we all have about AI, such as: What kinds of writing experiments are people doing with AI? Why and when do people typically invite AI into their creative processes? To what benefit and at what cost? What do we mean when we talk about “innovation” in AI? Why is it inaccurate to think that regulation would stymie innovation? What do we mean by “human-centric” AI?
From Chicago to London, New York to Berlin, Atlanta to Paris, Marseille, etc., House Music is a common ground, a unifying movement, gathering people and transcending differences. Night of Ideas: Common Ground couldn’t end without a house music DJ Set, a celebration of dance, bodies and joy. And when you think of fresh house music from Atlanta, Stefan Ringer is at the forefront of the movement.