MAT Seminar Series 2026 • 2027
Fall 2026
Abstract
This lecture traces my compositional path from the beginnings to the current moment. I comment on the works in the catalog, placing them within the biographical context of my artistic circumstances at the time.
My process of electronic music composition could be likened to that of a solitary painter in that I both plan and realize the final work in my studio.
My composition process unfolds in seven phases:
- Initial conception
- Tool configuration and research
- Creation of sound material
- Classifying and editing the source material
- Initial assembly of mesostructures
- Planning of macrostructure
- Multi-scale composition
I explain each phase and present excerpts of the works in chronological order.
Bio
Curtis Roads is Professor Emeritus in Media Arts and Technology and in Music at UCSB. His latest book is The Computer Music Tutorial (2023, The MIT Press).
Abstract
How can virtual realities create spaces for voice, affect, healing, and connection across diverse communities? In this lecture, Semi Ryu traces the evolution of her transdisciplinary art research through embodied avatar performance, affective computing, and XR ritual. Drawing from projects including VoicingElder, VoicingHan, SentimentVoice, and My Seeking Gut, she explores how virtual bodies activate personal and collective voices, how VR embodies affect, and how these experiences create new possibilities for relationality and collective experience.
Her transdisciplinary practice brings media art into sustained collaboration with medicine, social work, gerontology, and engineering, integrating artistic experimentation, technological innovation, community-based inquiry, and clinical research. Across these collaborations, Ryu approaches XR as a contemporary form of healing ritual—an embodied and relational space where voices are amplified, affect circulates, and new forms of awareness, relationships, and community can emerge.
Bio
Semi Ryu 류세미 is a media artist and Professor of Kinetic Imaging at VCUarts, Affiliate Associate Professor at VCU School of Medicine, and Director of EXE Lab: Embodied XR + Emotion AI. Inspired by Korean healing rituals, her transdisciplinary practice bridges art, technology, and health through avatars, extended reality (XR), and affective computing. Her work has been presented in more than 20 countries, and her research has been widely published in leading journals spanning art, technology, and health. Her chapters appear in The Routledge Handbook of Arts and Health and The Point of Being, and she serves on the editorial board of Arts & Health. A TEDx speaker, Ryu has received the Hamilton International Arts in Health Award (First Place, Arts for Innovation), the VCUarts Faculty Award for Distinguished Achievement in Research, and National/International Recognition Award. She is currently developing a book on My Seeking Gut with Wesleyan University Press.
Abstract
In this talk I’ll trace my thinking over the past quarter century about the possibility of constructing Artificial Moral Agents. Beginning with the article “A Prolegomena to Any Future Artificial Moral Agent” in 2000 (in which my coauthors Gary Varner and Jason Zinser and I argued for a hybrid top-down / bottom-up approach and critically discussed the possible designs for a Moral Turing Test) through the 2009 book Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (in which my coauthor Wendell Wallach and I developed and extended these ideas) to my present work on wisdom and collective rationality for humans and AI and the role that emotional processing my play in human and machine morality. I’ll also discuss the literature that has popped up around the Moral Turing Test (e.g. Aharoni et al. 2024 "Attributions toward artificial agents in a modified Moral Turing Test").
Bio
Colin Allen is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His main areas of research concern the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, particularly as these relate to scientific study of animal cognition and artificial intelligence. His publications also span topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and humanities computing. He is also Associate Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In 2010 Allen received a Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, which is given "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date", and in 2013 he received the Barwise Prize from the American Philosophical Association "for significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing by an APA member." In 2020, Allen was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Note: About the poster background image: Image of a drawing by artist Jenny Holzer which incorporates a figure originally produced by Colin Allen for Moral Machines:Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. A painting made from this was displayed in an exhibition of Holzer’s works at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2024 and a second painting using this image is expected to appear in her Musée d’Orsay exhibition opening Oct 18, 2026.