Creative Disturbance

Jordan Wirfs-Brock is making innovative sonifications for radio. She is working on a PhD in Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research explores how voice interaction, sonification, and narrative support people as they learn to listen to data, producing more meaningful and engaging experiences with information. She has studied how people consume news across various devices and transition between offline and online behaviors.

Our guest on this podcast is Jacob Stegenga, the author of Care and Cure and Medical Nihilism. We discuss the effectiveness of medical interventions, the relationship between philosophers and practitioners, how to deal with complexity, the nature of sexual desire, and much more.

In this episode: 

How do doctors and other medical professionals respond to the argument for medical nihilism? (2:45) — Issues of publication bias and replication crisis: parallels between animal cognition research and medical research (7:00) — Are there examples of “gentle medicine” being used successfully in the health care system? (8:30) — How do the institutional motives and incentives for excessive intervention affect physicians’ behavior? (10:45) — How does an ordinary person know when, or when not, to trust the experts? (14:00) — Differentiating between simple and complex causes of disease (viruses & bacteria, vs. depression or schizophrenia; 17:45) — With complex conditions, could it ever be worth trying interventions that don’t seem to “make sense”? (21:00) — Current research on the philosophy of sexual desire: Is there a nature to sexual desire? What about social and cultural causes? (25:00) — Is sexual desire an individual or social phenomenon? (30:00) — Understanding the sexual desires of others through philosophy, literature and empirical science (34:15) — Current and future projects: formal logic in philosophy of science, and applications in society (37:30)

Michele Hanlon, Associate Dean for the Arts at UT Dallas, discusses how teaching and performance have moved online in spring 2020, highlighting the School of Arts & Humanities Virtual Events in the Arts.

In this episode: 

How to keep figure-drawing classes going under a shelter-in-place order (1:15) — Using Blackboard Collaborate to conduct a conditioning class in real time, as well as recording sessions for later (4:15) — Working remotely: from dance choreography to music ensembles (6:30) — Recent successful virtual events, including Mikhail Berestnev’s piano recital and a virtual tour of the Light Waves exhibition (10:30) — Advice for artists and collaborators adapting to the current situation (13:30) — Announcing the Faust radio play (14:30)

Our guest on this episode of the podcast is Nils Roemer, interim dean of the School of the Arts and Humanities, director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, and the Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor in Holocaust Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas.

In this podcast: 

The timing of the transition to online learning (1:00) — The importance of engagement, closeness, proximity in humanities education (2:45) — Adapting to the technology of Microsoft Teams, online classes (5:15) — How to connect globally, across other borders and barriers, the importance of diversity (6:45) — After four successful searches, new tenure-track faculty coming to the School of Arts and Humanities (9:00) — Finding opportunity at moments of crisis and change (10:00) — Counteracting the compartmentalized, segregated model of knowledge (11:00) — Students are looking for some way to make different models compatible with one another; to make connections among disciplines (11:45) — Why students from Management or Computer Science are attracted to the arts and humanities (12:30) — Coffee houses as spaces of knowledge: the physician sitting next to the creative writer in Vienna (14:00) — Newest developments at the Ackerman Center: Developing an online MA in Holocaust and Human Rights Education (16:15) — Current project on Central European Jewish travel, from the 1880s to the immediate postwar period, considering the concepts of the flaneur, as well as class, nationality and ethnicity (17:45) — Upcoming project on how the Holocaust evolved dynamically after 1941 (19:00)

Can Quantum Physics help us solve the problems of race and discrimination in our society?

This provocation explores science culture and art through the medium of the Spoken Word.

Hear the contemplations of a recovering Astronomer; learn of the superposition of exitons of injustice in discriminatory design; the questionings of a quantum lab observer; and the hidden consciousness in man-made systems.

A compilation of the voices of

Roger Malina

Kylee Hong 

Arya Agrawal 

Ayen Kuol

Get insight into the, fun, wonder full, explorative, walk in the rain kind of romantic - interdisciplinary class designed and taught by Nomi stone: Ways of Knowing Science and Poetry.

Learn of the various processes and experiences that science and Poets have in fusing the arts and sciences.

Join Nomi Stone and Ayen Kuol in discussing the relationships between Knowledge and Power, Science and culture.

Contemplate on why we as a society value what we value, and what is truth. Reflect on your poetic vision of the world around you.

Immerse yourself into the journey of a poet and scientist in discovering the joy of Poetry, Science and Poetic science. "What would it be like to be a field worker of the Natural World and the sciences?" 

Nomi Stone, Anthropologist, Poet, designer, and teacher of the undergraduate course, Ways of Knowing: Science and Poetry, challenges the beliefs of a compartmentalized and labeled world.

Get entranced by the digital soundscape created by an entanglement of the sounds of elements, cultures, and data from carbon Nanotube Scanning Electron Images.

Produced by Ian Clothier, this soundscape features the sounds:

-A traditional New Zealand Putorino tane played by Darren Robert Terama Ward

-Fire By Dynamicell

-Carbon Nanotube SEM

-Haley's comet

-Comet Swan

-Meteor showers.

This piece is created as an artistic response to the collaborative study of carbon Nanotube entanglement. Listen to Ian Clothier explain his process of how to entangle carbon.

The very notion of a collaboration tends to get sidelined. Rarely are lessons given on 'how to collaborate'. Yet Collaborations, especially the interdisciplinary kind, remain one of the most challenging ways of working. Get insight into the collaborative process of an interdisciplinary study of Carbon Nanotubes Entanglement- with Ayen Kuol as the artist, Blake Bathman the Poet and Josef Velten the scientist.