Tom Tom Founders Festival Featuring A&S Faculty
Arts & Sciences faculty will be lending their creative talents to next month’s Tom Tom Founders Festival. The College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences is a Signature Event Partner for the seventh annual festival, which begins Monday, April 10 and runs through April 16. The Tom Tom Founders Festival celebrates the work of artists and innovators and is scheduled to feature more than 60 bands, 200 speakers and 400 community organizations in a variety of outdoor spaces, theaters, galleries and concert venues.
The festival’s Arts & Sciences Workshop Series features a series of interdisciplinary workshops at the Second Street Gallery led by Arts & Sciences faculty from Creative Writing, Media Studies, and Music. Additional information on Tom Tom events featuring Arts & Sciences faculty is available below:
African Dance: This is What Democracy Sounds Like
When: Noon, Saturday, April 15
Where: Second Street Gallery, Free
Description: Join Michelle Kisliuk, McIntire Department of Music, and the UVA African Music Dance Ensemble for rhythms, songs, and dancing from West and Central Africa, highlighting the democratic nature of this traditional art form. Michelle is an Associate Professor of music at UVA and directs the ensemble; she also received the doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University in1991. Integrating theory and practice, she specializes in a performance approach to ethnographic writing and research, and in an ethnographic and critical approach to performing.
How to Podcast: Making and Distributing Quality Audio
When: 1:30 p.m., Saturday, April 15
Where: Second Street Gallery, Free
Description: Presented with Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Join Jamal Millner, the technical director of Backstory; Nina Earnest, the associate producer of Backstory; and Jack Hamilton, author and Assistant Professor for Media Studies at UVA, to explore the all of the angles of how to start a podcast, from writing, to producing, engineering & hosting. The VFH is the largest and most diversely funded state humanities council in the country, producing more than 40,000 humanities programs including festivals, public radio programs, and digital resources, and contributing to more than 3,500 grant projects and 350 individual and collaborate fellowships.
Making Money
When: 3 p.m., Saturday, April 15
Where: Second St. Gallery, Free
Description: Money is one of the oldest technologies in the world, but in recent years experiments from Venmo to Bitcoin have promised to reinvent it. This workshop explores history and future of money, and asks participants think about how we might design money for our digital world and local communities. Join Lana Swartz, Assistant Professor of Media Studies at UVA, for an in-depth look at currency. Lana is the co-editor of Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff and was a post-doctoral researcher at the Social Media Collective of Microsoft Research New England as well as a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
“The Ceiling Floats Away”: An Audience Interaction Poetry/Music Installation by Matthew Burtner and Rita Dove
When: 4:30 p.m., Saturday, April 15
Where: Second Street Gallery, Free
Description: The Ceiling Floats Away is a new performance piece and installation by Matthew Burtner and Rita Dove, commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. This workshop will focus on Nomads, an audience interaction software designed for the piece by the University of Virginia's Interactive Media Research Group (IMRG). Audience members interact with the music and poetry through their smart phones in order to create an emergent audience-generated composition in parallel with the work. The system responds to the location and input of the participant with sound and in the poet's voice.
Interactive Creatures
When: 1-8 p.m., Saturday, April 15
Where: Saturday Block Party, Lee Park
Join stage production expert Steven Warner (Drama) for an exhibition and discussion of various maker projects from the “Creature Nights!” Maker Club. The projects on display will range from an automated stage platform to custom circus stilts.
