By Kira Ricarte
On Friday, April 25, a cluster of Brooklyn College (BC) students and professors gathered in the bare, white-walled art gallery in the basement of Boylan Hall for the PIMA Symposium of 2025.
PIMA, Performance & Interactive Media Art, is a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program at BC that aims to “provide students with training, theoretical and technical knowledge, and practical experience,” according to the Brooklyn College website.
The PIMA graduate students typically display their work off-campus, but since the opening of the art gallery at BC, the director of the PIMA program, Jennifer McCoy, decided to use this symposium to bring more attention to this graduate program and their art to other students of Brooklyn College.
“We do a lot of our performances…off campus, and because this new gallery opened, I thought, ‘Well, we should do something on campus just to raise visibility because […] a lot of people don’t know what this is…so it’s great to bring everybody together,” McCoy told the Vanguard.
In this symposium, there were three guest speakers for the event, two of whom were alumni from the PIMA program. Andre Zachary, an NYU assistant professor and founder of the Renegade Performance Group, discussed his way of approaching AI by showing a videotaped conversation he had with ChatGPT, wondering how an artist can use it reliably without getting misinformation, and holding it accountable when it does.
The AI responded by acknowledging the importance of these things, but also stating that, in the end, ChatGPT is not a person with “consciousness” that someone can “hold accountable”. It is a tool that best describes its role, as “a mirror of language” and “a librarian that can improvise”.
During the speaker’s lecture, McCoy asked Zachary what the future of dance would be, in terms of the increasing use of AI, especially when she mentioned “avatars being coded by our imaginations rather than by our physical embodiments”. Zachary responded by telling a story of a conference in NYU hosted by a BMCC professor, in which he showed an AI engine that, when given prompts based on observations the professor had in an audience member (“you’re wearing a red shirt”; “you’re tall”, etc.), would offer a set dance routine for the professor.
“And it wasn’t very interesting at all,” Zachary remarked while discussing his realization of the difference between AI art engines and artists themselves. “What we as artists do,” he said, “We ask the innocuous question: what is not there? We’re pondering, ‘Okay, what has not been said? What has not been seen?’ Like that is, really, really at the core of that,”
In the end, in Zachary’s words, what made art interesting was “the innocuous, the unseen, the unasked, what is not there.” The AI engines cannot create something without something being prompted to them. It cannot create something on its own volition.
Another alumni speaker in this symposium was Jared Mezzocchi, a theater artist, director, and actor who won two Obie awards for his work. In his lecture, Mezzochi showed his impressive projection designs that he created for his multimedia theater and film productions.
One such play, “On the Beauty of Loss,” was based on Mezzocchi’s experience of finding out his father had passed away after driving 8 hours in a blizzard to the hospital believing that he was still alive; for his family didn’t want to tell him the bad news until he arrived there.
In this play, which Mezzocchi created and directed with the Vineyard Theatre, an Off-Broadway theater based in NYC, he had one of the actors give live footage of him driving a car towards a house where Mezzocchi waited to tell the actor the bad news, while audience members on Zoom showed the names and photos of people they lost or deeply missed. At the end of the play, Mezzocchi gave the audience the QR code linked to a website so that people could tell their personal stories of grief and loss. It was an outpouring of human emotion that showed how modern technology can provide new ways for people to remember and memorialize the ones they loved.
After the lectures ended, The Vanguard discussed the showcase and PIMA with a prospective student, Bailey Oliver, who is in search of a program more in tune with their multi-disciplinary interests.
“I went to [New York University] for Film…and didn’t like the program,” Oliver told the Vanguard. “[I] was longing to go back to school, but wasn’t sure what program I would do, because I feel like I lie at the intersection of film, dance, and theatre. But I didn’t want to study any of those in isolation, and…[PIMA] is the only one I found that feels like it would satisfy what I wanna do.”
Going through the program, PIMA students held various artistic workshops that encouraged guests to interact with. One such workshop, hosted by PIMA student and queer zine writer, Kerosene Jones, people sat in an informal circle of chairs, talking about writing for grants and fellowships. This also allowed people to critique a system that forces artists to seek corporate donors with shady intentions and questionable morals for them to survive and continue their profession. It discussed that, for many artists, to get the funding and support to create art in the first place, they have to, according to Jones, “self-mythologize” themselves, figuring out unique parts of themselves to sell in their grant writing. If they are part of a marginalized group, and many of the people in that workshop are, they have to monetize their experiences of oppression to get funding and support.
There was another workshop named VIBE, which is full of sensory, immersive art that interacts with sound and texture. According to their poster just outside of the room where the workshop took place, these art pieces are “[imagining] emotion as vibration: a hidden network, a field of frequencies shaping how we feel, remember, and connect…This is not a space to observe–but to feel, sense, and wonder.”
In VIBE, there is a room lit by strings of pale blue light. One of the artists in the symposium plays otherworldly and ethereal music on her cello, and people get to draw on sand and play with a “potential-o-meter”, a small square wooden device with many copper wires connected to a tiny knob. If a person twists it, they can change the pattern design of moving sand particles that are projected onto white curtains that are hung on the walls.
At the very same workshop, one of the artists, Chi, put an art structure of pots stacked through a metal pipe with metal strings connecting them altogether for people to interact with, mainly by plucking the strings.
Overall, the PIMA symposium was an eye-opening experience. Through the lectures and the workshops, guests get to see the immersive, multimedia art PIMA students and alumni have created, bringing visibility to an art program for any artist wishing to work in more than one field or discipline, and connecting them.