XA Professor Lisa Mann is a founding member of M.A.M.A. (Mother Artists Making Art) an interdisciplinary, mother artist group. M.A.M.A.’s latest installation, “Pop-Up Condom Shop,” was commissioned for CalArts 50th Anniversary celebration on April 28-29. It features a mobile shop dispensing glitched, generative AI “ERUPT RESPONSIBLY” custom condoms, video, banner, and website which address the inequities in female and male-focused contraception.

XA Adjunct Professor Sam Gurry’s film “Up Close” was screened in April at Pleasure Dome in Toronto. The show, entitled Reimagining Queer Liberation, featured 10 short works made between 2020-2022 by 2SLGBTQIA+ Canadian and international artists. The works “reflect different understandings and re-imagining of what queer liberation means today.”

Last spring, students in XA Professor Lisa Mann’s Cinematic and Media-based Installation class collaborated with USC architecture students to create nest-like, video and audio-embedded structures inspired by bird species native to Los Angeles. In preparation, students visited the Doheny Library exhibition of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” water colors and watched a panel discussing the disappearance/resilience of birds and their habitats, as well as Audubon’s racist legacy. The structures were installed at the Clockshop art space near the LA River as part of the USC Visions and Voices series, “The Vanishing Worlds of Audubon,” co-organized by Lisa, Professor of Architecture Aroussiak Gabrielian, and the USC Libraries.

In March, XA Professor Kathy Smith presented a 50min talk entitled “The Indefinable Moods of Artificial Intelligence” at NVIDIA GTC March 2023 discussing how AI reflects the collective unconscious, driving new forms of art creation, structure, and narrative forms. Kathy showed her personal dream work and AI experiments including those from her CTXA 579 and CTXA 524 courses.