I can’t quite find the words to sum up 2019. Busy, rewarding, intense…I am grateful to have a wonderful creative community, incredible colleagues and wonderful, creative, curious, and hard-working students. Since coming to Oberlin, I have had the privilege of working on many different types of projects with various collaborators. I thought I would take a moment on this relatively quiet first day of the new year to reflect back on 2019.
January 2019: Last January, we had the pleasure of hosting a repeat intern from Wheaton College who helped with various studio tasks, I worked with a student to interview colleagues about maker resources on campus, and organized an outreach event in the TIMARA studios for a local STEM education program.
February 2019: In the Spring semester my department added a new 100-level TIMARA course, TECH 102, an introduction to sound art. For my first iteration of this course, I explored the idea of Crafting Sound (blending traditional crafts with sound technologies). I felt very fortunate to have a teaching assistant for this course funded through the grants office. Leslie Lang was a fantastic TA for this course and her printing background came in handy for our class visit to Oberlin’s Letterpress Studio. I also visited Santa Barbara in February (what a treat) to present a paper on my What I Didn’t Say project. I also started co-teaching the community music school electronic music class.
March 2019: In March, my collaborators Abe Reshad, Larissa Fekete, and I had our first workshops for the first iteration of the ArtiFACT Project. This project has received generous funding from Oberlin’s Research and Development Committee, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to Oberlin College for the Oberlin Center for Languages and Cultures. As of now, project RAs have included Lucas Brecher, Helen He, and Maya McCollum — we have at least one new RA joining us in 2020.
April 2019: We installed the first iteration of the ArtiFACT Project in the brand new GalleryOC space located in The Oberlin Center for Convergence (StudiOC) on the second floor of the Hotel at Oberlin. Our opening was just in time for the All Roads Lead to Oberlin visits that bring prospective students and parents to campus. We also presented the project at the Ohio Computer-Aided Language Learning Conference at Ohio University in Athens Ohio.
May 2019: Oli Bentley (my research assistant) and I presented a new iteration of the What I Didn’t Say project at Lorain County Community College for an after school program for at-risk teens. Oli’s position was also funded by a generous grant from the Research and Development committee. In May I also took the lead in organizing the first set of workshops for faculty at Oberlin College and Lorain Community College as part of the 4D Liberal Arts grant, a collaboration funded by the Bringing Theory to Practice grant spearheaded by Associate Dean Laura Baudot and colleagues at LCCC: Dean Brenda Pongracz and Dean Kelly Zelesnik.
June 2019: June was a true whirlwind. I went to Hong Kong the first week of the month and led a workshop in multimodal storytelling for a group of 40 college and university students from around the world who were participating in a summer institute at Lingnan University on Humanitarian Entrepreneurship. (The first protests in Hong Kong erupted just days after I returned to the States.) The second week of June I led the first iteration of the Girls Electronic Arts Retreat. We received lots of generous funding for our pilot session and hosted 16 campers for 5-days. I had 5 Oberlin students teaching alongside me full-time….and we all were just completely beat at the end of each day. It was so rewarding, though, and so worth it.
July 2019: My husband and I hosted lots of visitors and I worked on updates around the studios and took care of our dog, Layla, who was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
August 2019: We said goodbye to our dear sweet Layla, a beautiful senior hound dog who was not with us long enough. I lead the second round of faculty workshops for LCCC and Oberlin. (I’m so excited about the collaborations that have started to grow out of these workshops!) I also presented to local educators at Oberlin Center for the Arts’ annual arts educator symposium.
September 2019: This Fall semester, I taught two grant-funded courses. TECH 361 was a course on makerspaces and the contemporary maker movement, which I taught as part of the Reimagining Maker Culture(s) learning community with anthropology professor Amy Margaris funded through StudiOC. I also co-taught an English for Speakers of Other Languages course during the first module. In the course, we reimagined the ArtiFACT Project to help international students who are advanced English-language learners adapt to Oberlin.
October 2019: October brought the Crafting Sound Symposium to Oberlin, which my co-organizer Kyle Hartzell and I had been preparing for since Spring 2019. We had several events including workshops, concerts, and a panel discussion, and hosted several guest artists whom students performed alongside.
November 2019: We hosted sixth grade girls from Laurel School for a day-long outreach event in the TIMARA studios. While my ArtiFACT collaborators presented our work at a language learning symposium in Columbus, I was busy helping with the incredible Kaleidosonic Music Festival, created by my wonderful colleague Tom Lopez. This was an awe-inspiring event featuring over 500 musicians from Oberlin — including members of the campus community and the town. My makerspace students and I contributed a TIMARA-pun inspired work featuring MANY prepared umbrellas that I had started scheming up over the summer with help from Oli Bentley. We collaborated with middle school students in a local community choir for the final piece. For Thanksgiving, my husband and I took a very quick trip to Boston to visit some family which was lovely!
December 2019: Thank goodness there have been no big December events! I was contacted about and reworked an old piece for a performance in early January in Minnesota. I got to visit some more family with my husband. Otherwise, I have been preparing for 2020, which is already promising to be busier than ever, starting with my Sonic Arts in Society Winter Term group project that starts up on Monday!!
