We are pleased to announce that Nandini Ranganathan and CETI (A Creative and Emergent Technology Institute) has joined the School of Art + Design as a Visiting Artist/Technologist in residence. Beginning this spring Nandini will establish a home base for the institute in Fariborz Maseeh Hall. This partnership will offer collaborative opportunities in AI/XR (artificial intelligence and extended reality) technologies for students, faculty, and alumni in the College of the Arts and Portland State. Some of the exciting things in store include art-technology festivals, conferences, workshops, and forums as well as collaborations with civic, industry, and community partners.
Our partnership with CETI will also create exciting opportunities for the public to engage through projects and events such as XRchive (a social documentary/storytelling project), a summer art-tech festival and hackathon, and a data mapping and visualization project around environmental sensors.
We also look forward to building on previous relationships with College of the Arts community members. Stephen Lee and Alanna Risse, both Art + Design faculty, and College of the Arts Digital Facilities Director Scott Nieradka have all participated in previous CETI projects including the 2020 Winter Light Festival hackathon and installation, the creative jam to build the Gallery of the Future, and the webvr exhibition System Failure. Please Restart, which was recently invited to be part of the Tech and Activism space at Mozfest 2021.
Through this collaborative residency, we hope to develop exciting new programs and projects for our College of the Arts students, faculty, and alumni to engage in imaginative ways with emergent media and technology and a diverse community of partners. The residency will continue through Summer 2022.
Stay tuned for details about upcoming workshops, projects, and collaborative convenings.
About CETI
CETI (A Creative and Emergent Technology Institute) is an incubator, lab, and collective bringing together a diverse and interdisciplinary community of practitioners, professionals, educators, students, and researchers. Through a carefully woven tapestry of institutes, participatory research, projects, and experiments, CETI inspires a deep community engagement to create imaginative and impactful responses to emergent social and technological challenges.
About Nandini Ranganathan
Nandini Ranganathan, Ph.D., is a futurist, educator, and technologist. She is the founder and Executive Director of CETI. Nandini designs and facilitates interdisciplinary collaborations, creative experiments, learning experiences, and participatory research and design projects in emergent technology. Her work actively engages diverse communities across sectors, cultures, and expertise to spark ideas and actions, recognizing that these messy conversations are essential to creating imaginative and insightful responses to social, environmental, and technological challenges (see her TED talk at TEDxPortland, 2019).
She is deeply passionate about increasing access to and opportunities in emergent technology and design. She has created innovative, culturally relevant, and impactful curriculum, programs, and credentials for students, educators, and executives, preparing a diverse community to be leaders and creators in these fields.
Prior to this Nandini created Make+Think+Code, an art/technology lab at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she was a Professor of Liberal/Media Arts. She has previously worked as a Professor of Mathematics at Reed College, WSU Vancouver, and UT Austin. She has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan and an A.B. in Mathematics from Wellesley College.
Photo: Scene from Constellations, a weekend of collaborative creative experiments, interactive light and sound pieces, immersive experiences, and performances by CETI members at the 2020 Portland Winter Light Festival.