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California Institute of the Arts

Barry Threw & K Allado-McDowell

CHANEL Center for Artists and Technology (CCAT) Speaker Series

Event Information

Date: Oct. 23

Time: 4:30 - 6 PM

Location: CalArts Campus; Bijou Theater

About:

The CHANEL Center for Artists and Technology’s Speaker Series brings international figures from across artistic disciplines, industries, and institutions to discuss the role of technological research in their work. The talks are intended to give the CalArts community an opportunity to hear directly from these leaders in a casual setting, providing further insight into the Center’s mission of placing artists upstream in how emerging technologies are shaped and developed, and creating sustained, rigorous inquiry across the art and technology divide.

The inaugural event brings together two long-time collaborators with wide-ranging experience in how emerging technology can enable creativity and artistic experimentation.

photo of Barry Threw & K Allado-McDowell

About the Speakers

Barry Threw is the Executive and Artistic Director of Gray Area, San Francisco. He collaborates as an executive, curator, technologist, cultural producer, and strategist to cultivate forward-looking, boundary-blurring projects integrating culture and technology. Threw has contributed to projects presented internationally at festivals including the Venice Architecture Biennale; ORF Musikprotokoll, Graz, Austria; Club Transmediale, Berlin, DE; Mutek, Montreal, CA; collaborated on installations at significant sites including St. Peter’s Basilica, UNESCO headquarters, the Empire State Building, the United Nations Headquarters, Beijing 2008 Olympics, the Sacramento International Airport; and worked on audio/visual performances by artists including Jay-Z, M.I.A & Jenelle Monae, Kronos Quartet, Oval, Florian Hecker, and Morton Subotnick.

K Allado-McDowell is an artist, writer, and pioneering figure in the field of AI literature. Since 2020, they have authored several books with GPT-3, co-edited and contributed to multiple anthologies, and regularly publish essays on art, AI, and ecology. K established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google in 2015. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors, which previewed at Lincoln Center in 2022. Their first solo exhibition, The Known Lost, was presented at Swiss Institute in NYC in 2025.