UCSC Night at the Museum – Amending Worlds
On June 5, 2025, The Humanities Institute presented the 2025 Night at the Museum, featuring Amending Worlds, a panel discussion about speculative fiction and a multi-media exhibition by UCSC graduate and undergraduate students and alumni winners of the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures.
The panel featured Micah Perks (UC Santa Cruz), Cathy Thomas (UCSB), and Kim Tallbear (University of Alberta). It was moderated by Carla Freccero (UC Santa Cruz).
THI’s annual Night at the Museum event welcomes members of the public to experience the ongoing exhibitions and gallery spaces at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. This year, THI marked our 25th anniversary. The celebration culminated with Night at the Museum, an event which welcomes members of the public to experience the ongoing exhibitions and gallery spaces at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History for free.
Watch the video of the event here:
Event photos:
About Our Speakers
Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at UCSC, where she has taught since 1991. She is the author of Father Figures; Popular Culture: An Introduction; and Queer/Early/Modern. She has co-edited collections on Premodern Sexualities; Species, Race and Sex; and Animal Studies. She publishes in early modern literature, queer and feminist theory, and animal studies.
Micah Perks is the author of a short story collection, a memoir and two novels. Her most recent novel, What Becomes Us, won an Independent Publishers Book Award and was named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian. Her short stories and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and residencies at Blue Mountain Center and MacDowell. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University. She is a professor at UCSC in the Literature Department and has taught Women and the Apocalypse and US Feminist Utopias.
Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexualities. She is a regular panelist on the Media Indigena podcast and a regular media commentator on topics including Indigenous peoples, science, and technology; and Indigenous sexualities. You can also follow her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization.
Cathy Thomas is a writer, filmmaker, and creative critical scholar whose work on the ‘Black Fantastic’ and decolonial feminist thought is enriched by discovering modes of play and resistance in comic books, literature, through cosplay, while wining up at Caribbean Carnival. As she approaches tenure, she is juggling 3 novels, 2 comic books, 1 trade book collaboration, 1 scholarly monograph, and 1 experimental textile+digital+sound art installation for a 2028 museum exhibition, all in various states of completion, delay, ecstasy, and exhaustion. She is an Asst Prof of English at UCSB and the Director of the UCSB Creative Critical Writing Initiative.
The Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop, housed in The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, presents a multi-media exhibition by UCSC graduate and undergraduate students and alumni winners of the Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures. The Amending Worlds exhibition includes installations, performances, visual art, film & video, and a computer game, distributed throughout the museum’s spaces. Prizewinners come from a range of disciplines, including Anthropology, Art, Computational Media, Environmental Art and Social Practice, Film and Digital Media, Literature, and Politics.
The Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures prize was established by THI’s Speculatively Scientific Fictions of the Future project and is made possible by alumni Peter Coha (Kresge ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson ’77, Philosophy, and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee).
Exhibition Projects
Shades of Fake Green Grass, Hannah Barrett
Shades of Fake Green Grass is a collection of short stories that focus on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and their ordinary problems, through a technologically dystopian lens.
Hannah Barrett is a writer with a current focus on science fiction. She aims to compel readers toward internal dialogues that teach us how to better engage with the world.
a portal, Yasmine Benabdallah
a portal includes a video installation and a micro-chapbook, part of a project linking Brazil, Morocco, and Portugal through a shared history of colonization, enslavement, and a forced exodus across the Atlantic. a portal explores memory, archives, and non-linear time, and foregrounds our bodies’ resonances through time and space, calling on them to erode, wash over, and imagine liberatory futures.
Yasmine Benabdallah is a Moroccan filmmaker and visual artist whose work explores memory, performance, diaspora, archives, rituals, and time travel.
Whispers of Wear, Kristine Buriel
The Selveger Collective gets its name from a portmanteau of “selvage”- a stitched edge that prevents a fabric from unraveling and “salvager”- those who prevent something from being lost. Walk into the archives and don the clothes of wearers’ past and hear the stories weaved into the threads. Scan to gain insight from those whose hands touched the cloth.
Kristine Buriel is an interdisciplinary artist focused on making and craft. She uses technology to preserve the process and human story so that it can be shared and not forgotten.
Night Lights for Squid, Chaelim Lim
Squid are said to be attracted to light. Powerful lights are used during the night for squid fishing. However, scientists aren’t able to explain why some squid hide away from the lights, under the shadows of the vessel. Are the lights overwhelming for squid individuals? What if squid could create their own night lights? What stories would these lights tell?
Chaelim Lim is an artist based in Seoul who researches disaster investigation in a fictional manner. She explores architecture that amplifies the gestures of more-than-human beings in disaster discourse.
A Martian Manifesto, Jorge Antonio Palacios
A Martian Manifesto is a text and series of installations experimenting with craft and new media to create outdoor social sculptures. Through re-enacting speculative practices of the deep future and on Mars, this process-oriented work is metabolized into a manifesto of science fiction, gesturing towards alternative ways of being with each other, technology, and the world.
Jorge Antonio Palacios is an artist from Yanawana/San Antonio, Texas. They use foraging, digital media, writing, and installation as methodologies for investigating relationships between land, technology, displacement, and decolonization.
The Third Person, Rowan Powell
The Third Person, taken from the writing of the Diggers in 1649, refers to someone who relates to land without private ownership. Drawing on this idea, the work stages a hypothetical conversation between ‘ravers’ and ‘ranters,’ old and new. Through exchanges of soil, wood, linen, repurposed texts and symbols, the installation journeys through political romanticism– hope and dissolution expressed through squatting, trespassing, free parties and intentional communities.
Rowan Powell is a writer and researcher currently working with trees, chickens, film, and dancing. Their research draws on place(s), tracing attempts at reaching to what is buried.
olam ha-ba (the world to come), Tyler Rai
This project is a growing conversation between Palestinian and Lebanese heirloom seeds, the soils of coastal California, and communities of seed savers. Through these seeds in exile, the project explores how heirloom seeds encompass entire cosmologies and ancestral technologies for resistance, hope, and birthing the world to come.
Tyler Rai is a transdisciplinary artist whose work investigates cultural inheritance, ecological entanglements and solidarity work as a form of ancestral memory. She collaborates with seeds, stones, bodies, and soils.
Sea of Paint, Hongwei Zhou
Sea of Paint is a narrative-driven video game that explores the issues around contemporary machine learning-based AI technology. The player engages in dialogue with a “spirit” conjured from the Sea — an ever-recording flow of data. The game asks how our ideas of memory, labor and care are brought into tension with the prevalence of data-driven AI.
Hongwei Zhou is a video game educator and researcher. He is interested in thinking about the entanglement of game systems and technoculture.
Support Team:
Matt Polzin
GSR for the Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop
Matt Polzin is a fiction writer and researcher whose work focuses on queer utopia, interspecies relationships, and the Midwest.
Valerie Sainz
2024-25 Humanities EXPLORE Fellow, The Coha-Gunderson Exhibition and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History
Valerie Sainz is a History and History of Art & Visual Culture major (Museums, Heritage, and Curation concentration).
Carla Freccero
PI, The Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures; Coordinator, The Coha-Gunderson Creativity Workshop
Carla Freccero is Distinguished Professor of Literature & History of Consciousness, UCSC.
– Special Thanks –
- Peter Coha (Kresge College ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson College ’77, Philosophy and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee)
- Matt Polzin, Graduate Student Researcher
- Valerie Sainz, EXPLORE Fellow
- The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (Marla Novo, Deputy Director; Natalie Jenkins, Exhibitions Manager; Shanti Nagwani, preparator)
- The Humanities Institute (Pranav Anand, Faculty Director; Irena Polic, Managing Director; Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, Research Programs & Communications Director; Jessica Guild, Event and Operations Manager)
- UCSC Faculty Guests: Micah Perks (Literature); Alison Laurie Palmer (Art); Claudio Bueno (Art); Soraya Murray (History of Art & Visual Culture); Maria Puig del la Bellacasa (History of Consciousness)